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OS X Operating Systems

Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3.0 465

Posted by michael from the step-by-step-the-longest-march dept.
node 3 writes "Following the current trend of posting video from product demos long past, openstep.se has posted a 55MB video from 1992 of Steve Jobs demoing NeXTSTEP 3.0. They already have 4 mirrors hosting the file, but hopefully someone will set up a torrent (I would, but I don't have a place to post it). If you find the demo compelling and want to try out NeXTSTEP for yourself, you can always go here or here to get started."
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Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3.0 More

Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3.0

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  • old apple ads (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dclaw ( 593370 )
    what's with all these old apple ads?

  • Next NeXTSTEP? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )
    Wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to contribute to GNUstep [gnustep.org]?

  • Geez (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:35PM (#11517034)
    Is someone keeping a list of these or something? It sure would be nice if someone could just put together one big bittorrent archive.

    I mean, it would be sad if after these things being rescued from the ravages of time and analog media, they were lost to the ravages of time and the broken Slashdot search function the instant that the blogosphere's attention span moves on...

    • Dissapearing History (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 )
      Or the files are lost due to the wonderful DMCA, as the DRM rights kick in and all unapproved files are magically deleted off your pc.. or just refuse to play beacuse they *might* be infringing on something, somewhere..
      • I'm sure you think you're being responsibly concerned, but the fact is that somewhere along the line you crossed over into the realm of the deranged ravings of a lunatic.

        Might want to take a step back there, to rejoin us in reality.

        • When "trusted computing" becomes a reality, said "lunatic" might not be too far from the truth. And if such technology is invented, it'll be illegal (read: illegal, jail-time, not illegal, 1 in 100000 chance of getting sued) to break it.

          Might want to have a look at where your reality's heading. "Orphan works" are all too real, there was an article posted quite recently here.

    • Re:Geez (Score:3, Informative)

      by retiarius ( 72746 )
      list not needed with given the existence of the archive.org
      wayback machine. try on for size:

      http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html

    • Re:Geez (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Sunday January 30, 2005 @02:06AM (#11518211)
      I mean, it would be sad if after these things being rescued from the ravages of time and analog media, they were lost to the ravages of time
      This is precisely why we need industry standard open formats, not proprietary formats (QuickTime won't fly). All specifications have to be out in the open since we don't want the death of a company to take its format to the grave.

      The second threat to archival is digital rights management, content protection, keys or any other kind of 'protection' is basically going to kill long term archival.

      I think pure MPEG video is still the best candidate.
      • Quicktime is open, and it's also a much better container than pure MPEG (or avi, which is just unsuitable for modern codecs). ASF/WMV are proprietary and patented.

        Since you obviously use Windows, do a search for 'Quicktime alternative' to get around having to use Apple's Quicktime Player. MPlayer, vlc, xine et al support Quicktime as well. http://www.openquicktime.org/ [openquicktime.org] has a nice library you can use.

        Hopefully, someone else can comment on the quality of Ogg as a container format for video.

  • where'd the torrent go? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by interactive_civilian ( 205158 ) <mamoru&gmail,com> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:38PM (#11517048) Homepage Journal
    I caught this link yesterday on the Mac.Ach. on the ArsTechnica forums, and they had a .torrent link on the page itself (though that was for an older version of the video which was missing the last 10 minutes), but it seems to have disappeared. Either that or they haven't made a torrent for the new file...

    Anyway, think about it people. This video was made in 1992!!! It is amazing how advanced NeXT was at that time. I mean, that machine is what?...a 68030? 040? 33MHz? Amazing! A lot of the technologies that we take for granted in MacOS X were already around at the time, as well as some other things (such as OpenDoc) which were not introduced in other systems for years and have yet to be re-implemented.

    Truly an impressive OS.

    Oh, and it is great to hear Steve Jobs say "BOOOM!" during his demos. ;)

    • Old Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:45PM (#11517093) Homepage Journal
      I agree it shows you what could be done in the old days.

      It was due to the fact that programmers understood the hardware's limitations and made do with what they had. Regardless of whos.. Be it a Mac, an apple IIGS, atari ST.. whatever...

      Today, its 'just throw some more cycles at it, the user can just upgrade'. All the wonderfuly fast hardware and gobs of memory have made all the system guys lazy..

      • Good point! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by interactive_civilian ( 205158 ) <mamoru&gmail,com> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:56PM (#11517153) Homepage Journal
        nurb432 said:
        It was due to the fact that programmers understood the hardware's limitations and made do with what they had. Regardless of whos.. Be it a Mac, an apple IIGS, atari ST.. whatever...
        I agree. There are many times when I think about some of the things that I do on computers today, and sometimes it seems like they aren't much faster than years ago...of course, now with the power and the multi-tasking I can do many more things at the same time...

        but think about it. Back in the 80s and early-mid 90s, a lot of things on computers were VERY hardware limited and developers had to program efficiently to get things to run with some semblence (sp?) of speed. IANADeveloper, but it seems to me that that kind of efficiency has for the most part disappeared (and this is not a knock on developers...you guys are doing amazing things!).

        I guess I just imagine about what it would be like if the same kind of efficiency that was used to make things run quickly on an 040 was used to make things run on a G4 or G5 today and it blows my mind.

        Of course, there is a lot that I don't understand about developing and the hardware has also advanced so much that programming for efficiency due to hardware limitations like developers had to back in the day probably doesn't apply as much any more.

        thoughts?

        • Re:Good point! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:55PM (#11517426) Homepage
          Don't forget that optimization and writing the code in the first place are tradeoffs. Sure, it was possible to perform miracles on very limited hardware if you focused entirely on one single piece of critical code over a long time- but that was time you could have spent adding new features, removing bugs elsewhere in the code, and so on.

          Also, optimizing compilers have very nearly caught up with human assembly programmers, at least when using modern chips with complex architectures and very aggressive internal scheduling (depending on platform, of course).

          Finally, there is a place where very high levels of optimization and hand-coding are still used: console games.

          • Re:Good point! (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            "Also, optimizing compilers have very nearly caught up with human assembly programmers"

            Not really. Chips have gotten fast enough that it really is a moot point 95-99 percent of the time.

            Even the best optimizing compilers are still putting out much of the same crap they use to five years ago.

          • Re:Good point! (Score:4, Informative)

            by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @12:31AM (#11517772)
            Also, optimizing compilers have very nearly caught up with human assembly programmers
            Not if you're a Real Programmer! [catb.org]

        • Re:Good point! (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          One observation... yes NeXT was *way* ahead of its time, but that isn't 100% a good thing.

          A lab I worked in back in the 90s had a few 'cubes and some similarly speced old UNIX workstations. NeXTstep was far and away prettier and more advanced, yet noone used those boxes unless they absolutely had to. They were just *so* slow. After a couple days of using a NeXTcube and watching the the beautiful UI update in slow-motion and the machine constatly swapped you'd be begging to be back to using twm and X11R

          • Re:Good point! (Score:4, Interesting)

            by tyrione ( 134248 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @12:57AM (#11517865) Homepage
            So speaking of 1992 when the hardware began being phased out and having worked at NeXT I can tell you DPS screamed on future hardware and in-house we fixed a few high penalty flaws in coding that never got released but later the design was rolled into Quartz.

    • Re:where'd the torrent go? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bonch ( 38532 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:00PM (#11517171)
      NextStep in 1989 was an endless series of brilliant concepts and ideas that are just now coming into mainstream operating systems. Truly ahead of its time. As someone else mentioned, the foundations of OS X are a lot more mature than people realize. Cocoa is truly a fantastic way to develop apps. Even simple things like menu item enable/disable becomes automatic due to the way messaging works (i.e., if no methods are found to handle the Print message, then Print gets grayed out automatically).

      Microsoft is going the way of declarative interface programming with languages like XAML, which I disagree with. I take issue with not knowing about the interface objects until run-time which can cause all sorts of issues, particularly display issues. NextStep/Cocoa, on the other hand, actually stores the object graph into a "freeze-dried" file in Interface Builder (the famous NIB files), serializing all the objects and bringing them up in a flash when the application runs.

      It's truly a neat technology to play with. Too bad most of the major apps on OS X are sticking with the Carbon route to avoid rewriting their codebases. Cocoa gives you so many things for free, you even get automatic spellcheck available for any input fields if you want it.
      • NextStep in 1989 was an endless series of brilliant concepts and ideas that are just now coming into mainstream operating systems. Truly ahead of its time. As someone else mentioned, the foundations of OS X are a lot more mature than people realize. Cocoa is truly a fantastic way to develop apps. Even simple things like menu item enable/disable becomes automatic due to the way messaging works (i.e., if no methods are found to handle the Print message, then Print gets grayed out automatically).

        There's an o

      • Flawed management helped keep NeXT out of sight. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:08PM (#11517479) Homepage
        Brilliant concepts, perhaps, but management that was anything but brilliant. "Kits" (proprietary software--collections of ObjC objects and classes--one was encouraged to build dependencies upon) were obsoleted quite quickly, frustrating developers. The underlying OS was a rapidly decaying proprietary variant of 4.2BSD. I vaguely recall the details on how to build shared libraries were kept secret. This might have helped developers write programs that could work better on machines that had less than the full 64MB RAM (on a NeXT Cube). 64MB might not seem like a lot of RAM today, but back then RAM was considerably more expensive.

        Many of the apps that came out for the OS were profoundly overrated and overpriced. There were some unquestionable gems here and there (some gems were even available with source code so one could learn from them, like the sorting demonstration application which allowed you to sort groups of bars of varied heights using different sorting algorithms), but I think many people looking back on what NeXT had to offer are wearing rose-colored glasses and are likely to have never owned NeXT hardware.

        My experience with my NeXT Cube (ownership starting with NS 2.1, user experience starting before that, perhaps with v2.0) helped lead me to appreciate the free software movement. I didn't have my software freedom then and now I do, using commodity hardware I can afford to enhance and replace if need be.

  • That explains it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jspoon ( 585173 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:39PM (#11517056)
    When I downloaded it half an hour ago I thought it was remarkably sluggish to download for something posted on MacSlash several days ago. Now I understand.

    Anyway, this is pretty cool stuff. You can definitely see the broad strokes of OS X in most every part of this demo. Interface builder still ruled.

    A few years ago, I was this close to buying a NeXT box at a University surplus store but it wasn't in booting condition and I didn't have time to determine what was wrong with it. WOuld have been fun to play with though.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • It's More than Just a Dock redux(was Re:Afterstep) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WillAdams ( 45638 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:07PM (#11517205) Homepage
      NeXTstep is far more than just the Dock. Some of the advantages which it affords:

      - Display PostScript --- true WYSIWYG, and the ability to do rich on-screen stuff like display (auto-updating) dimension lines in a drawing program by just typing up some PostScript code.

      - Services --- these allow any app to take advantage of any other app which provides a Service. There're Services for sorting text, convert TeX source to in-place graphical equations, printing envelopes &c.

      - Customizable UI --- tear off menus allows one to decide which command is most easily available and where it's available at.

      - Dynamic run-time binding means that installing a filter service affords said capabilities to any other app, w/o recompiling.

      William
      (who misses NeXT's vertical menu, Display PostScript, Webster.app, pop-up main menu, concise shortcut descriptors and lots of other things on his PowerMac G4 at work in Mac OS X, and appreciates them greatly on his NeXT Cube at home ;)
    • buah ha ha ha... yeah sure.. afterstep, all the look and none of the function.
  • I didn't know Jobs auditioned for Jerry Maguire!
  • I knew that OS X inherits from NeXT, but I was surprised by the similarities. This also makes me believe that OS X is more mature than I had previously thought.

    • Re:Almost looked like a demo of OS X (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bonch ( 38532 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:12PM (#11517232)
      The technology behind OS X is going on almost two decades. :)

      The only thing immature about OS X coming out of the gate was the Aqua interface, which they finally patched up around 10.2.

      On an unrelated note, on Panther, and with Tiger upcoming, the interface is so polished that everything else feels six years behind. I can't help wondering what Apple will offer to compete with Microsoft in the update after Tiger, which might be coming out the year Longhorn ships if Longhorn doesn't delay again. Longhorn sounds like they're ripping off a ton of OS X technology, like a new display technology, hardware-accelerated window drawing, and so on. And what new apps will take advantage of .NET? Adobe, Macromedia, id Software, and so on aren't going to rewrite their apps in unmanaged C++ .NET code just to fit in. At least on OS X, Apple offered the Carbon APIs to allow old apps to compile with few changes and suddenly take advantage of the new environment.

      Honestly, though, it would be nice of more of the major OS X apps took advantage of Cocoa instead of hanging onto Carbon for dear life. Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs like a dog, and Photoshop CS is little better.
      • Honestly, though, it would be nice of more of the major OS X apps took advantage of Cocoa instead of hanging onto Carbon for dear life. Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs like a dog, and Photoshop CS is little better.

        I could not agree with you more.
        • Honestly, though, it would be nice of more of the major OS X apps took advantage of Cocoa instead of hanging onto Carbon for dear life. Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs like a dog, and Photoshop CS is little better.

          You can thank Adobe's brain-dead business model for this. Instead of trying to make great stuff that highlights the strength of each OS they develop for, they've largely abandoned doing things first on the Mac in deference to having feature parity at ship time.

          This is why Photoshop CS is slower on th

      • The main reason not to use Cocoa is portability (or lack thereof). It's far easier to maintain Carbon and Win32 side-by-side than Cocoa and Win32.
      • or rather OWULD compete ifd it ran on x86.
        Your going to need some strong, immediate, and obvious reasons to get a CTO to buy all new boxes with 'new' OS and interface.

        Or a CTO that wants the company to take a long term apraoch to savings..haha I crack my self up.

  • GNUstep demo (Score:5, Informative)

    by roard ( 661272 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:47PM (#11517102) Homepage

    For thoses who want to see how programming is done in GNUstep, there's this short flash demo here [gnustep.org]

    GNUstep is a free software implementation of the OpenStep API (like Cocoa), and it provides development tools as well. The demo steve do is doable in GNUstep as well..

    (Yes, it's flash... a mpeg version will probably be available next week... in the meantime, it's a good idea to check either swift tools [swift-tools.net] or swfdec [schleef.org] , if you don't want or can't use the Macromedia Flash player..)

  • Mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by CypherXero ( 798440 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @09:52PM (#11517132) Homepage
    I'm hosting a mirror of the video, and I have unlimited bandwidth from my host.

    http://www.collegechixors.com/jobs_NS30_demo_small .mov [collegechixors.com]

  • WndowMaker (Score:3)

    by gustgr ( 695173 ) <gustgr@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:19PM (#11517267)
    If you find the demo compelling and want to try out NeXTSTEP for yourself, you can always go here or here to get started

    If you want a more end user solution, you might want to go here [windowmaker.org].

  • Wow.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:27PM (#11517308)
    You know, this does more or less what Exchange does, and ask any business if they could live w/o Outlook/Exchange (or Lotus, whatever) these days and the answer's no. I guess with the price tag (wasn't a Next workstation something like $20 grand?) nobody cared, but he did say he was going to port to 486. I can't help but wonder if a 486 could do this kind of stuff (a dx 100 could, but I think the dx33s where current when this was being done). All I can say is, what the heck happened? I've read a bit of the history (I hear those MO drives they Next Stations ran off of were kinda buggy), but this is big enough stuff that they should have been able to get through a few lean years and sell the technology....

    • Re:Wow.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by roard ( 661272 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @10:41PM (#11517366) Homepage

      All I can say is, what the heck happened

      Well, basically, NeXT overcharged their hardware, then their software. For example, you probably never heard of WebObjects, even if it was (still is actually) one of the best technology to create a dynamic website... and it's no wonder considering they used to sell it at insanely huge prices. Now you can have it via Apple for 500$ ...

      this is big enough stuff that they should have been able to get through a few lean years and sell the technology....

      Well, they did :-) -- to Apple ...

      Actually, the problem they had, is that nearly nobody in the industry was used to OOP. Now it's easier to understand the brilliance of NeXTSTEP's concepts, but it was probably more difficult to convaince people at the time ? (check the real media video on openstep.se/next/videos , they take half the video to explain the interest of OOP before introducing IB..)

      And of course, a NeXT Cube and even a NeXT station were extremely expensive... too bad, they were 15 years ahead of their time (yeah, OSX is not as clean as NeXTSTEP, partly because of the need to integrate all theses existing apps..)

      • Re:Wow.... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dubl-u ( 51156 ) *
        Actually, the problem they had, is that nearly nobody in the industry was used to OOP.

        From the code I see out there, I'm pretty sure the industry still isn't used to OOP. Of the Java code I see in industry, about 80% of it is one of
        • Perl written in Java
        • C written in Java
        • COBOL written in Java
        Remember, folks: if the data and the code don't go together, it's not OO!
    • but he did say he was going to port to 486.

      an x86 port was eventually released (along with several other platforms, like PA-RISC).

    • Re:Wow.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by SteeldrivingJon ( 842919 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:10PM (#11517491) Homepage Journal
      "(wasn't a Next workstation something like $20 grand?)"

      From a 1992 Usenet post of the Winter 1992 price list
      NeXTstation 8-1MB SIMMS, 105MB HD $3775

      NeXTstation Turbo 2-4MB SIMMS, 250MB HD 4775
      NeXTstation Turbo 2-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD 5775
      NeXTstation Turbo 2-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD 6775
      NeXTstation Turbo 4-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD 7775
      NeXTstation Turbo 4-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD 8775

      NeXTstation Color 4-4MB SIMMS, 105MB HD 5650

      NeXTstation Turbo Color 2-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD 6650
      NeXTstation Turbo Color 2-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD 7650
      NeXTstation Turbo Color 4-8MB SIMMS, 250MB HD 8650
      NeXTstation Turbo Color 4-8MB SIMMS, 400MB HD 9650
      These prices are in the ballpark of comparable machines from Sun and Apple.

      but he did say he was going to port to 486. I can't help but wonder if a 486 could do this kind of stuff (a dx 100 could, but I think the dx33s where current when this was being done). All I can say is, what the heck happened?

      It was ported to Intel in the 486 era, but it didn't really become practical to run until the Pentium 2. Ran pretty well on my AMD K6-350, if I recall correctly. Supposed to scream on Athlons.

      In addition to Intel, it was ported, and sold, to run on Sun Sparc workstations and HP PA-RISC workstations.

      I've read a bit of the history (I hear those MO drives they Next Stations ran off of were kinda buggy), but this is big enough stuff that they should have been able to get through a few lean years and sell the technology....

      It wasn't the stations that had the Optical drive, it was the cube. That was the machine that got really expensive, when loaded up with a NeXTDimension color graphics card, big hard disks, and lots of RAM. The Optical was dropped before very long, and the Cube just shipped with a floppy drive. I think the Turbo Cube (33 MHz) couldn't even connect to the optical drive.

      What happend to NeXT is (roughly) this:

      First, customers realized they didn't so much want the hardware, they wanted the operating system. So NeXT dropped hardware and started doing their OS for other peoples' hardware.

      Second, customers realized it wasn't so much the operating system they wanted, it was the development tools. So NeXT came up with a way to run the development tools on NT. And they had their WebObjects product, which let people use NeXT development tools to do web apps. So they de-emphasized the OS.

      Then Apple bought them. The dev tools for NT were de-emphasized, except as a way to do WebObjects development. The OS was refreshed and updated, a process which continues.

      Jonathan Hendry

  • This demo is staged (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lutzray ( 854591 )
    You can see that Jobs is behind a monochrome NeXT MegaPixel Display and the screen grabs are from a color screen.

    • Re:This demo is staged (Score:5, Informative)

      by cjwl ( 776049 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:21PM (#11517534)
      A NeXT cube can drive multiple displays, a 4bit grayscale display built onto the motherboard, and one or more NeXTDimension cards which will do 24bit color (up to 32bit internal w/ alpha driving 24bit to the monitor). So doing a color demo w/ a monochrome monitor nearby isn't far fetched at all. Steve typically used a cube w/ NeXTDimension since it was the "hottest" machine NeXT made.


    • The mono monitor was ribbed, or flanged. I have two in the room with me. The monitor in the video is not. It also looks too big to be the mono monitor, which only came in 17".

      Also, the mono monitor had fat rubber rollers at the front of the base. It actually looked a lot like the old Apple IIc greenscreen monitor, which was designed by the same company (frogdesign). The monitor in the picture lacks the rollers.

      (There was a differently-designed mono monitor towards the very end of the black hardware era (i
  • "This is a live demonstration"..."this EPS file is really coming off of a Mac which is why it takes a second. The Mac's a little slow to give it up."

  • So little has changed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by System.out.println() ( 755533 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:15PM (#11517515) Journal
    I got a chance to play with a friend's NeXTStep 3.0 box tonight, and fiddling around in the OS, I was quite amazed with how similar it is to modern day OS X, despite being over a decade old. A few things that were damn near identical that come to mind:
    - the color picker (except for the fact that it was a grayscale monitor)
    - Interface Builder
    - Terminal.app is dead-on, except in his NeXT it took me a couple of tries to get an actual prompt to come up
    - Drag and drop everywhere
    - The beachball when an app is loading

    And when I saw Jobs demo the WordPerfect, I thought, "So what's the big deal about Pages again?"
  • Morror: http://www.goweee.com/jobs_NS30_demo_small.mov

  • Torrents available for updated QT versions (Score:4, Informative)

    by nedron ( 5294 ) on Saturday January 29, 2005 @11:58PM (#11517670) Homepage
    The original version of the video was truncated by about ten minutes. The people at OpenStep.se posted corrected versions in QT contained MPEG-4 files.

    I've made torrents available at:

    http://nedron.net:6969/ [nedron.net]

  • the future of Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bbh ( 210459 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @12:01AM (#11517679)
    Wow, hopefully Linux will be this good one day!

    -bbh
    • It is here today [gnustep.org]. GnuStep is a great environment based on OpenStep standard. Too bad that Linux communities got sucked into Genome/KDE to pay enough attention to it. Maybe the popularity of Mac OS X can help GnuStep to gain some attention.

  • I 'Heart' WindowMaker (Score:5, Interesting)

    by astrosmash ( 3561 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @12:18AM (#11517732) Journal
    I find it facinating that a lot of the stuff I consider compelling in OS X existed in NeXTSTEP 14 years ago, and it reminds of how disappointed I was with the direction the Linux Desktop took in the mid to late 90s (and today) when the vast majority of support went behind the Win9x-esque KDE and Gnome desktops.

    The designs, ideas, and concepts were all there in the 90s waiting to implemented. And, as hardware improved, there could have been an advanced desktop built on top of Linux that would have been a very compelling alternative to Win9x, if not the leading edge of desktop innovation.

    Instead, we got a start menu, a task bar, and a dump truck full of skins.

    At least nowadays the Gnome people have set their sights much higher, which is great to see.

    I loved WindowMaker and wished it was so much more than a lowly window manager. Ironically, I suppose, it took Apple to make that happen for me. At least these days I can afford to buy a Mac.
    • And, as hardware improved, there could have been an advanced desktop built on top of Linux that would have been a very compelling alternative to Win9x, if not the leading edge of desktop innovation. Instead, we got a start menu, a task bar, and a dump truck full of skins.

      A start menu and a task bar is pretty much what OS X uses (Apple menu, dock), together with a bunch of quick-launch buttons. Despite all the hoopla, the OS X GUI is not all that different from any other GUI: separate apps, file storage o

      • A start menu and a task bar is pretty much what OS X uses (Apple menu, dock), together with a bunch of quick-launch buttons. Despite all the hoopla, the OS X GUI is not all that different from any other GUI: separate apps, file storage of documents, file system browsers, icons, desktop, etc.

        Thank you for demonstrating my point.

        Whether a system has a task bar or start menu is completely irrelevant to its quality or user experience. Yet many people (still) believe that a Windows or Mac desktop is nothin

  • It's amazing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@@@gmail...com> on Sunday January 30, 2005 @12:46AM (#11517822) Journal
    It's honestly amazing. I'm serious. Can anyone remember Windows 3.11? That's what was state of the art when this came out.

    Over 10 years later, tasks like e-mailing, starting a program, and even browsing a network look very similar to what he's demoing, and I'm talking about MS Windows (PC) use. I'd still like an easy-to-use inter-application dictionary. I'm sure the editors of slashdot could use one too.

  • The whole thing is pretty bittersweet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 30, 2005 @02:35AM (#11518321)
    This is sort of sad to watch, because it makes me realize that most of the neat new developments in OS X are really just progressive reimplementation of a vision and feature set that was already complete very long ago.

    This is sad, first of all, because it illustrates just how much Windows's domination has stalled everything in the interim. It's like we've been stuck in a time warp, with nothing changing except processor speeds, for 10 years. Now, since the DOJ suit, things seem to be unfreezing a little and progress can start up again--maybe. But how much further along would be be if the industry had actually had meaningul competition all these years, and if the NeXT vision had not failed so completely to make a dent in Microsoft's two monopolies?

    The other sad thing is that Jobs is still basically just trying to get that vision reinstated. Even playing sappy music while showing family snapshots--everything is the same from demos then and now, only now it's part of iLife. But what if he doesn't have any more big visions beyond what he did at NeXT? We've been living so much in the dark ages that everything old looks new and exciting, but at some point we'll have everything NeXT had again--and then what? Is that the end of the evolutionary path we're on? (In terms of real computer development, not consumer electronics.)

    Seeing him mention Lotus Improv led me to the Wikipedia entry on it, which led me to a (pretty awful) OS X version of Quantrix, which led me to understand that when Cells comes out, that is probably exactly what it will be like, with premade templates for commonly-used home functions like blood-pressure management and weight control, and an emphasis on beautiful charting and graphing, so Apple can deny that it is trying to mess with Excel. And again, we'll be back to something wonderful that we should have had a long time ago. I mean, reading PC Magazine and having them celebrate Pages as a new way of thinking about word processing . . . it really is just a reimplementation of another ancient NeXT program, Pages by Pages.

    So anyway, the whole What Might Have Been feeling is just so strong for me when I see this stuff. You can see why Jobs ended up feeling bitter.

  • PyObjC & GNUStep (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JPyObjC Dude ( 772176 ) on Sunday January 30, 2005 @04:05AM (#11518656)
    GNUStep's Objective-C programming language is just plain sweet and by adding a native Python bridge and it would be even sweeter. I hope that the developers of PyObjC can get their code trees to work on GNUStep solidly so that coders can bring PyObjC based apps to win32 and *nix environments.

    Currently, PyObjC is kind of limited to OSX.

    JsD

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