HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

There's a fun bit of marketing [0] NeXT did when AppKit was the new thing, comparing building a reasonably non-trivial application with it to a Sun workstation using C. Obviously biased, but still an interesting look into the development environment that among other things brought us the Web and DOOM.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Still, the Web might have never existed without Objective-C, which is moreso my point. From [0]:

> A second phase would almost certainly involve some programming in order to set up a real system at CERN on many machines. An important part of this, discussed below, is the integration of a hypertext system with existing data, so as to provide a universal system, and to achieve critical usefulness at an early stage.

> (... and yes, this would provide an excellent project with which to try our new object oriented programming techniques!) TBL March 1989, May 1990

Objective-C had a wonderfully pragmatic approach to OOP, though it remained tied to the systems it was on because of the standard object libraries that enabled it. NeXT promotional materials really liked to showcase its suitedness to rapid application development, whether Jobs himself doing so [1] or in a staged competition with Sun [2]

[0] https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

[1] https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?t=1391

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

⬐ pjmlp

The Web would have existed in another form.

Hypertext systems preceded it by decades.

Objective-C has great as it might have been, didn't brought much to the table to those used to the Windows or Mac IDEs for GUI development.

The Next vs Sun marketing video wouldn't have been the same when placed against HyperCard, Visual Basic, Delphi or C++ Builder.

NeXT was almost bankrupt when they were pivoting into OpenStep, and not only was Java born out of Objective-C influences at Sun during the OpenStep days, Java EE was born from the ashes of an Objective-C framework for distributed computing at Sun.

Although clearly a marketing demo, it is nice to watch.

"NeXT vs Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

⬐ neilv

This video is great, though a bit unfair, besides the manipulative cinematic details.

Three minutes in, you know that Sun (he looks IBM) is going to get destroyed, not because of OO like the narrator later asserts, but because the requirements will leverage components that are bundled with NeXT, but not bundled with Sun.

Just like the Web supports responsive design and not everyone actually uses it.

For Motif I am aware of the one provided with Motif++, now gone from the Web, and the one provided by ICS (https://motif.ics.com/products).

I guess Solaris might have lacked one indeed, given NeXT's commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Sun was never good at desktop software anyway, killed NeWS, Swing while powerful requires graphics programming knowledge to make cool UIs and then there was F3 (JavaFX 1.0), and the Java Desktop Framework Integration project went nowhere.

What mattered on A/UX for application developers on Apple platforms was the System APIs layer ported to run on top of X Windows integration.

Likewise, anyone doing NeXT development was focused on Objective-C frameworks all the way down to driver kit.

As Application developer on a NeXT, the tune was all about WebObjects, Renderman, EOF.

Applications like Lotus Improv, Wingz, and those being put out by Omni Group were the meat of the kind of applications that people considered to use NeXTSTEP, not BSD command line utilities.

Pretty much patent on commercials like NeXT vs Sun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Or Steve Jobs opinion on UNIX users,

https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-st...

and later when back at Apple

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2591327/apple-hopes-to...

AIX is definitly UNIX, because it isnt' like A/UX, NeXTSTEP, OS X or iOS, where the UNIX layer is there more to bring stuff into the platform, while the main developer stack is something else.

I think you mean the NeXT vs. Sun demo, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg&lc=UgidKu1gsNhVQ....

⬐ dep_b

Thank you so much!

In case you still haven't seen this,

https://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/BooksArticlesWhitePapers/...

"NeXT vs Sun" commercial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

https://opendylan.org/

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/531-mac-os-8-0-copland-b...

https://tech-insider.org/mac/copland.html

It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience,

You can start by having a look at,

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

"SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w

You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS,

"NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA

Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas.

Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack.

So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top.

On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS.

The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions.

Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available).

And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant.

It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

⬐ EricE

> It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux.

A perfect summation!

By writing system level macOS software, although I think you mean old style POSIX UNIX stuff.

Here is a thing, already with NeXTSTEP, UNIX support wasn't never something worthwhile looking for, NeXTSTEP was used for its Objective-C tooling and frameworks, like Renderman and Improv.

The UNIX stuff was just a solution for having a quick ramp up for their OS development, and just like Microsoft with Windows 3.1 NT, to have a tick in the box when selling to the government,

Their famous commercial against Sun, hardly touches on UNIX like development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

You aren't going to see a CLI on that NeXTSTEP screen.

Just like the SDK is all about Objective-C related stuff, even the device drivers were written in Objective-C.

https://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

The only fouls here are those that keep giving their money to corporations instead of supporting Linux OEMs, as Microsoft cleverly discovered.

In fact, had either A/UX not been discontinued or Microsoft seriously supported their POSIX personality, Linux would never taken off, as the same crowd would be happily using these systems.

An interesting video showing some features of NeXTSTEP, on which GNUStep is based:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

If you enjoy reading documents, BITSAVERS.ORG is a treasure mine full of lost knowledge.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers

Here you will find Xerox PARC, DEC, Burroughs, Apple, Sun, Borland,... old research documents, papers, manuals.

In the context of static compilation, for example in MS-DOS, take Turbo Pascal 6.0 programmer's guide.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandturVersion6.0Pr...

For some 8 bit love you can check ZX Spectrum and Atari archives.

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/

http://www.atariarchives.org/

Next step is to get an emulator for any of those old OS/computers and try to follow along one of those books.

Also there are some videos on YouTube showing those systems.

"The Smalltalk-80 Programming System"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU

"NeXT vs Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

"Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

"Amiga Programming"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOAyVIWFaXQ&list=PL1E7187BCF...

"Amiga Hardware Programming"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10&list=PLc3ltHgmii...

The Mother of All Demos"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Just a very tiny sample of videos

⬐ nurettin

I emailed the bitsavers link to our programming team at work with the subject: "jurassic park"

Started programming in 1982. Object oriented programming was a huge advance - especially in developer productivity. A side effect was the dramatic improvement in developer tools: gui builders, IDEs, etc all improved dramatically. Probably the watershed moment for OO was this NeXT video that showed the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

⬐ zzzzzzzza

going from emacs to eclipse hardly seems like an improvement.

⬐ delinka

emacs to vim, however ... ;-)

> which is further evidence of the amazing foresight Apple had in basing macOS on an open-source core (BSD):

NeXT did it, not Apple.

And the goal of the time was just to help bring UNIX software into NeXTSTEP as they were competing against the likes of Solaris for market share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

The whole NeXT architecture has very little UNIX on it.

http://osxbook.com/

http://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_Developer_Documentation/

NeXT also made a promo film with an app development shootout between NeXT and Solaris :https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg

You mean like this in 1991?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

I would have rather used the GUI tooling of a NeXT, which eschews the UNIX traditions even though it builds partially on top of them, than the Solaris way of programming GUIs, if given the option.

Just because I could only access green phosphor terminals, doesn't mean I wasn't aware of other, more expensive, options.

Another good example is the NeXT vs Sun duel, regarding the RAD tooling of NeXTStep vs the traditional UNIX development (1991).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

⬐ hayksaakian

'interface builder' 1991 reminds me a lot of interface builder from xcode in 2016

⬐ kitsunesoba

Interface Builder remained nearly unchanged all the way up until Project Builder turned into Xcode and shortly after IB got blended in. Here's a screenshot from IB under OS X 10.2: https://cl.ly/0J1g1p1m0T3C

I personally liked the two being separate applications. IB is still great today, but it (and Xcode) slowed down noticeably when the two combined.

⬐ meddlepal

I had almost forgotten about the horrendous horizontal pinstripes in early OS X. Looking back it's hard to understand why people drooled over the early OS X UI.

⬐ hayksaakian

does this have something to do with rendering on CRTs? How they draw horizontal lines?

⬐ sho_hn

No, nothing.

⬐ protomyth

It was so much easier to fire up interface builder and build something to play around with ideas than the all-in-one Xcode must define a project of today.

I think anytime I have to create a project in any software, it adds a wall of ceremony that just keep adding more layers. It's the difference between QuickTime Pro and iMovie for editing.

⬐ methehack

You probably know this, but it's the same stuff -- I would wager a hunk of the original interface builder code written for the NeXT machine runs on your Mac today when you use the interface builder part of xcode (though I haven't looked recently). You probably know this too, but all those classes that begin with the "NS" prefix come from "NeXT Step" -- same stuff, just updated.

It seems likely to me that all these dev tools from 1991 have something to do with why there are > 1M iPhone apps today. That and the enormous market attracting developers...

⬐ stuaxo

What was in the Next box CPU wise? You would need Rosetta or something like it to run the old binaries... though it would be awesome if someone implemented this (in fact... bring back rosetta, ffs!)

⬐ dredmorbius

CPU Motorola 68030 @ 25 MHz, 68882 FPU @ 25 MHz, 56001 digital signal processor (DSP) @ 25 MHz

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer

⬐ patrickg_zill

The original NeXT was Motorola 68030; but performance got decent after they added the 68040 running at either 25Mhz or 33Mhz (which was called the NeXT Mono Turbo if the display was mono or Turbo Color if 4096 colors display).

⬐ acqq

And the same year, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had "world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...

⬐ Razengan

Let's not forget the development of Doom on NeXT, which ironically went on to make PC/DOS cool in gaming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programmin...

⬐ acqq

It wasn't ironic, at these "earlier" times it was common to use significantly stronger computers to develop for the "smaller targets": in 1975 Altair Basic, the first product of (then called) Micro-Soft, which had to run on the 8080 computer with only 4 kilobytes of memory was developed on the PDP-10 computer owned by Harvard University:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Paul Allen wrote an emulator for the microprocessor which run on PDP-10. He was able to extend his previous version of emulator for that.

At the time Microsoft developed MS-DOS (actually modifying the program they have bought), around 1981, they owned their own DECSYSTEM-2060:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20

⬐ tarsinge

And for developing on the early Macintosh you had to have a Lisa Workstation[1]

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=3rd_Party_Develop...

⬐ csl

Also, the original Lucasfilm Commodore 64 games, such as Maniac Mansion, were cross-compiled on UNIX workstations, transferred over the network and uploaded to running C64s — way back in 1987! (Source: The Thimbleweed Park podcasts [0], which I highly recommend.)

[0]: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com

⬐ acqq

Three years earlier, the development for the 1984 game "Match Point" for ZX Spectrum (the graphics in the video is original, the sound is fake by the youtube video producer):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRO_nY-d94w&t=22s

was done by then-just-software company named Psion on their VAX computer:

https://archive.org/stream/sinclair-user-magazine-036/Sincla...

⬐ slashblake

For one of my summer jobs in college, this is around 2005, I had to port an old NeXTSTEP phone system to Mac OS X. I was amazed at how easy this was, considering it was just taking Carbon to Cocoa, and amazed at how ahead of its time NeXTStep's APIs were. Project Builder (XCode) and Interface Builder were created on these machines. Then bought by Steve@Apple.

⬐ eddieroger

> Then bought by Steve@Apple.

Um, what? Steve founded NeXT and was with them with Apple bought them out for the OS.

⬐ aaronbrethorst

Carbon was the name for the cleaned up, sanitized version of the old Classic Macintosh APIs that was compatible with OS X[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

Steve founded NeXT after getting fired from Apple, as is reflected in part by the name of the company. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 for $429mm, which is how Steve Jobs came back to Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me...

[1] Well, what was then called OS X.

⬐ charlesism

...and Avie, from this video, came to Apple with him :)

⬐ duncan_bayne

I've heard that purchase described as "Jobs buying Apple for $-429mm" :)

I still remember reading reviews of the NeXT OS as a child, wishing I had the hardware to run it (from memory I was still running a PC at the time - an original IBM PC, which was considered a dinosaur even then).

⬐ therealmarv

Am I the only one who had the same development feelings but only on Windows with Borland Delphi?

You could do the same video with Delphi vs. Visual C++ playing in the 90s.

⬐ snaky

That's why Microsoft stole all of the key people from Delphi team.

⬐ therealmarv

C# is the copycat today.

⬐ msh

How can they steal them? They were not slaves.

⬐ snaky

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000

⬐ msh

I don't have a account so I can't read the whole article but I can't see how someone could claim that the people was the property of Borland.

⬐ lopatin

I always feel like the Sun programmer, writing web apps today.

⬐ asenna

Have you tried some of the newer magically-handles-everything frameworks like Meteor? Yes, it may not suit every project and I too use the more traditional tools for a lot of my work.

But when I do use Meteor for a project, I feel exactly like the NeXT developer in this video.

⬐ deanCommie

I wonder if the Sun programmer knew he would be portrayed as a patsy..

⬐ ebbv

I mean he knew it was a video for NeXT, so I don't know what else he would have expected.

Though I would say I don't think he was portrayed badly in this video, the point was not that he was a problem, the point was that NeXT's application development environment is better.

⬐ None

None

⬐ primis

What I found interesting, up until the Tiff issue, they were basically on par. The Sun programmer said his code would basically work with anything except tiff. The NeXT people probably knew this was a limitation of a specific library he was using and threw it in to make it less fair.

⬐ mistersquid

@12:19: https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg?t=739

> At this point, we threw the programmers an unexpected but not unrealistic curve.

> Like a typical user, we asked them to add a feature not in the original spec. In this case, a button would recall all the trouble logs for a particular customer.

> Using NeXT Step, the NeXT programmer completed the task in about 20 minutes.

> [NeXT progammer discussing some details]

> The sun programmer also estimated a time of 20 minutes, but it took about 45 before he was ready to test his version.

This was about 20 hours in, which means that since they started on Wed, 30 October 1991 and assuming maximum 8-hour days, they have missed Halloween and would be at least halfway into Friday. The video states that the programmers finished on Sat, 2 November.

The video goes on to state that the NeXT system enabled the NeXT programmer to add a number of features such as system fonts and button icons "for free", which goes to show that the video's intended audience are managers and executives of software development teams who would of course want faster development, ad hoc requests, and cost-free features.

I personally would have been tempted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ once they announced a planned "unexpected" feature request because rather than train users and customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design decisions that would be made as a result, the video encourages customers to believe their out-of-spec requests will be more quickly accommodated if only their programmers were using object-oriented NeXT Step.

25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-hour feature requests when using object-oriented code.

EDIT: link to specified timecode; formatting; additional detail about date code was written.

⬐ mwcampbell

> they have missed Halloween

I don't understand this part. You said you're assuming 8-hour work days. AFAIK, it's not at all common to take Halloween off from work. So what's the point of mentioning that day?

⬐ None

None

⬐ mistersquid

Just that there are so few secular holidays in the US work context and Halloween is one of those non-holidays (like Cinco de Mayo in California) where people in the US will make an extra effort to spend time with friends and family.

⬐ m_mueller

The main problem is that managers and users - lacking a mental model of the software - have no idea what's an easy problem and what's a hard problem (that would take lots of engineering). Thid creates unrealistic expectations.

⬐ colejohnson66

The problem is people think that just because it's easy for them, it's easy for a computer. Obligatory xkcd[0]. "What!? I can clearly tell that's a bird! You mean to tell me that you can't make a computer do the same?"

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1425/

⬐ wpietri

Has this ever worked?

> than train users and customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design decisions

No matter how much training we give customers, the very best they can do is give us the reasonably foreseeable requirements. That was maybe possible for a couple of decades when our main job as an industry was to take well-evolved paper processes and put them on a computer. Even then, though, people were getting better results by shipping every few days in response to observing actual user experience.

I don't think trying to frontload requirements works anymore, though. Startups are effectively machines for learning. We can't predict what learning will happen; if we could, we wouldn't be learning. And those startups are creating change for everybody else, making it impossible to know what competitive challenges might arise tomorrow.

So I think it's time for us to stop pretending we can get everybody else to freeze the world just because it's more convenient for a particular set of design techniques.

> 25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-hour feature requests when using object-oriented code.

I was a NeXT programmer back then. 25 years later, it is much easier to add feature requests to OO codebases. The three big differences: automated testing is common and easy; refactoring a design is a well-understood process; and you can deploy to millions of people with zero additional cost or work beyond committing and pushing to master. Which in turn means that the whole notion of "11th hour" is dissolving. Which hour is the 11th if you're releasing a few times per day?

⬐ mistersquid

Yours are all excellent points, especially in contexts that are close to or approaching continuous integration.

However, many shops still release annually, quarterly, and bi-monthly. Also many shops don't have smooth sprints, their development processes being somewhere between Agile and Waterfall. I've worked in two such shops.

I'm not naysaying you, just adding that I think your insights apply to a different model of development than the one I'm thinking about in my previous comment.

⬐ agumonkey

"Sun" was trimmed out of the title.

Still an enjoyable video.

⬐ dang

Not sure what happened there! Restored.

⬐ infodroid

It was originally posted with the title:

NeXT vs Sun head-to-head programming competition (1991) [video]

⬐ akhilcacharya

But ultimately most application developers wouldn't be using $15K workstations anyway.

⬐ aninteger

Maybe not $15k but developers frequently have much more powerful (and thereby more expensive machines) than the users who use those apps. Many of the developer machines at work have 16 to 24 gb of ram, SSDs and very fast CPUs. Our customers on the the hand might be running machines with a non SSD drive and 4gb of ram (or less??).

⬐ NEDM64

GBs of RAM in 1991?

That's supercomputer stuff... maybe...

⬐ patrickg_zill

Pretty sure that the Sun workstations and NeXT workstations were about the same price at that time. NeXT might have even been cheaper if you go off list price, although Sun had huge discounts off their published prices for education and large corporate customers.

⬐ protomyth

Heck, Apple was selling the IIfx for 10k at the time. Never mind the HP offerings.

⬐ snaky

So IBM Thinkpad 700C priced $4,350 was a cheap thing? With 'a beautiful 10.5-inch active-matrix color LCD - the largest screen available on any notebook computer at the time'.

⬐ saretired

They did on Wall St., where Sun and NeXT competed for a while. Neither got much penetration in the general corporate dev market.

⬐ trimbo

Exactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer service representatives) and the competition within that market (Sun).

Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there.

Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off.. but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.

⬐ pjmlp

I wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.

⬐ cuckcuckspruce

Isn't that ASP.net?

⬐ pjmlp

Kind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript mess.

⬐ pcwalton

Does Visual Basic pre-.NET/WinForms even support layout at all?

Edit: Doesn't look like it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070

⬐ pjmlp

GUI RAD tooling is much more than just layout, and at least it can center text and quite a few other things that require CSS tricks.

Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else?

Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Apparently each browser still implements just part of it.

Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.

⬐ smacktoward

http://php.net/

:-D

⬐ snaky

Oracle Application Express

⬐ wtallis

You can't ignore how NeXT was somewhat constrained by not being able to compete head-on with Apple without incurring serious legal expenses. They got sued once right out of the gate and would certainly have been sued more if they started to cause real trouble.

⬐ setpatchaddress

Sure you can. Sun and SGI were viable for a while.

⬐ wtallis

Sun and SGI had a significant head start over NeXT. By the time NeXT shipped hardware, they were moving off 68k onto SPARC and MIPS respectively, building on successful and established product lines with the kind of hardware differentiation that NeXT didn't have the capital for. That's why NeXT had to change direction and make software such a major part of their strategy; they couldn't just re-play the same strategies that Sun and SGI got off the ground with, because those niches were now pretty well occupied.

⬐ youdontknowtho

That was really fun to watch. I love old tech videos...thanks!

⬐ Narishma

Here's one of a demo of Lucid's Emacs-based C++ IDE from around the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

⬐ youdontknowtho

Nice. Thanks for that. Enjoyed it very much.

⬐ Asooka

Wow. This is parsecs away from the embarrassment that's modern Linux IDEs. What the heck happened?

⬐ mwcampbell

Does anyone know what kind of database the NeXT version of the application probably used? Plain text files? .plist files? A relational database? Something else?

⬐ ams6110

IIRC the NeXT workstations came with a contemporary version of Sybase (ancestor to SQL Server).

⬐ kristopolous

Man that control to put on the multiple buttons and give them spacing was really something. Kinda useless but really quite impressive.

⬐ api

One of the things that really disappoints me about computing is how GUI development is such a horrid treadmill of constant reinvention and total reboots with no overall cumulative progress. The Web is just now reinventing things with React and components that were perfected in several different desktop systems at different times. Something about UI development makes long term reuse and depth building impossible.

I think one factor is that good UI and UX is nearly always proprietary, so these great platforms get built but then ultimately die when the market moves on.

⬐ wtallis

There's nothing dead about this UI platform. It got a new theme in 2001 and is still going strong today. The colors have shifted over the years and the scroll bars switched sides and have mostly faded away, but it only takes a glance at the code to see that it's the same platform at heart.

⬐ radiofan

With over a billion devices sold running a direct descendent of this platform I'd say 'going strong' is a bit of an understatement!

⬐ dredmorbius

Except that some elements have changed massively.

You no longer have window-independent focus. You cannot bind hotkeys to windowing events. You cannot toggle through all windows via alt-tab, you can't set focus-follows-mouse.

Source: I've been use WindowMaker (a NeXTstep clone) for 20 years.

⬐ wtallis

I really don't see how some tweaks to window manager behavior to make it more accessible to Mac and Windows users are more fundamental and massive than the aforementioned change to scrollbar behavior to make it more accessible to Mac and Windows users. They were all noticeable, for sure, but from a technological perspective they were all quite minor.

Plus, I'm not sure how many of the things you mention are even changes relative to genuine NeXTSTEP rather than just differences from WindowMaker's imperfect emulation of it. Focus-follows-mouse was an X11 thing WindowMaker shoehorned into its NeXT-like environment; genuine NeXTSTEP was click-to-focus, though it could be hacked to emulate focus-follows-mouse: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Mi...

BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history.

BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS as well as WinFS. The BeFS main developer wrote a book about it, as it is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System

Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS

Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Canc...

Another interesting video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg (In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later.)