I'm noticing this a lot for all the Steve Jobs autobiographies that have recently flooded the TV, net, and bookshelves after he kicked the bucket.
EVERYONE talks about his history at Apple but that gap between him leaving and him returning is odd. Only once did I even see mention of NeXT and it was in the form of a picture, the text "NeXT" and a brief discussion with Ross Perot.
Did nothing really happen in that time span for anything to really be noted in history. Was NeXT that dull? :?:
Yes, it is even sad that some categorize NeXT as his "failed" company.
But the first web server (and some say the internet) was created on a NeXT Cube.
Objective-C, and pretty much modern OOP was a result of NeXTSTEP.
Micro-Kernel with its ability to isolate the OS from the hardware was brought back to life with NeXT as one the bases of OSX and some say the savior of Apple.
The mouse driven GUI was refined with NeXT, that along with OOP would have made NeXT unstoppable if it weren't for the machines price.
NeXT was sued out of the personal PC market by then Apple and so high end workstations were their only avenue.
Not so dull but not so flashy, more of a very strong undercurrent in the tide of everything we know about computers today.
There was recently an article in the german computer magazin ix covering the importance of next leading unix to the mass market. A preview of this article can be seen here.
http://www.heise.de/ix/inhalt/2011/12/100
Quote from: "GrafZahl"There was recently an article in the german computer magazin ix covering the importance of next leading unix to the mass market. A preview of this article can be seen here.
http://www.heise.de/ix/inhalt/2011/12/100
it would be great to be able to read this in english
:lol:
I got to get that magazine, as they used my screenshot of nextstep with jobs's welcome mail message
QuoteNeXT was sued out of the personal PC market by then Apple and so high end workstations were their only avenue.
I'm not sure if this is entirely correct, or just legend. The lawsuit was designed to prevent NeXT from redesigning the Mac, which Apple's management feared. I don't think Steve Jobs cared about the law suit, because he wasn't planning on redoing Macintosh anyway.
As for the cost, I think in 1990 terms that the B&W NeXT Station was about as cheap as could be done without jettisoning all the features. Back in 1991, my university book store actually sold NeXT Computers and had several brand-new slabs on display. I think they cost around $4000. They were fun to play with, but were for a normal student unaffordable. They also couldn't run commodity (pirated) software, so probably didn't sell too well.
Once NeXT transitioned to Intel, the prices came down a little bit, but I don't think it was possible to build a useable NeXT system for less than about $2000, not including the monitor or the software license. Throw in a decent Mega-Pixel monitor and a software license you would be back at the $4000 level, so NeXT was never really a player in the consumer market.
I was amazed at how inexpensive OS X was when it came out; probably because they jettisoned Adobe.
Quote from: "bkmoore"I don't think Steve Jobs cared about the law suit, because he wasn't planning on redoing Macintosh anyway.
Nope: in typical Steve fashion, he was onto something entirely new.
One of my best friend's was the NeXT campus rep when I was in school ('89-'93) so I get a lot of time on the hardware and software. NeXT was so far ahead of what was around then--systems 6 and 7 in the Mac world--that it was little short of amazing. When I got my first G5 I thought that this was what Steve was aiming at all those years ago.