NeXTSTEP Release 3 Video

[Willis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A&search=steve jobs

Go to 13minutes in, and after about 5 second or so, you hear a mention that the next release will be for Intel processors.

Where would OS X be without NeXTstep?

EDIT: you should listen to half the things Steve says about Apple "this is all live, and the Mac is a little slow as it doesnt want to give it up, but there we go"

 

[RacerX]

Go to 13minutes in, and after about 5 second or so, you hear a mention that the next release will be for Intel processors.

A little background on the history of this...NEXTSTEP 3.0 was released in November 1992, NEXTSTEP 3.1 (which was the first release for PC compatibles) was was released in May of 1993. Next stopped hardware production on February 9th, 1993 (Black Tuesday)... months before the release of the PC compatible version of NEXTSTEP.

NeXT wasn't moving to Intel processors... they were dropping their hardware business altogether.

NEXTSTEP 3.2 added support for HP's Pa-RISC workstations and NEXTSTEP 3.3 added support for running on Sun's SPARC hardware. This was mainly because PC hardware at the time wasn't truly up to what was needed to run NEXTSTEP.

Part of the reason for Apple dropping Rhapsody for PC compatibles was that former NeXT developers very quickly abandon their PC hardware in favor of Apple's hardware. The first time that PCs had any type of edge over Apple hardware was in 2000 when Motorola started having issues with the G4 (they couldn't get it beyond 500 MHz).

 

[RacerX]

A comment post on the linked page from above...

This came out in late 1992. The runtime was based on the Mach microkernel and a version of BSD (which was redesigned for Mach). The software cost like $1,000 at the time. The machines this version ran on where like $10 grand though (compared with Windows box for maybe 3 grand). But there was no desktop or programming environment like this. Still, the hardware as a whole was not up to the task.

The "$10 grand" figure is revisionist history... only the original Cubes from 1998 ran that high. Comparing the prices between machines from NeXT and Apple (with comparable features) from 1991:

NeXTstation (68040 at 25MHz, 8 MB of RAM, 105 MB hard drive, 2 bit (black & white) 17" display, Ethernet) $4,995.00
Macintosh IIsi (68030 at 20MHz, 5 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, 8 bit 12" display, LocalTalk) $5,097.00

NeXTstation Color (68040 at 25MHz, 12 MB of RAM, 105 MB hard drive, 16 bit (color) 17" display, Ethernet) $7,995.00
Macintosh IIci (68030 at 20MHz, 4 MB of RAM, 80 MB hard drive, 8 bit 13" display, LocalTalk) $7,897.00​

You would have had to have bought a '040 based Cube with a Dimension graphics board to push the price of a NeXT above $10,000... and there wasn't much on the market for under $20,000 that could match it's performance (far from "the hardware as a whole was not up to the task").

On the other hand, when NeXT hardware went away, the price of the operating system on any platform was still pretty high... but not quite "$1000".

NEXTSTEP 3.3 (single user license) about $820.00
System 7 (single user license) about $100.00
A/UX 3.0 (single user license) about $795.00​

But this was before Linux had taken off, so $800-$900 was about average for a Unix based operating system at the time (NEXTSTEP used 4.3BSD while A/UX was using a modified version of System V Release 2.2).

And the reason the PCs were so much cheeper back then was that they were hardly able to handle Windows 3.0 and were really designed for running DOS.

The Motorola 68040 processor had workstation performance comparable to systems made by SGI (like the R3000 based IRIS Indigo) and Sun (like the SPARCstation IPX).

when Apple finally released the Quadra 900 (68040 at 25 MHz), it was almost $10,000 and it replaced the Macintosh IIfx (68030 at 40 MHz) which was $10,000.

And it was never the pricing of the systems that mattered... NeXT was barred from selling in the desktop market by a settlement with Apple.

 

[Jason_Bryan]

In the video there is a section were Steve demos dynamic links. Is this posible on a mac?

 

[RacerX]

In the video there is a section were Steve demos dynamic links. Is this posible on a mac?

A lot of those abilities were broken with the merging of Carbon and Cocoa... as apps from those environments tend to not communicate well together.

This hasn't stopped former NeXT developers from attempting to bring this back. There is an open source project called LinkBack that is being used by many of the bigger Cocoa developers (Stone Design, Omni Group and Nisus). The project has promise, but hopefully as Carbon becomes more like Cocoa (in supporting services) Apple will bring back this functionality system wide.

 

[jaxstate]

It's funny to hear SJ bad mouthing the Mac.

 

[RacerX]

It's funny to hear SJ bad mouthing the Mac.

Jobs rarely used a Mac after returning to Apple for the first few years.

In fact he took is IBM ThinkPad running OPENSTEP to the PowerBook design team and told them that this (his ThinkPad) is the quality he expected to start seeing from them. I know that he also continued to use NeXT hardware at his Pixar office at least until 2001 (his e-mail messages back then show that they were sent using NeXTMail).

I doubt that he ever used System 7, Mac OS 8 or 9 in anything he did. He just didn't care for them.

 

[Willis]

Jobs rarely used a Mac after returning to Apple for the first few years.
....
I doubt that he ever used System 7, Mac OS 8 or 9 in anything he did. He just didn't care for them.

Hi Steve

Jokes aside, you're probs right. When Steve came back, you have to believe there was a sour spot. But it shows how he loved NS to become OSX. Main reason why I linked the video. Back then he said it was better than a Mac and Windows. Just the fact that what you see there is similar to what I'm/we're looking at now. Apple were in stut when Steve joined the board (theres a video on YouTube when he comes back aswell) back in...97 I believe?

I'd say the last 9 years have shown up some really cool designs and I hope the future has better ones.

Im not trying to cause a debate of any kind. This thread is just to highlight some form of history and cause some interest.

I think I ranted a bit, but just my expression.

 

[Willis]

A little background on the history of this...NEXTSTEP 3.0 was released in November 1992, NEXTSTEP 3.1 (which was the first release for PC compatibles) was was released in May of 1993. Next stopped hardware production on February 9th, 1993 (Black Tuesday)... months before the release of the PC compatible version of NEXTSTEP.

NeXT wasn't moving to Intel processors... they were dropping their hardware business altogether.

NEXTSTEP 3.2 added support for HP's Pa-RISC workstations and NEXTSTEP 3.3 added support for running on Sun's SPARC hardware. This was mainly because PC hardware at the time wasn't truly up to what was needed to run NEXTSTEP.

Part of the reason for Apple dropping Rhapsody for PC compatibles was that former NeXT developers very quickly abandon their PC hardware in favor of Apple's hardware. The first time that PCs had any type of edge over Apple hardware was in 2000 when Motorola started having issues with the G4 (they couldn't get it beyond 500 MHz).

Should of quoted this first lol. Thanks for that, I didn't know much about Nextstep anyway, so good to hear a bit more

 

[xPismo]

...I didn't know much about Nextstep anyway, so good to hear a bit more

I agree. The transition period with SJ and NeXT cum Apple OSX has always been an interesting gray area of Apple history.

Neat. I didn't know you could run NeXT on an IBM portable.

 

[RacerX]

Jokes aside, you're probs right...

The other thing to keep in mind is that when Jobs came back it wasn't like NeXT disappeared... The NeXT web site was replace with Apple Enterprise. Apple continued to sell OPENSTEP, WebObjects and Enterprise Objects years after acquiring NeXT. In fact, all copies of OPENSTEP and NEXTSTEP developer sold by Apple after 2000 had a stipulation in the license agreement that developers could not use it to make commercial software (as OPENSTEP/NEXTSTEP was now a direct competitor of Mac OS X).

Jobs using OPENSTEP was still Jobs using an Apple product.

Further, until the PowerBook G3 Wallstreet Apple had never produced a laptop with a 1024x768 display... where as IBM had a number of models with that resolution. It took me less than a week running Rhapsody on a PowerBook 3400c (top of the Apple line when Jobs returned) to realize that it wasn't going to cut it... I went back to running Rhapsody on my older (and slower) IBM ThinkPad which has a 1024x768 display.


This is what www.next.com looked like after the merger:

And this is the page it redirected to:

Im not trying to cause a debate of any kind. This thread is just to highlight some form of history and cause some interest.

I'm all for exploring the history of Apple and Mac OS X... that is why I have two sites devoted to that stuff (NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Rhapsody).

I'm glad to see that this video is still of interest. I can remember when we were discussing converting the tape to something for the web a few years back. Honestly, no one involved with the NeXT Information Archive and the NeXTeZine had expected the amount of interest it originally got when released. Originally it was just an avi shared between us at NIA forums (which was why the tracking stuff wasn't removed). Before we knew it there were a ton of people downloading it. At one point there was at least 8 mirrors for it.

Neat. I didn't know you could run NeXT on an IBM portable.

I've run NEXTSTEP 3.3, OPENSTEP 4.1 and 4.2, and now Rhapsody 5.1 on my IBM ThinkPad 760 ED (starting back in 1998).

This is a screenshot of my ThinkPad running OPENSTEP 4.2...

click to enlarge​

You can find the NEXTSTEP hardware compatibility list here and the OPENSTEP hardware compatibility list here.

 

[Sharewaredemon]

Thanks for all the info RacerX I was blown away at what Steve did in the first 2 and a half minutes of that video, and I figured that this was from 1995 or 6, not 1992!

wow.

I can't wait to watch the rest.