NeXt

[Paolo]

I was just reading about the NeXt boxes, and how they were UNIX based machines etc.
Is this where Jobs got his idea's for OSX? Was he ever planing to release a smooth GUI for NeXt machines?

That may also give insight into os-X- (ne-X-t) the name!?

(Sorry if this should have gone in Software Rumors... it's sort of hardware aswell though... I guess)

 

[cb911]

wasn't next an old sort of computer that stopped production ages ago?

 

[gopher]

Actually parts of NeXT are integrated in X

One of the Man pages for a unix command is copyrighted 1992 from NeXT. Don't forget Steve Jobs founded NeXT and Apple bought NeXT to get their Mac OS X development started.

 

[crassusad44]

Also...

...several NeXT engineers were brought to Apple after the buyout. These are some of the topgunners at the UNIX department at Apple, like Avie (a very, very, good man!).

 

[porovaara]

Uh.

OSX is basically Openstep 5.X (which had names not been changed around with new platforms/dev stuff would have been NeXTSTEP 5.X).

How quickly people forget Apple bought (or paid to be purchased by) NeXT.

 

[eric_n_dfw]

Re: Uh.

Originally posted by porovaara
OSX is basically Openstep 5.X (which had names not been changed around with new platforms/dev stuff would have been NeXTSTEP 5.X).

How quickly people forget Apple bought (or paid to be purchased by) NeXT.

Yes, remember "Rhapsody" - that was OPENSTEP 4.2 for Intel (the last incarnation of the NeXT OS before Apple bought them.)

Cocoa is the OpenStep frameworks with a bunch of new stuff added.

What Apple has done is port the NeXT Mach micro-kernel from Intel/Mk680x0 to PPC (with some help from the MkLinux people I would bet) and replaced OPENSTEP's DisplayPostScript engine with Quartz (display PDF). From what I've read that was less of a technical discision as Adobe was not going to give away that Display Postscript licenesing so they moved to the open PDF standard.

Of course they've done a lot of other things (ie: Aqua, drivers, etc.) but those were the keys to get the first OS X Beta's out the door.

In fact, if you look at the first edition of Mac OS X Server, I beleive it still uses Display PostScript - they just put a Classic Mac OS face on OPENSTEP.