5 ms·
http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
by glurgh 12y ago
http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html http://toastytech.com/guis/ns08.html
NextStep 0.8, '88 vintage.
- reedlaw 12y agoGood find. That's clearly an [X] in the upper-right corner.
- ekianjo 12y agoYeah, but still more recent than Atari's Gem.
- glurgh 12y agoThe Atari Gem thing is not an X, it's actually supposed to be a gem. It's just confusing because of the low-res image. Take a look at http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11menu.png http://toastytech.com/guis/gem11menu.png
- empressplay 12y agoThat's not GEMTOS, that's GEM for DOS... big difference...
- glurgh 12y agoI was looking at the wrong end of the window, to boot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS#mediaviewer/File:ST_Desktop.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS#mediaviewer/File:ST_D... Looks pretty X-like. It seems GEM itself was licensed from Digital Research but their GEM didn't use X. Edit: Fixed DEC to DR, as pointed out by reply comment below.
- ahy1 12y agoI doubt DEC had anything to do with GEM. It was a product of Digital Research (same company that gave us CP/M, MP/M and DR-DOS)
- glurgh 12y agoThey didn't, I just brainfarted. You know, http://vt100.net/dec/alpha_era_logo_small.png http://vt100.net/dec/alpha_era_logo_small.png and all that.
- empressplay 12y agoEven so, Atari GEM could have influenced NeXT, which then influenced Windows 95... it's a cool bit of retro-chic =)
- glurgh 12y agoIt's possible, sadly there is no folklore.org for Nextstep. In the end, both the X and things like context-menus were made ubiquitous by Windows '95.
- Joeri 12y agoThose screenshots are strikingly modern compared to the windows screenshots of the era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x#mediaviewer/File:Windows_2.1.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x#mediaviewer/File:W...
- noir_lord 12y agoThe NextStep was way ahead on the curve for it's time (which is one of the reasons it failed). I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers. In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where designing software light years ahead of its time.
- frozenport 12y agoI don't think it worked out for them? The systems were way to expensive for most users.
- noir_lord 12y agoThe NextStep didn't work out for a bunch of reasons cost been one of the major ones. The other project wasn't trying to create a product they where trying to capture a sense of what hardware would be on every desk in 10 years and design for that, in effect skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is. I wish I could remember where I read it :|.
- abrowne 12y agoWindows 95 looks quite similar to NeXTSTEP, with very similar gray window decorations and beveled (might be the wrong word) borders and buttons. It could be a design of times kind of thing, but to me it looks very "inspired".
- mschaef 12y agoFor what it's worth, I remember thinking that Windows95 was 'inspired' by NeXTStep when it was new. The NeXTStep machines themselves were pretty amazing for their late-80's origin. They had (and effectively used) 4-level 1-megapixel displays at a time when PC's were largely stuck at 640x480 or worse.
- Gormo 12y agoHigh screen resolutions were certainly possible on DOS PCs of the era, but since PCs were an open platform, developers would often target their software at the lowest common denominator of hardware, so outside of specific niche markets, they didn't typically produce DOS applications intended for high-resolution displays. On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. At 640x480, a VGA display contemporary to NeXTStep could display 16 colors, and at 320x200, 256 colors.
- mschaef 12y ago> On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color modes (320x200, ModeX, etc.) and productivity applications favoring higher resolution. At the time, having both high bit depths and high resolution at the same time was asking too much of the hardware. To put it in perspective, for a while, my desktop PC was an older generation 486/33. When I say 'older generation', what I mainly mean is that it was one of the last machines that lacked a local bus of any kind. This put the video board behind an ISA-bus, which was lucky to sustain 8MB/sec shared across all peripherals. Just looking at the bus, it couldn't update a full 1024x768 desktop at more than 10Hz. (320x200 was well over 100Hz).
- linuxlizard 12y agoNextStep, yes. The first time I saw Win95 (Chicago beta), I decided it was a rip-off of the NextStep UI.
- peapicker 12y agoI came to post the same thing... I had NeXT cube serial number 32 on my desk at Los Alamos as an intern back in '88 running NextStep 0.8 and clearly remember how amazing the machine was. We got the first 50 of the line (I think) because a guy in the Laboratory was a friend of Jobs, and Jobs wanted to promote the box as the perfect research tool thanks to Mathematica and the like. Those were fun times!