See how NeXTSTEP evolved into Mac OS X.

[MacBytes]

Category: Mac OS X
Link: See how NeXTSTEP evolved into Mac OS X.
Posted on MacBytes.com

Approved by Mudbug

[Longey Nowze]

very summarised

[winmacguy]

and the future continues....

[azdude]

Wow... now that was poorly written. Yuk.

[AmigoMac]

Originally Posted by azdude

Wow... now that was poorly written. Yuk.

That's what future generations will say about OS X

How the h*ll could they work with that fugly GUI... it's a matter of time.


Edit: Wait! Wait a minute, that dock looks , that's what I need instead of dragthing, the drain/trash icon is quite funny but such a dock is awesome, you can have a lot of things there without needing to make shortcuts, put them into the dock, right-click and select...

Can you bring that in Tiger, steve? Grrrreat!

Again: It's my point of view

[robbieduncan]

I've only read the first paragraph and I'm already wondering if they did ANY research. NeXT were a small net services company? Really? So what about the years they spent making NeXtStep 1.0 and the famous black hardware to run it on?

[Saad]

NeXT discontinued its workstation line well before Apple bought it. By the time of the merger, its biggest selling product was WebObjects, and OPENSTEP, which was being licensed to other companies.

[Cooknn]

I remember how much I loved NeXTStep when I first saw it at Comdex back in hmmm, 1994 I believe. What's funny is that they had Java and JavaScript running on their boxes at that time - way before anyone at Sun Microsystems ever "invented" Java.

The week after the show I think Sun invested like [EDIT] $10 million in the NeXTStep object oriented technology and then a couple of years later Java resurfaced as their invention <cough>. I would love to find the guys that were at the booth that week in the NeXT area showing Java off. I remember them talking about how much it was like C++. There was even a coffee cup icon on that beautiful desktop...

[robbieduncan]

Originally Posted by Cooknn

I remember how much I loved NeXTStep when I first saw it at Comdex back in hmmm, 1994 I believe. What's funny is that they had Java and JavaScript running on the boxes at that time - way before anyone at Sun Microsystems ever "invented" Java.

The week after the show I think Sun invested like $100 million in the NeXTStep object oriented technology and then a couple of years later Java resurfaced as their invention <cough>. I would love to find the guys that were at the booth that week in the NeXT area showing Java off. I remember them talking about how much it was like C++. There was even a coffee cup icon on that beautiful desktop...

What are you talking about. Sun were the originators of Java. Check out here, here or here

Javascript was created and introduced by Netscape with Netscape 2.0. NS 2.0 was released in 1996

[AmigoMac]

Isn't he talking about Cocoa?

[robbieduncan]

Originally Posted by AmigoMac

Isn't he talking about Cocoa?

That seems reasonable until you try and work out what the JavaScript part?!? Also as far as I remember Sun never claimed to have invented Cocoa (OpenStep as it was)?

[Cooknn]

Originally Posted by robbieduncan

What are you talking about. Sun were the originators of Java. Check out here, here or here

Javascript was created and introduced by Netscape with Netscape 2.0. NS 2.0 was released in 1996

November 22, 1993

Steve Jobs announces that NeXT will port its NextStep operating system to the SPARC architecture. Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy announces plans to invest US$10 million in NeXT, and use its software in future Sun systems.

I'm telling you what I saw. Las Vegas 1993 (correction) in the same area/booth as NeXT there was a PC running NeXTStep and there were a couple of guys showing off Java and Javascript. $10,000,000 bought Sun that technology and they claimed it as their own from my perspective. Believe it or not. I know what I saw.

[robbieduncan]

Originally Posted by Cooknn

November 22, 1993

Steve Jobs announces that NeXT will port its NextStep operating system to the SPARC architecture. Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy announces plans to invest US$10 million in NeXT, and use its software in future Sun systems.

I'm telling you what I saw. Las Vegas 1993 (correction) in the same area/booth as NeXT there was a PC running NeXTStep and there was a couple of guys showing off Java and Javascript. $10,000,000 bought sun that technology and they claimed it as their own from my perspective. Believe it or not, it doesn't matter to me. I know what I saw.

Sun did port OpenStep (was NextStep) to Sparc and did even ship it for a while. This was Objective-C based and basically what we call Cocoa now. Next also used to ship the whole OS to a number of architectures before being bought by Apple. There seems to be no mention on the web of Java running on NextStep or OpenStep before around 1995.

JavaScript is totally seperate and has nothing to do with the above agreement.

As can be seen from any of the links I previously included Java was developed at Sun. I've no idea what you saw, but at the moment this seems to be the only suggestion anywhere that Java came from NeXT not Sun!

[Cooknn]

I had a friend with me - and he confirmed what we saw when I called him about it a couple of years ago. What we saw had two flavors. A programming language and a scripting language. They were running on NeXTStep and used coffee cup icons.

Did anyone here run NeXTStep back then? If it wasn't Java, what did I see

[bousozoku]

Originally Posted by robbieduncan

What are you talking about. Sun were the originators of Java. Check out here, here or here

Javascript was created and introduced by Netscape with Netscape 2.0. NS 2.0 was released in 1996

Oak was around in 1993. It didn't become Java or publicly available until 1995. It's certainly possible that a version of NeXTStep on SPARC would have had Oak running, but unlikely that Netscape's CoolScript (later JavaScript) would have been.

Oh, and the article was a piece of inaccurate rubbish.

[robbieduncan]

Originally Posted by bousozoku

Oh, and the article was a piece of inaccurate rubbish.

The what now? Oh yeah the article... not the best

[shamino]

Originally Posted by AmigoMac

Edit: Wait! Wait a minute, that dock looks , that's what I need instead of dragthing, the drain/trash icon is quite funny but such a dock is awesome, you can have a lot of things there without needing to make shortcuts, put them into the dock, right-click and select...

The amusing thing is that this was in OS/2 since version 2.0.

OS/2's "workplace shell" supports the concept of icons that represent abstract data-objects and not just files. So you can have icons representing things like color swatches/palettes, printers, etc. And any icon can be placed in any folder.

If you would take OS/2's desktop-object model, and add in the ability to "dock" folders to the bottom of the screen (like you could in MacOS 8), you'd be pretty darn close to that Rhapsody mock-up image.

Now, one thing I would love to seen in Tiger would be some form of Tabbed browsing in the Finder.

Imagine, if you will, a Finder window where you can open multiple tabs. Each tab may contain a separate folder or a Searchlight-based SmartFolder. It should also be possible to create icons that represent a window with it's full complement of tabs, so you can use these as a storage meaphor.

For example, on my system, I've got several sub-folders under ~/Documents. I can browse them all at once using a list-view or a columns view, but it would be really nice if I could double-click a single icon to open one window that has a separate tab for each of the most important sub-folders (but not all of them.)

[Cooknn]

I repent The name of the program I saw running on NeXTStep in '93 wasn't Java (obviously). It was Espresso!. My bad. Check out this announcement for the '93 Comdex by NeXT. Scroll down to the entry:

LOGIBEC/PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE
Espresso!, a flexible 4GL programming language and development suite

My brain fades, but Google lives on

[RacerX]

Well, maybe I can iron out some of this...

Sun, like many other companies was quite taken when they first saw NEXTSTEP in action. But unlike other companies (namely IBM and HP) they still wanted to use their own operating system as a foundation but get all the advantages of NEXTSTEP.

At the time NeXT was barred (via a settlement with Apple) from producing a desktop computer. This meant that NeXT was trying to sell their systems (that were equivalent to the Apple Quadra series) as workstations. This was a hard market to sell in and it was slowly being eaten by the desktop market. Those forces were already bringing an untimely end to NeXT hardware.

As a way to get into the Enterprise market (with both hardware and software originally) NeXT began working on Enterprise Objects Frameworks and Portable Distributed Objects.

About the same time Sun approached NeXT about making the application environment portable and also porting the GUI to Solaris (which was already based on Display Postscript making the move easier). This new portable version of the NEXTSTEP application environment was to be called OpenStep and the specifications were made open for people to use (which is how GNUstep got started).

In return, Sun helped with modifying NEXTSTEP into OpenStep and put their reputation in the enterprise market behind NeXT software.

All of this took place in 1993. the OpenStep Specifications were released in 1994 along with the first releases of Enterprise Objects Frameworks (though a version was released in 1993 for NEXTSTEP for HP hardware) and Portable Distributed Objects.

By the beginning of 1995 NeXT was looking to get out of the operating system market completely while Sun bought Lighthouse Design to get their suite of office applications written for NEXTSTEP (as most of you know, Sun would do this all over again with Star Division to get StarOffice) and they were well on their way to releasing Solaris OpenStep (which was to replace CDE on Solaris as the default environment).

In a move that has confused thousands... NeXT renamed NEXTSTEP 4.0 to OPENSTEP 4.0. At the same time NeXT had released OpenStep Enterprise for Windows. So when people said "I use OpenStep" the usual response was "which one".

The look of OPENSTEP was actually a step backward from the NEXTSTEP 4 betas, this was done to make both OPENSTEP and Solaris OpenStep look the same (as it was based on the look of NEXTSTEP 3.x).

Everything was progressing great, as far as Sun was concerned. They had a new GUI and application environment coming out with an office suite getting ready in the wings. 1996 was going to be the jumping point into something great... or so they thought.

Remember that Sun (at this point) still had a ton of money. Some people even thought that they might buy Apple back then. But Sun didn't think that NeXT was for sale. So when Apple bought NeXT and closed down all ties with Sun, it was a little of a surprise.

So, OpenStep on Solaris was quietly swept under the carpet, and Sun pushed the same basic ideas they were with the OpenStep Specifications with Java now.

Even though the Lighthouse Design office suite of applications is now free (for people like me who still use OPENSTEP), the code has been locked away inside Sun since 1995. People have been trying to get Sun to release that code ever since Apple bought NeXT.

That pretty much covers the major points of the NeXT-Sun relationship.