Steve demonstrating NeXT OS (vid)

[hob]

Some things I noticed:

Steve is obviously still bitter about the mac thing
He's substituted Blamo (1991) with BAM! (2002)
The demo he give of a DTP app is very similar to the demo Schiller gave of Pages...

My 2 pence

 

[Phat_Pat]

Dang....... so close..... thats amazing......

 

[john1123]

i'd like to see build in voice recording for mail in OS X!

Edit: now half-way through the movie and why can't i do that on osx 12 years later?!?

dragging text files to pages doesn't paste the text inside the document into the text box! nor is networking so easy!

OS X looks better but Next OS is pretty damn close in ease of use and - in some regards - even better! True it is slow but that is due to the 'ancient' technology.

I WANT ONE!

 

[HiRez]

I'm blown away by just how responsive and fluid the UI was back then, most likely running on...what...a 33 MHz 68040 CPU? Sheesh. Consider that today the average CPU is probably at least 20-50x as fast just in clock speed (and many times faster with bus/bandwidth/etc. improvements), plus the very powerful hardware graphics acceleration we have today. Honestly, I don't notice much difference between what Steve demoed on that ancient machine and my dual G5 PowerMac, which is a bit depressing.

Secondly, where is the way-cool "DB Kit" that Steve demoed in the video? That would be so great to be able to use today, one has to wonder why it's not a part of the Cocoa APIs. I assume much of it is was split off to become WebObjects/EOF, but you can't even use that with Objective-C now, and since it's not integrated with Cocoa, developers generally can't/don't use it. That's a real shame, I believe there's a need for standard Cocoa database APIs, as well as a database that is installed by default in OS X, such as MySLQ, like Apache and JBoss are. Apple took most of the best parts of NeXTStep, but they missed a few good ideas too.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Untill I saw that demo I actually thought NeXT to be just another *nix flavour, I knew it was advanced for it's time and the forefather of OS X, but still thought it just another *nix... at the time I actually tried the *nix systen the University in Bergen ran, and this demo blew that system away any way you see it... actually it blows the Mac I bought in 1994 to bits and to some degree it looked just as good as (or even better then) my current system, an iBook G4@800 running Mac OS X 10.3.8... Networking actually takes way longer time today, and those multisystem integration thingies, both networkingwise and against the databases was awsome...

I'm impressed...!

 

[RacerX]

dragging text files to pages doesn't paste the text inside the document into the text box!

Dragging a text file on to a Create window pastes the text inside the document just fine. It helps to use software that was originally developed on NEXTSTEP by original NEXTSTEP developers. Like many Mac users, a lot of Mac developers still have no idea what Mac OS X can do. Add to that the fact that Cocoa functionality comes from NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Carbon from the old Mac OS, and you start to see why many apps can't do this stuff. For the first few years of it's life, people were complaining that Mac OS X was too NeXT like. What they were really unhappy with was that it wasn't Mac like enough for them, they had no idea what NeXT software could do.

nor is networking so easy!

Just to point it out, that was a demo. I can guarantee that networking is far easier in Mac OS X today than it ever was with NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP. The same basic functionality that you see in the demo is how networking is supposed to work in 10.3. Getting to that point in NEXTSTEP is no easy task (which wasn't demoed) compared to Mac OS X.

I assume much of it is was split off to become WebObjects/EOF, but you can't even use that with Objective-C now, and since it's not integrated with Cocoa, developers generally can't/don't use it

Enterprise Objects Framework was always a separate package costing around $300 as I recall. The developer tools were not included in NEXTSTEP either, those ran $5000. NEXTSTEP 3.0 was around $800. NeXT could only sell in the workstation market, so it was assumed that this was being sold to the enterprise and that all the additional software would be bought. This demo wasn't for the general public as they were not the target market for NeXT (thanks to Apple).

Also, Apple didn't drop Objective C in WebObjects until version 5. WebObjects was originally running a few thousand dollars. I knew people who bought Mac OS X Server 1.x just to get the copy of WebObjects 4.0.1 that came with it (it was limited by a bandwidth restriction, but nothing that small to medium businesses would run into, Apple still wanted big businesses to buy the full version).

 

[RacerX]

There was thread about Next to X ...
here a link...

http://mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=17

The author has taken the time to revise this article after I pointed out a few (major) errors in the original.

If you read it before, you may want to read the new version.

 

[aethier]

Wow, i sure cannot get over how fast the gui seemed to be. he was dragging around pictures with ease. the voice recording, and networking also apeared quite fast.

as to the guy who said the path thing should be in os x. it is.. just not in the default setting of finder..

 

[Mr Jobs]

12 years and Steve's appearance has changed so much. The 1992 Steve looks foreign to me. Anywho, NEXTstep definitely was decades ahead of its time. I remember running DOS on my PC in 1992 and I couldn't do 90% of what he was showing in the video.

That's because he is foreign, well partly. He's biological father is Middle-Eastern.