NeXTSTEP vs Mac OS X - System Demo and Comparison

[@morezco]

“If we were doing this on a mac we’d be waiting til next week for the windows to repaint” holy shit Jobs

[@officiallylazlo]

E

[@dbloyd2]

It would be funny to do a demo of Windows Vista on an old PC and a screen capture of this with Steve Jobs comment in the audio track.

[@milkshakeplease4696]

Jobs: iPhone runs MAC OS X. People in the crowd: WOOT WOOT YES BABY. WE SUPPRESS THE TRUTH OF GOD AND BELIEVE IN SOCOIOPATHIC DARWINISM THUS WE DECIDE TO WORSHIP YOU, Steve Jobs. lame

[@surprisedpotato]

Sam H over-religious anyone?

[@bgimusic]

@jo gr stop

[@amberdean1263]

This is wonderful - thank you for delving into vintage technology. It's important that we keep the history alive.

[@ComputerClan]

Thank you. We'll be delving into more soon, so stick around. If you liked this, you'll like what we've got in store ; )

[@johnconnor6735]

It’s not vintage it’s the same thing we have today.

[@janrusthaug6254]

I've. been using a Mac since 2002. Just found out I have Chess installed.

[@bum4202]

LLOL

[@tinmank]

Jan Rusthaug same here :D i just checked i have chess :D

[@georgediama]

holy crap there's chess preinstalled. I was more impressed with this grapher app tho, it's so useful and cool

[@iMonZ00]

Why i don’t have Chess on MacOS 11?

[@fanosup]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@mattl_]

NS stands for NeXT/Sun from the OpenStep specification. NX was the previous version, from NeXTSTEP

[@BrianBoniMakes]

Nice video, brings back lots of memories. I used many NeXT systems and went to the seminars and had the training, from a professional standpoint the systems were the best deal in computing at the time. Notice I used the word professional, these systems were for business, science and education and no where do I remember them marketing them for home use so comparing the price to the PC junk of the day would be useless. A better comparison would be to other high end unix systems and by that measure NeXT were a steal. Some of the features of NeXT were so useful we bought machines that just did one thing all day long, for years. That example of the screen redraw, we had a system setup to preview postscript on a large gray scale display, that's all it did and it paid for itself within a few months and lasted for years, now that's value. Many manufacturers of machines included NeXT computers with their machines because it was so easy to develop powerful software with them, many of the NeXT machines that came into my shop actually came as the controller for a much larger machine. You mention the interface builder that came with the system, a compiler also came with the system, I don't remember any version of windows that came with a full development kit. The APP and the object along with the interface builder allowed you to create your own applications that used functions from any of the software you had loaded on the machine. In other words you could pull data off a number of servers, save dump it in a spreadsheet, massage the data in Mathematica, image it with Illustrator and display the results in Framemaker and wrap the whole thing up to look like you created a application all in a couple of minutes, nothing else at the time could do this. Another thing you don't get with a computer today is support, I had the phone number of a NeXT engineer that I could call directly and he'd help me and if he couldn't help he'd talk to someone and they would call me back usually within a couple of hours, what's that worth? You also didn't mention the shaking head password fail response.

[@Cenot4ph]

I guess you've pointed at the main weakness of next systems, that it wasn't for home use.

[@mikem9536]

Yep, as a consumer product, NextOS was a failure.@@Cenot4ph

[@compactc9]

Really the whole core of OS X came from NeXT, Apple was having so much trouble with a replacement for OS 9 that the basically gave NeXT's OS a facelift, but the Unix core of it was what they were really after.

[@MaddTheSane]

compactc9 Mac OS 9? No, Mac OS 7. Copland was meant to *be* Mac OS 8. Apple botched the development by tacking too many features on it.

[@robinandthedog]

The race was between BeOS and NeXT, NeXT won and in hint-side it is maybe better history went this way.

[@eknuds]

@@MaddTheSane yeah, "Feature Creep" or "Moving the Goal Posts" in Silicon Valley parlance. Major product management faux pas, and a company killer. As it almost did with Apple.

[@Charlesb88]

Madd the Sane The two big issue with Copeland were that they tried to bring much needed features like Protected Memory to the OS while still maintaining backwards compatibility with older apps and feature creep. The former proved much harder to do then anticipated. Secondly, they tacked too many features on (aka feature creep) which also caused the OS to be too unstable. Eventually they realized that the only way forward was to either make a PPC version of MS Windows the default OS on Mac or purchase another OS outright and adapt it into a new version of MacOS. Fortunately, they cam to there senses regarding putting Windows 95 on Macs as the loyal Mac fan base would have started a riot if they did that. So they decide instead to look into either buying the BeOS or NextStep OS and adapting it and fortunately, the ended up buying Next and taking Steve Jobs back as their interim CEO (later permanent). They solved the backwards compatibility thing buy including a virtual machine running OS 9 inside the OS X (called the Classic environment). They solved the fact that they need an OS 8 in the meantime while they developed OS X by adopting some of the features intended to be in Copeland to much so-called back update of OS 7 as well as giving the OS 8 a facelift (much like how the overly ambitious MS Longhorn had to be scaled back into the much less ambitious Vista). OS 8 & 9 still had some nice features added though, but since it merely was a scaled back upgrade of OS 7, it still suffered from the issue of any app crashing crashing the whole system to crash (due to the lack of protected memory) and the screwy way you had to predefine each apps memory allotment before launching due to the lack of good memory management. Of course, Windows 95 was a very buggy OS too and I can recall countless times I had to deal with apps crashing and blue screen’s of death much more I cared too.. (Both OS X and XP where bth much better in this regard, though OS X suffered from fewer kernel panics vs XP, for me at least.

[@astroboy2345]

@@robinandthedog Steve Jobs went back to Apple from Next. Of course he is going with NextSTEP OS. But let history shows that BeOS was pretty awesome. To bad it didn't have the opportunity to take off.

[@mylesl2890]

was lucky enough to have a NeXT machine when they first came out, was so amazing and so much fun i can't even describe it, still have it still works loads of fun to reminise

[@37Kilo2]

Cool video. The 80s to early 00s was an awesome time to be a computer nerd. There was so much innovation, and wonder. Now everything made is geared toward ad delivery.

[@Erik_The_Viking]

Lovely memories of NeXTStep - I used those computers in undergrad. Loved them! Most people don't realize how much of Mac OSX comes from that OS.

[@technite5360]

And most probably inspired w95

[@chriscross12324]

It’s strange hearing Steve Jobs dis the Mac when not working at Apple.

[@ComputerClan]

I thought the same thing . . . Salty Steve.

[@NotJohnTanner]

Yeah

[@OldAussieAds]

He spoke about Apple the way you might talk about your ex wife.

[@brianh2771]

Nice video. It's not just features and design that came over from NeXTSTEP. OS X is the evolution of the same OS. It never died, and iOS is a NeXT descendent too. Also worth noting is that the World Wide Web was first developed on NeXT, as was id Software's DOOM.

[@GaryBusey-sLaserdiscCollection]

If Doom was devved on a NeXT rig which use 68040 CPUs at best then why does it run like ass on 68060 Amigas?

[@1337penguinman]

Optimized for PCs since that was going to be the primary market for it. However, the fact it was developed cross platform made porting relatively simple. That and the engine being open sourced is why Doom can run on effectively anything.

[@Enigmatism415]

So what you're saying is, it was the Macintosh Classic OS that died and NeXTSTEP usurped its name.

[@BrianWardPlus]

@@Enigmatism415 Yes, this is *exactly* what happened. That's what Classic and Carbon APIs being end-of-lifed was all about: A transition to give people a chance to jump ship before the Classic Mac OS boat sank.

[@Enigmatism415]

@@BrianWardPlus So what we call Macintosh in the 21st century isn't really Macintosh at all, just better versions of NeXT software wearing a Macintosh name-tag for nostalgia and brand recognition...

[@MajurathanS]

I used to feel bad for having code in my app that's a year old...this video is reassuring

[@sean8102]

If it aint broke

[@johnsim3722]

So much of what you showed with NeXTSTEP was already on the Acorn Achimedes with its RISC OS. It was a fully 32-bit OS that came in the late 80s, and as the name suggests using a RISC processor. You'll know that as the ARM processor, which you've probably got in your phone. So really it was Acorn who set the look for Next and is also powering just about every smart phone on the planet!

[@supercellex4D]

ironic considering now macs use desktop Arm chips just like the Archimedes was.

[@johnsim3722]

@@supercellex4D Indeed! ARM has gone full circle back to the desktop! Macs have gone from using Motorola chips to Intel to ARM. That's quite incredible that they've been able to change platforms like that. How the x86 platform has developed through to the Core processors today I'm not sure they've been able to full drop previous compatibility. Can you still run DOS and DOS programs if you could get it to boot? Yes, I know Windows now emulates DOS. At the same time, so many other processors have disappeared from the workstation market. HP PA-RISC has gone, but it used to be a very stable platform with HP-UX. Far better than Windows almost never requiring reboot. SPARC processors are gone almost, but interestingly are now being used in Aerospace applications were they've been radiation hardened. ESA have an approved design for satellites. But the ARM processor has only gone from strength to strength and much of that has to be attributed not just to Sophie Wilson, Steve Furber but also Robin Saxby who seen the potential and kept pushing the product and business model of licensing out the design without producing any silicon themselves.

[@northwindkey]

@@johnsim3722 Because CISC Architectures are a dead end. What's funny is Apple knew that in the early 90s, when they jumped to PowerPC and knew Intel had an expiration date. Unfortunately IBM kinda screwed up the development of PowerPC and by the mid-2000s Apple needed to get away from PowerPC fast, so they just jumped to Intel since they were the easiest choice at the time. But now Apple has moved to Silicon because, again, CISC was a dead end. Anyone who's ever tried writing x86 assembly can tell you how much of a clusterfuck the architecture is.

[@johnsim3722]

@@northwindkey And Acorn realised it in the 80s, hence why they invented the ARM processor (See Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber). I did x86 assembler a long time ago. Done various processors, mainly microcontrollers in recent times though.

[@coryplum5375]

Yes, macOS X was NextSTEP's son.

[@NickEnchev]

NextSTEP's hipster son.

[@StevenEveral]

NeXTSTEP➡OSX➡iOS.

[@Sherolox]

Steven Manning iOS➡️iPadOS Though there is barely any difference.

[@lightlysaltedcalmingvlogsa7286]

iOS ➡️watchOS

[@TheJamieRamone]

NS stands for NeXT-SUN, not NEXTSTEP. That's because that prefix is exclusive to OPENSTEP, developed by NeXT and SUN in 94. Before that, they used NX for the API.

OPENSTEP is still aviable by GNUStep. MacOS is still based on this but new advancements were closed.

[@nikitakipriyanov7260]

@ One is that see WindowMaker and you'll see it looks like GNUStep. Which looks like OpenStep. Which loosk like NeXTStep. But it feels differently, for example, menus, while look the same, work other way and so on.

[@BilisNegra]

1:15 64 megs of RAM and 2 Gb disk drive are killer specs for a 486 era computer! Well, that machine must have been obscenely expensive.

[@karanjoshi2662]

5000$ to be exact in 1990s money.

[@Cinicraft00]

All classes you program in Xcode using objective-c still have the NextStep abbreviation in all class names. Strings are called NSString, object base classes are called NSObject, NSNotificationCenter, etc...

[@GerhardAEUhlhorn]

And all the stuff was made in Display Postscript! Every window, every menu was Display Postscript! It was possible to send anything from the screen directly to the Postscript printer. In macOS the screen is now Display PDF.

[@ianzen]

Kinda funny hearing Steve talk shit about the Mac at that point in time.

[@StevenEveral]

Considering how Sculley fired Jobs from Apple, it's not all that surprising.

[@northwindkey]

@@StevenEveral Also cause Apple was really misusing the brand at the time. By the early 90s they had like 10 models that all had confusing specs and confusing target demos. Not to mention Apple kept trying to break into the corporate space that Wintel had already owned and won. When Jobs came back, Apple finally stopped trying to get the business demo. They acknowledged Microsoft had won there, and instead focused on education and creative markets.

[@PeterRichardsandYoureNot]

Best part of next was how it was built on postscript. At the time when desktop publishing was a print media end game this was huge to bring print consistency from screen to printer.

[@rcnhsuailsnyfiue2]

RIP PostScript 🙏🏻 macOS Sonoma has just deprecated it... Sad times 😢

[@EddyGraphic]

Lol Jobs roasted his original company 🤣😂

[@xXxmlg_vacxXx]

EddyGraphic Offended

[@Bruh-rj5vw]

2:40

[@matthewstott3493]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee creator of the HTTPd/HTTP protocols built the World Wide Web on a NeXT workstation. Doom was built on a NeXT workstation before being ported to DOS. NeXT was popular on the American stock markets and when NeXT first launched, Apple threatened Jobs and to avoid conflicts, Jobs targeted higher education, science, and focused on workstation class machines. NeXT was competing with HPUX, Sun Microsystems Solaris, IBM AIX, DEC Alpha, etc. When NeXT killed their hardware they released OpenStep and sold their RAD development environment alongside which ran on EVERYTHING including various commercial UNIX flavors and even Windows NT via a product called Yellowbox. Compiling for OpenStep resulted in multiple binaries being kept inside the App Bundle sharing the App resources such as GUI graphics and included libraries, etc. They were doing write once run everywhere long before Java came into existence. UNIX had been doing it with C for longer but still required the source code and actually being compiled on each platform by the users.

[@MegaManNeo]

This actually makes NeXTStep more awesome than OSX nowadays. But it's also sad that technology was so expensive back then, this would have been mind blowing to use instead of DOS and Windows3.11.

[@jcfawerd]

At least, we can enjoy one of the greatest invention that this system helps to build - WWW

[@PhantomWorksStudios]

well heres a question as well, what if nextos took over instead of osx and what would of happened if it continued to evolve from the late 80s? I always wondered that :/

[@Hans-gb4mv]

Fact is, it didn't. NeXT was running into financial issues (just like Apple was) because the machines became to expensive and the software took much longer to develop. The same issue that basically had Apple take Jobs off the Lisa project and ultimatelt fired him for for doing it on the Macintosh project was also causing his new company to struggle.

[@martinandreaskruse4446]

Mac OS X IS NextOS...

[@alvallac2171]

@@PhantomWorksStudios *would've (contraction of "WOULD haVE")

[@mgabrysSF]

The menus were pretty handy - not only could they be placed anywhere - but sub-menus could be 'torn off' and also placed elsewhere. The method was similar to Irix which ran on SGI workstations around the same time. This meant you didn't have to constantly scroll to the top of the screen - handy on large monitors - which would have been particularly nice today if it had been transferred into the macOS / OSX. Apple's acquisition of NeXT has been often cited as a 'reverse merger' since - besides Steve Jobs taking control - most of the principal people at NeXT took leadership roles in Apple and the Apple board was replaced.

[@RobertHana]

Objective-C! ... and now many elements shared w/ iOS! And I've worked on (and am STILL working on) WebObjects! FREAKIN AWESOME STUFF!

[@theodricaethelfrith]

Random titbit: the spinning CD wait cursor from NeXTSTEP made it way into OS X as well, but was replaced with the current "beach ball" starting with 10.2

[@ComputerClan]

Ah, yes. It did resemble more of a CD. A recent macOS major release replaced the 10.2 beachball, however.

[@CloveCoast]

mind-blowingly ahead of its time

[@nickhimes2736]

Plus people usually don't mention this but NeXTStep also gave us the world wide web, tim Berners-Lee made the first web page on NS. Along with the first app store or at least a forerunner to the app store

[@adam872]

NeXTSTEP was incredible for the time. It still looks pretty fresh now. I lusted after one of the workstations for the longest time.

[@hikaru-live]

This might be a bit of a stretch as the earliest Mac OS X builds used kernel versions 1-3 (as can be seen using uname command,) but the final, stable-ish version of Mac OS X 10.0 had a kernel version of 4, and each subsequent version of macOS had a kernel version number 4 greater than the OS's own version number. The last public version of NeXTSTEP was version 3.3. This got me thinking - is macOS kernel version really just a continuation of NeXTSTEP? Is macOS 10.13 High Sierra really NeXTSTEP version 17?

[@darth_kal-el]

陈北宗 NextStep was the foundation of Mac OS. It is what it was based on. Trying to suggest otherwise shows you don’t know about tech or Apple.

[@TheDanielLivingston]

That’s a really interesting thought. I would imagine that you’re correct. The macOS kernel is called XNU. From Wikipedia: “After Apple acquired NeXT, the Mach component was upgraded to OSFMK 7.3 from OSF,[2] the BSD components were upgraded with code from the FreeBSD project, and the Driver Kit was replaced with a C++ API for writing drivers named I/O Kit.”

[@TheDanielLivingston]

Also, read up on this; en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

[@jscorpio1987]

Cory Weston they literally kept the same exact code base and redesigned a good chunk of the UI. OS X really is just NeXTSTEP with a prettier interface.

[@TheDanielLivingston]

@@jscorpio1987 It's not OS X anymore, it's OS 11 ;)

[@ColonialPuppet]

lol that ball in break out looks like a nod to amiga's bouncing red ball

[@teddiecrash8216]

Today iam 48y old. First time i saw NextStep i was flashed like the Acorn in the 80s. Never had so much money to buy this stuff. Had an Atari ST & Amiga. But i like to see videos about the old days. Nice. Thank you. The Voiceover is great.

[@RobertBaskette]

The black and white beach ball is actually the disk icon for the magneto-optical drive on the original cube. This over time morphed into the beach ball as it lost its context. Wikipedia has the some great icons showing the progression: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel

[@matthewstott3493]

The technology from NeXT has been Apple's secret weapon since Apple bought NeXT. It is what led to the iPhone & iPad. It is why BlackBerry and Android struggled to compete. It is how Apple was able to switch architectures several times on mobile and from PowerPC to Intel and now Intel to Apple Silicon. The NeXT development environment was decades ahead of the competition. They had the very first object oriented graphical rapid application design environment which predated VisualBasic and others. Previously, developers had to draw their graphical interfaces on graph paper and manually calculate the X, Y coordinates to position and size a window, button, other controls on screen. Then code those values directly in source code. NeXT allowed you to quickly draw those controls on screen and make connections by dragging and dropping connection points and create code to make the control object do something. This was truly revolutionary. Objective-C was essentially C with smalltalk like object orientated features. Smalltalk had some basic GUI but NeXT took it to a whole other level.

[@BenkArtist]

great video! I'd previously only seen stills of NexTSTEP. Note: Mac OS7-9 and possibly earlier had the 'hide' application feature. It was found by clicking the application name on the top right of the screen. :)

[@peymanx]

I installed and run GNUStep which is based on NEXTSTEP great video... great job!

[@ComputerClan]

Thanks for watching!

[@seanc.5310]

Awesome video! I knew that Apple bought NeXTSTEP after Jobs came back but I hadn't known how much of the tech was plugged into Mac OS.

[@tasosalexiadis7748]

Basically all modern continuations of macOS (from Mac OS X onwards) are continuations of NextStep as all modern Windows OSes are continuations of Windows NT.

[@ITzTravelInTime]

you should try apple rasphody, which was the beginning of mac os x after next step was bougth by apple, and it's truly a mix of next step and os x, and it also has an official pc relese that could run on a non apple pc

[@alvallac2171]

*bought *release

[@lorensims4846]

"Hide" program was part of System 7 on the Mac, and probably much earlier.

[@Planet2763real]

0:57 so that's where the imagemagick UI menu came from

[@paytondev]

I’m a developer and I’ve always wondered what NS meant in Xcode. Crazy that it means NextStep!

[@MemorieMusic]

Ken, you missed one thing , the icon of me folder in NextStep is a house similar to the user in the Mac OS

[@MinecraftMarioFantheAnimator]

Finally a good video in ages, thank you

[@ComputerClan]

Are you saying we haven't made a good video in a long time??? :c :c :c

[@MinecraftMarioFantheAnimator]

Like I said, your videos aren't the amazement they were back in the day. I really miss the old days, please bring them back.

[@ComputerClan]

You're going to have to be more specific than that x3

[@MinecraftMarioFantheAnimator]

Look back before 2015 ;) Oh, and SpoofOS was funny as hell, I'd love to see more of that

[@ComputerClan]

Was it _just_ Spoof OS?

[@abdulazizalserhani7625]

Did you know John Carmack of id Software used a NeXT computer to first develop Doom and Quake?

[@ComputerClan]

Did he really? Seems like a lot of groundbreaking things were made on NeXT.

[@xcript123]

This OS was way advanced on its time...Nowadays MacOS looks so similar to this one. Really pretty & sleek design.

[@irata2006]

If you opened that welcome message in an actual NeXT machine it had a voice message from Steve himself.

[@AlexTechie]

Spoiler alert: every time he asks, "sound familiar?", that means it carried over to Mac.

[@KingNothing22]

Duh, He explains Right after

[@Locutus]

It didn't carry over. OSX is Next OS. Next OS was slapped with an Apple logo and UI over it.

[@jaybrooks1098]

One criticism.. sorry.. it was a good video. However... the .app isn’t a file extension. Its a filesystem handle. Technically the .app is a directory structure. It isn’t obvious but if you go into a terminal you can enter this structure.

[@jonvincentmusic]

1:55 'It was so advanced for the time, no one had seen this technology before". Two words: Commodore Amiga.

[@ComputerClan]

That's why I said "basically". ; )

[@NSResponder]

The "NS" prefix is usually assumed to stand for NeXTSTEP, but at the time it was introduced, you could ask different people at NeXT what it stood for, and get various answers including "NeXT-Sun" (since they were working together on bringing OpenStep to Solaris), or even "Neat Stuff". There was never any official statement on the matter. -jcr

[@tambovskya]

Cool to know each feature in detail.

[@justinhall3243]

I was a beta tester for Mac OS X, this brings back memories.

[@dustindowney_]

This is a GREAT video, thanks for taking the time to put it together!!!

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Later versions of NextStep were also available for 486 computers. Funny how Steve was fired from Apple, started Next, got into financial trouble (the systems cost $9999 or $6499 with education discount), went back to Apple and then bought Next (getting him out of a financial pickle). Next may have succeeded if they had been able (or willing...) to sell the the system for a reasonable price. After all, it only had a Motorola 68040 running at 33 mhz in it. Fast, but not CRAZY fast (some Amigas and even Atari STs had that, and at higher clockspeed too!) But Steve was used to overpricing things (look at Apple products even today) and just assumed that people would buy it no matter what, as long as his name was attached to it.

[@TheyRiseBand]

BeOS and NEXTSTEP were both in the running as a replacement for the outdated Classic MacOS. NeXT was just farther along, functionally, so they were selected. Scully bought NeXT and got Jobs as a bonus. The whole cofounder thing, return of the prodigal son, and all...

[@SteveSteeleSoundSymphony]

TheyRiseBand Sculley was long gone. Michael Spindler replaced Sculley as CEO but didn’t last long. Gil Amelio replaced him and was the CEO who watched the BeOS vs NeXT demos. Be had a very strong beta-OS running on a dual 603 PPC system called a BeBox (I had one), and Gil took Be very seriously, but Gasse, thinking Apple was desperate (or maybe he knew he stood no chance against Steve), wanted too much and didn’t impress, while NeXT offered a much more mature environment and came with Steve Jobs.

[@brodriguez11000]

You're seeing two things. One in answer to the question,"what happens when a perfectionist runs a computer company", and the larger, "what dynamics does one get when 'good enough' meets 'not good enough'" aka the whole IBM PC/Windows saga vs Macintosh?

[@MukBh]

NextStep was such an inspiration, I had written a complete set of controls for MS Windows to make them look like NSObjects.

[@kaitsurugi3280]

So interesting! Thanks for the history comparison!

[@ComputerClan]

Thanks for watching : )

[@uliwitness]

Some of the things you show are superficially also available the same in old MacOS (9 and earlier), or on Windows, or on RISC OS or whatever, but MacOS X 10.0 and NeXTstep often still use the same layout and icons. And under the hood, NeXT and MacOS are practically identical. Like, if you've programmed an app for NeXTstep, you can write a Cocoa app pretty easily, most of the command names are the same. Would be kinda neat to show how different and yet the same things are by adding old MacOS to the equation.

[@ThnkCmdyFeelTrgdy]

Back in 1992 I used NeXT Step, which had already been out for 3 years. I built an Intel system to run it, at the time it was demanding. This was at a time when the minimum 16 MB RAM cost $1600, the 1.2 GB HDD and SCSSI controller card cost $2000, and then the 486 CPU and MB and rest... around $4-5K in early 90's. But it was so worth it. Way ahead DOS/Windows 3.1, OS2, and Linux was still more or less Linus Torvalds. Oh great, I'm just had an image of being Grandpa Simpson... with my rambling on Ren & Stimpy and Beavis & Butthead... where was I... oh yeqh, thanks for the video, great trip down memory lane. Truly Steve Jobs was a visionary, that his ideas and designs still live on is incredible. One must also give a shout out to Xerox Park of the 70's and 80's and how fortuitous Steve's visit to them was back then.

[@ryanjameshope]

This was very cool to see the roots of the operating system I love to use today :) thanks for this!

[@gavinthecrafter]

This guy deserves 10 times the subscribers

[@ComputerClan]

I humbly agree.

[@TheCocoaDaddy]

Great video! A friend of mine owned a NeXT workstation and I just loved the NeXTSTEP UI. For a while, I ran the "AfterStep" window manager on Linux, just to have the NeXTSTEP UI available. :) Thanks for posting!

[@ag4eng]

It’s 2022 and what has Apple done to setting in Ventura. Bring back the old school settings.

[@johnsimon8457]

Those app bundles are such a good idea . All assets are self contained, not like windows or other unix packagers which can put files willy nilly.

[@joeleomoreno]

Great video! But NS doesn’t stand for NeXTSTEP, it stands for NeXT-Sun as a result of their partnership and the evolution of Foundation APIs. Before NS prefixes, NeXTSTEP classes were prefixed with NX.

[@chindall]

Good job! I actually bought a next cube of eBay so years ago. When I powered it on the lights dimmed. One of the reasons I use macOS to this day is because of what is running in the background a UNIX Lenix like terminal.

[@HazyJ28]

I am still blown away by how far ahead of its time Next was

[@chnoxis]

And the whole NextStep/OpenStep-Desktop looks like the Windowmanager "Window Maker" on Linux or BSD. It is really very similar. Window Maker is still an active used graphical user interface..

[@winlux2]

Window Maker does look so *because* it is mimicking NextStep.

[@MarkyShaw]

I still enjoy using Window Maker when I’m making a Linux or Unix box. It’s fast as heck and can look really nice with a proper theme.

[@Big-Chungus21]

If you want to be technical, IOS and by extension IpadOS are based off of MacOS, and therefore NeXTSTEP. Weird to think about.

[@Minecraft101ToonLink]

Wow!!! I did NOT know what the NS stood for in Xcode, but it ALL MAKES SENSE now! 😂

[@ComputerClan]

When re-researching it, I've heard some people say it's Next-Sun and some say it's NeXTSTEP. So either, I suppose. : )

[@Minecraft101ToonLink]

Computer Clan - WHAT? The CC actually replied!?! Amazing! But really, Next-Sun? How does THAT make sense???

[@ComputerClan]

Sun, as in Sun Microsystems, Inc.

[@MaddTheSane]

Sun Microsystems (the people responsible for creating Java) went into a partnership or asked NeXT to make a NeXTStep-like UI/Developer Tools without the NeXT kernel. IIRC, Sun ended up ditching NeXT for whatever reason, but the new APIs (those that begin with NS) became a part of OpenStep. Fun Fact: you can still find some APIs with the NX prefix. I know IOKit has a few.

[@Zakalwe-01]

There's that Jobs presentation when he asks 'what is the next step? OSX is the next step'. You can hear a smattering of laughter in the audience. Begs the question: did Apple really survive it's problems in the 90s, or was it actually covertly acquired by NextStep and robbed of its name? Hmmm...

[@vraiverifiableinvisiblekta2887]

Apple did not survive and was helped by microsoft in 1997 and it helped a lot to port Rapshody to i386 and Next Step/i386 to powerpc ... Apple sells phones not computers

[@stevey500]

Apple sets the standard of computing, lawls. Look at Windows 10, it was released with zero features and these updates that are constantly being developed after the fact are slowly catching it up to what Mac OS X has been for decades. Granted, Windows 10 does have a few small tidbits that they've ventured on their own (finally) but still, as a user of all the systems in depth, yes, Apple makes the computer the way computing should be, others slowly have reflected, very thankfully.

[@justrant]

Apple's worst times were in the 90s.

[@777jones]

Technologically, NeXt was the successor to Apple Computer. Apple acquired NeXt, re-branded it as “new Apple products” and shut all the legacy Apple stuff down. The only valuable part was the Apple logo and Next technology. Apple was technologically failing and dying.

[@utubeavid]

Starting from 1997, Apple didn't sell computers at at all.. They sold home appliances that were passed off as computers. Also, every Mac OS version starting from OS X 10.4 is a pile of crap.

[@ag4eng]

Ahead of it’s time, can wait for macOS 11.

[@northwindkey]

Fun fact: According to Steve Jobs, the OS is actually not called NeXTSTEP. It's actually called "Mach OS" since it's a combination of the Mach Kernel and BSD. Think of how "Linux OS" is usually referring to the combination of Linux and GNU. NeXTSTEP is not the OS, but rather, the platform consisting of the OS and its API layers and applications. Eventually, the two were separated off and the APIs were renamed "Openstep" and the OG NeXTSTEP became "Openstep For Mach", to differentiate it from versions of Openstep that ran on top of Windows NT and other systems.

[@makkersjnr]

Where would i be able to get an iso? i would love to virutualise this!

[@Jarppi]

winworldpc.com/product/nextstep

[@spicoliravioli]

What about Mac OS, Jarppi?

[@logansorenssen]

It's tricky to get working in a VM, though it will work. There is also a partly-working emulator for old NeXT 68040 hardware. You may find that OPENSTEP 4.2 is easier to get working than NeXTSTEP 3.3. Generally OS 4.2 is more modern, though only slightly. You *may* be able to get either of them working on old SPARC emulators, too (if they can emulate a SPARCstation 20).

[@lukica3335]

winworldpc.com/product/nextstep +Jarppy said it

[@markteague8889]

Check out the “previous” emulator. One can get OpenStep v4.2 (for Intel) up and running in Virtual Box. But, a lot of the premiere NeXT applications (Lotus Improv, the Lighthouse Design apps, etc.) were only ever compiled for the m68k platform. The “previous” emulator emulates most of the NeXT m68k based system’s hardware on an Intel based machine.

[@marvinalone]

if you go thru the SDKs you will see macOS/iOS is from NeXT, is NeXT

[@deckard2665]

Nice video. I remember when these computers came to market I was around 13 years old but I remember being very impressed even as a 13 year old. I read somewhere that Bill Gates thought that the Next Step OS was not impressive and that it was just a warmed over Unix system with a GUI. I still find that hard to believe. I mean that Next System was so much more advanced then what Gates had at the time with Windows 3.1 and DOS. Of course the price of the Next and its target audience were altogether different. Still though If I could ask Gates one question, it would be "did you really think the Next system was just a warmed over version of Unix?" Wonder if his response would be the same.

[@irata2006]

That “Welcome” message on the NeXT mail app has a short voice message from Steve Jobs himself.

[@paulussantosociwidjaja4781]

Wow, thank you for sharing this "memories are made of these!".

[@blackneos940]

People who use macOS... When I meet them, they normally seem very smart, but none of them know why or what influenced macOS and OS X. Nice video. :) And of course, we have Bell Labs to thank for ALL of this, not to forget Xerox PARC. :)

[@jericoba]

Small note: You could hide applications is Mac OS before 10.0.

[@ComputerClan]

True

[@alessandrozara924]

Actually there are also 2 other things of NeXTSTEP that were adapted to Mac OS X. The menu window of NeXTSTEP became the menu bar of Mac OS X (in Mac OS Classic it was similar but it didn't include the name of the software if I remember well) while the other thing of NeXTSTEP that came to Mac OS X is a web browser called OmniWeb. In fact the team who produced this browser, the Omni Group, first released it for NeXTSTEP then, after Apple acquired NeXT, OmniWeb was changed into a web browser for Mac OS X. Also, today in Linux world NeXTSTEP has been recreated through 2 desktop environments (AfterStep and WMaker) and a Debian-based distro (WMaker Live).

[@TheyRiseBand]

One in the same. macOS Mojave is just NEXTSTEP v20 (or so).

[@alvallac2171]

*One and the same.

[@desmondevelops]

this object oriented cake tastes pretty good

[@vaalrus]

“Inspired by”? …It Was a Port.

[@mortenthorpe]

“While he was away from Apple”… a very kind, albeit twisted representation of events… He was thrown out of Apple, and only in its most dire darkest hours, did Apple relent and elect Steve to be (Interim) CEO.. The fact that he had apparently grown up a bit in the timespan of 12-14 years between his Apple stints, showed clearly upon his return, as the company stabilized and focused

[@J4ckCr0w]

NeXT and Amiga OS were the most beautiful operating systems.

[@Dave102693]

J4ckCr0w I wish I can see them in their glory days.

[@J4ckCr0w]

Dave102693 You might just do, in the future.

[@Dave102693]

J4ckCr0w but how?

[@J4ckCr0w]

+Dave102693 The future holds endless possibilities.

[@Dave102693]

J4ckCr0w ok?

[@iwanttocomplain]

The Next systems also introduces soft power on and network power control.

[@parker_aug2]

Great vid! I just wish you showed it in 4:3 instead of all stretched out. I wouldn't have minded the black bars on the sides.

[@joeylantis22]

This is an AWESOME video! More like this please! Subscribed.

[@bla2030]

Would be interesting to show the difference between osx and windows, around the Vista/Leopard era. I think then there was a really huge gap between those two. Nowadays windows are much closer to osx.

[@pmgodfrey]

We had NeXTSTEP running on Intel machines in 1996 when I did IT work for South Western Bell Mobile Systems. Could have been version 3.3. Had boxes and boxes of the operating system discs. Might still have a set of them somewhere.

[@stevenschmidt]

The NeXT computers were so far ahead of their time!!

[@bitterseeds]

heh. I use to dual boot NeXTStep for Intel and OS/2. Yeah, it was an exciting time and so much fun.

[@allansh828]

Damn I wish Steve Jobs is still alive! :(

[@nomebear]

In the mid 80's we were using SCO Xenix which ran our accounting database. When I saw Job's NEXT step I thought it was just another version of Xenix. It was developed by Microsoft, long before Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. Hard to believe, Microsoft was the king of Unix world by developing Xenix, the most popular version of Unix of its time.

you sound like Lewis from unboxtherapy XD nice video btw

[@atomicorang]

NeXT was great ...the NeXT Cube was very good and it still has aged well

[@Jebbidan]

Fun fact: Steve job's NEXT computer hardware was inspired by the hardware of another computer called commodore amiga computer released in 1985. The NEXT operating system is just a modified version of the amiga workbench OS version 2.0 Source: dfarq.homeip.net/steve-jobs-and-the-amiga/

[@Cyba_IT_NZ]

Love how salty Steve sounded.

[@johnwerner4925]

For a logo with lettering the NEXT logo is truly cool. Here's what I got out this...OS10 is a linear refinement of the MasOS with a very heavy debt to Job's Nextstep OS. Notice I said "refinement". Honestly it appears much of the goodness that is Max OSX is a graphic refinement mostly and not some quantum leap OS. But the beauty is how great MaxOS 10 really is. It's not kludgy and is intuitive to the Nth degree. It has been perfectly matched to the hardware of each Mac laptop. Things like the wireless chip and the "glasspad" set the benchmark for all laptops They just work correctly. So while I have no doubt OS X is much better it was all here two decades ago.

[@SriHarshaChilakapati]

I did see a kinda similar video showing System OS 7 and thought that these apps we see today are from it. Now this, are from 1980's??