[HN Gopher] Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
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Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-12-21 21:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.hayman.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.hayman.net)
| grecy wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to work at a WebObjects shop from
| 2007-2009.
|
| I had always heard of Frameworks and how they differ from
| Libraries, but those first few weeks (months?) were the most
| exciting of my development career. Learning how much of the heavy
| lifting WO did was simply incredible and being able to whip up a
| very fully-featured Web Application in an our or two was
| impressive.
|
| writing the Java line 'NSArray customers = new NSArray()' always
| put a smile on my face. (NS stands for NextStep).
| smm11 wrote:
| Must be running on a NeXT 486.
| bcantrill wrote:
| For anyone interested in the history of NeXT, I highly recommend
| Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing."[0] (And I
| regret that I may have personally had some role in the current
| outsized prices of used copies -- my apologies!) We also had a
| really interesting Twitter Spaces discussion of both the book --
| and on NeXT more generally.[1]
|
| [0]
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316.Steve_Jobs_the...
|
| [1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-
| spaces/blob/master/...
| spitfire wrote:
| Wow. That audio chat was obnoxious. Nerds laughing at
| themselves about how smart they are (in hindsight).
|
| NeXT was attempting to bring OOP programming to the masses,
| along with some really excellent for the time (and even now)
| rapid development tools.
|
| Try some of the applications (FrameMaker, Mathematica, IB, etc)
| on NeXT. Then try the equivalents on Sun (which they were
| holding up as the exemplar in that audio chat), not even in the
| same ballpark.
|
| They actually got very good traction in financial services and
| a few other areas. Just too late.
|
| As for the hardware, they were 3 years too early for what they
| wanted to do. Had they held in until 1996 they could have had a
| fast enough machine for the price target they wanted. (Say
| 100mhz, 32meg ram, ~gig disk, high res colour).
|
| Edit: Of course it turned out NeXT was right once they got a
| large enough market for it when they acquired Apple.
| MR4D wrote:
| Best quote in the article:
|
| _And, all that technology that I started learning when I bought
| my $11,000 NeXT cube in Indiana in 1988 now runs on my phone. And
| my watch! On my wrist. Objective-C runs on my wrist today.
| Crazy._
|
| Fantastic article. Can't believe it's been a quarter century
| already!
| superdug wrote:
| Setting NeXT cubes on fire was totally a thing I'll never
| forget. They were made out of Magnesium and burnt
| wonderfully[0].
|
| [0] -- https://youtu.be/pkvQ-BJD2rU
| smm11 wrote:
| Something tells me if I put sparklers and thermite in my DEC
| box running NeXT, it would burn, too.
| superdug wrote:
| IS it an Alpha?
| smm11 wrote:
| Nope, sadly.
| superdug wrote:
| I still remember this time quite vividly. Apple had fired Jobs
| years earlier and knew that MacOS was not a modern enough
| operating system to make them competitive. BeOS and NeXT were
| competing for Apple's partnership to make the next Mac operating
| system.
|
| At the time I had an Intel pII Xeon desktop from Dell that had a
| nvidia monster video card and turtle beach sound card. Oddly
| enough, the processor, video card, and sound card were all
| compatible with BeOS so I had an unofficia x86 BeBox. The
| official BeBox was a PPC box.
|
| BeOS was chosen to be the successor to MacOS 9 until the 11th
| hour, when a meeting with Jobs and the board of Apple met. BeOS
| was dumped almost immediately for NeXT that night.
|
| BeOS was a completely new operating system while NeXT was based
| on a Mach OS BSD base (later to become Darwin BSD).
|
| Be Inc fell apart and sold to 3Com, which sold to HP eventually
| and there it was neglected and mothballed. Haiku came out later
| to try and bring the project back, but at the time of Haiku's
| release Be was already over a decade old and the code had not
| kept up.
|
| There was so much momentum in the BeOS world before the 3com
| acquisition that was stifled and killed.
|
| Now this period of time is often referred to as "When NeXT bought
| Apple with Apple's money."
| coldcode wrote:
| I left Apple almost exactly a year before this, but I remember
| how totally horrific the Copland dev was, hundreds of engineers
| writing crap with hardly any coordination. It was pretty
| depressing to come to work because we had almost no money for
| anything, and no real hope for a future. I assumed Apple was
| doomed if they continued as they were so I left. If I had only
| known what was going to happen I would have stayed. Oopsy.
| superdug wrote:
| At the time, it was a sport of sorts to predict when Apple
| would fold entirely. It was always imminent. Then came Mac OS
| X, iMac, iBook, and iPod ... and the rest is history
| macintux wrote:
| I don't think the word "beleaguered" fully abandoned Apple
| headlines until after 2010.
| spchampion2 wrote:
| I think this acquisition may go down in history as one of the
| most successful ever, delivering shareholders a return of over
| 82,200% (the Nasdaq returns have only been about 1,100% in the
| same timeframe). According to Google Finance, Apple was trading
| at $0.21 in December, 1996 (price adjusted to reflect subsequent
| splits). Today they're trading at $172.99.
|
| It's very rare that you see acquisitions work out like this.
| Apple traded away about 13% of their 1996 market cap to buy NeXT,
| and then allowed NeXT's leadership to take over and run the
| place. Most M&A stories like this usually result in massive
| underperformance for shareholders. Instead, Steve Jobs turned
| NeXTSTEP into OS X and iOS, driving an incredible turnaround.
|
| People like to point out that this merger was different because
| of Steve Jobs and his history with Apple, but I don't think
| that's so obvious. Neither Apple nor NeXT were strong companies
| at the time, and Apple's culture had drifted considerably since
| Jobs was fired in 1985.
|
| For anyone who has been involved in a big acquisition
| integration, it can be like pulling teeth to get a buyer to
| properly adopt the target's technology. There are always barriers
| from the junior engineer all the way to the CEO. While it
| certainly helped that Jobs was the original founder, even that
| was no guarantee of success. Jobs had learned a lot running NeXT
| and Pixar, but that was not obvious at the time. I imagine there
| was a lot of internal resistance within Apple.
|
| This acquisition probably would have failed miserably anywhere
| else, and yet Jobs and Apple made it one of the best ever.
| macintux wrote:
| There was certainly much lamentation at the time that Apple
| didn't purchase BeOS.
|
| I'm also reminded of Sun's near-acquisition of Apple
| (apparently multiple times), which McNealy(?) later
| acknowledged would never have worked out so well.
|
| Jobs gets a lot of grief here and elsewhere for his personal
| failings and management style, but this was an epochal moment
| in the computer business. I remember roughly at the same time
| dreading what seemed like the inevitable Windows victory over
| all of personal computing.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > It's very rare that you see acquisitions work out like this
|
| The acquisition was a normal acquisition.
|
| What made it special was the DOJ stepping in to destroy
| Microsoft because Bill Gates was essentially too rich and his
| riches were so talked about that people in DC wanted to show
| him who's the alpha.
|
| Apple would have gone to zero without Microsoft essentially
| saving it from bankruptcy, and it would be irrelevant had the
| DOJ not attacked Microsoft with such vigor.
| macintux wrote:
| I don't believe it was the money that really mattered, but
| the commitment to provide Office for Mac made a big
| difference.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| This wasn't a merger it was a reverse takeover. Jobs basically
| got rid of a large amount of unprofitable projects and merge
| NextStep with a Mac UX and make a compelling computer to use it
| with.
|
| The result was what Apple needed to compete. A modern OS made
| of with a modern UI with XNU that had memory protection that
| can compete with Windows. Also a transition VM for older
| software.The iMac broke away and showed that computers could
| look cool
|
| The iPod showed Apple could make compelling Consumer
| electronics XNU got adopted with the iPhone iPad and with what
| they learned with the iPod.
|
| Not many companies can claim so many innovative devices and
| most get 2 or 3.
| pfarrell wrote:
| Wayback Machine link if you get resource limit errors
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211220184240/https://blog.haym...
| mattl wrote:
| Time flies.
|
| For the 21st anniversary a few of us got together outside the old
| NeXT office in Boston. We tried to hire a Dr. Gil Amelio
| impersonator but had no luck finding someone, so one of the group
| just did an impression of old Gil.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| If you ever find yourself in this situation again, virtually
| all grocery stores will sell you deli ham to place between
| slices of white bread. Just set it on a stool and you'll have a
| solid hour of entertainment.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Can confirm. We did this in a pinch once. Sure enough, most
| grocery stores do in fact sell these, readily available in
| just about every city in the United States.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I had not an idea what you were talking about, until
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIcXkROQRZQ
| mattl wrote:
| Me if I ever run into him:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnHqE3mYi7A
| jcims wrote:
| Apologies to anyone that has seen me mention this before but i
| found some evidence and need to rehash it. Did anyone in here
| ever reply to the email from Steve Jobs that was baked into the
| NeXTSTEP email client?
|
| (About halfway down this apropos article)
| https://www.howtogeek.com/698532/before-mac-os-x-what-was-ne...
|
| I did as a freshman at Ohio State and found out in his reply that
| he was _not_ a fan of read receipts! They are an invasion of his
| privacy!!! lol
| smm11 wrote:
| I emailed Steve at Apple right after the merger.
|
| Said what could save Apple would be a small, handheld, battery-
| powered device that WAS your computer, and could plug into
| anything and be your computer.
|
| Today I'm happy to use a Samsung Galaxy S21 that plugs into a
| monitor and is my computer.
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(page generated 2021-12-21 23:00 UTC)