The NeXT Video

[@BrianBoniMakes]

I ran them in printing and graphics shops. Had one with a huge gray scale monitor that previewed postscript off a huge VMS server. It only did that its whole life, but it might have saved a million bucks of wasted film and time. I loved how it shook its head "NO" when you got the password wrong. The thing I miss the most is I had a NeXT phone number for engineering and they would answer questions. If someone wasn't there they would set up a call and call back. Those days sure are gone.

[@jSyndeoMusic]

Earlier versions of Mac OS X did the head shake too… I loved that.

[@Mainyehc]

@@jSyndeoMusic the latest version of the now renamed macOS still does it! 🤷‍♂️

[@kuzadupa185]

Quality service is gone everywhere. No one cares, and many of those who remember the days of quality service, who know that quality service CAN EXIST... well they are either dying off or their souls have long since been beaten into the ground, due to being surrounded by so many people who dont care...

[@CalifornianSupremacy]

@@kuzadupa185 Keep in mind that if ANY business were to adopt such customer service policies today they would be completely overrun by low skilled tech idiots, Karen’s with too much free time, and warranty scammers. This is a consumer problem just as much as a business one.

[@kuzadupa185]

@@CalifornianSupremacy i can understand that.

[@sjn7220]

I remember watching a Next rep give a demo in college around 1992. I was pretty amazed by the machine and wanted one real bad but there was no way I could afford it back then. I now work across the street from the old Next building in Redwood City. Hallowed ground.

[@Peter_S_]

I worked at the North Bay NeXT reseller and was a NeXT field service tech. About 30 of us went down to the NeXT HQ in Redwood City for a dog & pony show and after a tour of the machine, OS, and Lotus Improv, Steve came in gleaming with pride (and with orange skin from drinking huge amounts of carrot juice) and he asked, "How do you like the new computer?" and our MIS guy who was seated next to me belted out, "I'm still looking for the Finder!". Steve went from light speed to brick wall stopped in nanoseconds and it was like being inside an atomic explosion that progressed through the entire chain reaction but didn't lead to a blast. Steve was stunned for a moment, dusted himself off, and immediately probed for ways to make the machine batter without any anger where most suits would have had a coronary. The astounding beauty of the receptionist is still burned into my mind as well.

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

Speaking as a programmer who was (and still is) a huge NeXT fan, I found Objective-C elegant. Much preferred it to Java, Perl or JavaScript. I wrote Obj-C code which ran on OPENSTEP on NeXT hardware, also cross-compiled for OPENSTEP for Windows NT and SPARC. It was elegant, felt great with easy to understand object-oriented design and the dynamic runtime meant you could do neat tricks when debugging and updating running programs. The crown jewels were NeXT's OPENSTEP frameworks and APIs, though, the programming language plays second fiddle to that. Also, to this day, NeXT's (no Apple's) development environment with Interface Builder is second to none. Back in its heyday, it was leaps and bounds more elegant than IDEs on Windows, Solaris or any other platform. Way ahead of its time. Glad we're reaping the rewards now on modern macOS.

[@brucelesourd3074]

Great summary of the benefits of NeXTStep (later Openstep, later Mac OS, later iOS) development. A couple of things to add: - NeXTStep didn't just look better and work better than any other OS for at least a decade, it fostered a whole culture of *nix developers who were obsessed with UI/UX design and human-centered computing, essentially the OG Steve Jobs ethos you pick up listening to his early Apple club speeches. When iOS was opened to 3rd party devs in 2008, those devs weren't just up to speed on the frameworks, language and dev environment - they understood what it would take to design apps for an entirely new, disintermediated HCI paradigm. Having grown up using an OS that moved the entire window when you dragged it, they understood that the smooth scrolling and juicy bounce of table views in iOS were there for a reason. Long before the iOS frameworks had performant APIs for these widgets, they were going one layer down and manually drawing the cells to match the performance of the built-in apps. They didn't try to cram hover-text in for a direct port of a web app, they rethought the interface architecture. All this attention to ease of use, carried into 3rd party apps, is what made users abandon their chicklet keyboards despite the yammering of industry experts. - Objective C is designed to encourage code that is human-readable, i.e. that reads like natural language. I understand why programmers with decades of experience in another languages, particularly Java, dislike its "aesthetics", but going the other direction was also super-painful. There are lots of programming best practices that were encouraged better by Objective C than other languages of its era. Moving to Swift iOS development was painless: the frameworks and many of the paradigms are still the same; the IDE is light-years ahead of where it was back in the day; and the basic language constructs are so much more robust than C, it's like programming on easy mode. But back in the day, moving from fluent ObjC to any other language was like getting your teeth pulled.

[@marklechman2225]

I have fond memories of spending many hours in our University’s 24-hour NeXT lab back in the early 90s. The machines we had were the early ones with the huge boxes, optical-only for storage and monochrome displays. But the 300 dpi laser printer they had networked to all of the machines was the icing on the cake. I used to design band flyers and album art on the cube - I printed countless photos of Luke Skywalker and Yoda that I found via FTP on other college’s computer systems. I remember my hacker buddy would show off his terminal skills by sneaking into other users’ chats on the university system and making it look like they were saying nasty things to each other. We did everything on those machines and it was a blast.

[@drywinddotnet]

Same. I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and in '92 we had a bevvy of NeXTstations. We loved them because when you logged in your desktop configuration and documents followed you from machine to machine

[@TheJamieRamone]

The display wasn't monochrome, it was a 4-level grayscale like the Hercules monitors for PCs.

[@yt45204]

​@@TheJamieRamoneQuadrachrome?

[@TheJamieRamone]

@@yt45204 😁

[@WilliamKellerTheSkeptic]

I loved working with Objective-C. I came to it from a C/C++ background, and it was the first language and platform that made sense to me. I got to work professionally with some large Openstep codebases for a few years, and enjoyed it a lot. Programming with Obj-C now, with all of the Mac-isms added, is much less fun. But the early Nextstep/Openstep platform was mind-blowing.

[@Superlokkus5]

I guess in the pre C++11 and Qt times you would be right, but now I can just use the JS React/Web ecosystem for GUI and package my C++ code with it with e.g. electron and be done. Objective C was just really C with some class syntactic sugar/macro stuff, in contrast to C++ (although the opposite is a common misconception), intertwined with Cocoa and stuff. Since I don't like C and also saw although that Coca was nice, I really can afford to not write portable Applications, Objective C was just a experiment for me.

[@Superlokkus5]

​@@linusfu515 The problems a GUI has to tackle are the same between a Web App and Desktop Apps: Different window sizes, dpi, aspect ratios, and much more. What one would summarize as Responsive Web Design. One wants to write a declarative i.e. marked up UI, instead that imperative Overhead. You can see that in Qt with QML. If you actually want the same portable but very beautiful UIs as a Browser Render has, than Qt and even the Windows Foundation has pretty much no advantage, except for that you implicitly thrust the desktop app code much more, but also in performance, since almost Windows 98, the native Windows UI is/was not much more then their stripped down internet explorer .

[@LMB222]

I loved working with Perl. There are perverts out there like you and me.

[@Jorge-xf9gs]

​@@Superlokkus5Thank you for shoving your bloat down everybody's throats 😊

[@Jorge-xf9gs]

​@@Superlokkus5I can understand why you don't like C.

[@DrJatzCrackers]

It's a shame that BeOS was left behind. It seemed so good at the time

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

There is an open-source project called “Haiku” which has managed to recreate a large part of it.

[@tompov227]

Not to me. UNIX all the way BSD won the UNIX wars and I'm thrilled about it

[@jessepatterson8897]

action retro does a lot of fun videos with it. Everyone loved Be. (as they should) @@lawrencedoliveiro9104

[@hicknopunk]

Woah, Jobs let the Next have a cooling fan!? How progressive.

[@CarlosOsuna1970]

Actually it didn't... the Fan was for the power supply as chips of that era weren't that hot (if you catch my drift) and didn't required a dedicated fan... kinda like A* and M1 chips today.

[@rabidbigdog]

Lucky for NeXT users he let them have lowercase letters and abilities to do a few upgrades. Perhaps he was away for that meeting.

[@hicknopunk]

@@rabidbigdog 🤣🤣

[@daishi5571]

@@CarlosOsuna1970 The 68040 was a hot chip (especially that 33MHz) and really did require some air flow otherwise it would be unstable, especially in the ALU. I still have a system with an 040 clocked at 40MHz which has a heatsink with heat pipes and a dedicated blower to keep it cool enough.

[@andreasu.3546]

@@CarlosOsuna1970 Poor chips, not hot and no fans. I can relate.

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

Nextstep went to multiple CPUs BEFORE openstep. Openstep was quite a few years later. I had a Pentium 90 running Nextstep on my desk for a while, before we moved on to running Openstep on some Sun machines, then later again, running Openstep on windows on P200 Pros. People didn't buy it for the OS - certainly in the research laboratories I worked in - they bought it for the RAD toolset - Project Builder, Interface Builder and EOF. Tools so good it's only recently that apple stopped using them for iOS and MAC OS Design.

[@djrmarketing598]

That is so crazy to think how big Netware was at the time. I was just 16 years old working in the family computer store in 1994, Netware Certified Administrator for 3.1. Never got the CNE, I was already making $65/hr as a Netware IT consultant as a teenager, so I never really need to do more - I had dozens of clients. I did end up administering Netware networks until the mid 2000's. I do miss the fact that being forced to have a dedicated server that ran a completely different OS really kept people from messing with it. Netware's best part was when I went to a hotel to investigate a problem with their software and I hunted for their server, opened a cabinet and thought it was full of towels, but it was actually a big dust layer as thick as a blanket. Inside was a Netware server, with a monochrome amber screen in all its glory. Uptime was like 5 years. Ended up it had a bad network card and we had to reboot it.

[@JawzXlives]

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of the Netware server that had been encased behind a new wall... It eventually had a hardware failure and they called a tech in... No one could find the machine... They traced the cables in and out of a wall and we're like... "it has to be back there!" pulled down the drywall and unearthed a machine that had something like 12 years of uptime, half of it behind a wall...

[@jesswilliams3208]

I always appreciate your high quality content and I love the historical context you bring to the early PC era. I never got the chance to see a NeXT computer in person, but it interesting to see the way it influenced object oriented design.

[@mrkitty777]

I have it in virtual box running, easy to setup, but paradigm filosophy is very different than what you're used too.

[@RetroBytesUK]

There is also a nice emulator called previous that emulates the original 68k system.

[@mgabrysSF]

Agreed - although if I were to nitpick (because it's fun), Irix and NextStep both shared a similar menu system including tear off sub menus - which were handy to prevent 'massive mousing' on options. I was really annoyed when that was abandoned for OSX with the usual 'top of screen jazz'. Such a waste of a really nice ergonomic UI / UX feature.

[@hessex1899]

I suspect that someone will have a FPGA implementation of, at the very least, a mono Nextstation, in not too long. I have a Vampire V4SA (FPGA Amiga, roughly 8x the speed of an A4000) and my initial thought after using if for a few moments was "Wow, someone should make a NeXT core for this.".

[@noth606]

NeXT in person is mostly impressive for how solid the all alloy chassis/box of it is, only downside is they are heavy. I even got to web browse on a maxxed NeXTCube Turbo Color with the extra DSP doohickey that afaik you can't do anything useful with :-), but any Sparcstation will blow it away in processor speed, not so much graphics, GX and TGX were pretty meh and as stated in the video openwindows sucks so you need Motif or something asap on them.

[@wigrysystems]

I am one of those few who "get" the Objective-C. I did iOS development in Obj-C for three years and I loved every single day of it. Yes the paradigm is completely different from the average imperative programming language but thats what made it special. The concept of not calling a method but sending a message instead to an object was a brilliant idea - basically you eliminated NullPointerExceptions because you can always send method to a non-existing object. I would choose Obj-C over many languages. The concepts are great if you understand them. And yes I hate Swift - too many exclamation and question marks in the code.

[@FarnhamJ07]

I don't think he has a problem with OOP in general, just Objective-C's specific style and syntax for it. It's certainly peculiar and has a different feel from most other OOP languages, e.g. in the syntax used to -call methods- send messages, delimit parameters, &c., let alone the finer details.

[@robbybobbyhobbies]

Respect to you, etc., but I never did "get" ObjC. Happy in C/C++/Java back in the days when I first looked at it, but it never gelled for me. 20 years later (after long spells making money from Ruby and then Elixir) I'm enjoying learning Swift for fun. Still use Elixir/SQL to do actual work, but Swift's a fun environment and the library support is gradually filling in gaps.

[@gormster]

If you have “too many exclamation marks” in your Swift code, that’s a pretty nasty code smell. They’re ugly on purpose: you should want to never see them.

[@LMB222]

I get Perl. It doesn't make it a good language.

[@jsrodman]

Objective C is vastly superior to c++, Java and similar for typical tasks. It does real oo, it supports it by design with parameters Abe late binding. They syntax is a bit of a Mashup but that's just the pain of adjusting.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

7:33 The NeXT Cube was originally envisioned as an “academic workstation”. Jobs even brought in a panel of consultants from across academia to advise on its design. In spite of that, it never sold well into its target market. I remember him telling a reporter that, in spite of poor sales, the company was determined to continue focusing primarily on the academic market. Not long after that, the company abandoned that specialization, and tried to sell the machines more generally. That didn’t help much.

[@genius1a]

Fun thing is, how well that paid long term! As foolish as their efforts seemed to be for their intended audience (for being too expensive) the better the spot was they ended up being. It got them to become the core of the later most valuable tech company of the world. "Stay hungry, stay foolish" is a great citation, and I say that as a long term apple eco system hater.

[@RockwellAIM65]

That was one of Steve's marketing stories. You bought it! Not uncommon, just common. The turf they wanted was Sun's turf, which was very reasonable. Sun was a much bigger company with more momentum tho'. They even made JAVA sort of work OMG. This industry is full of snowjobs. Twitter, for example.

[@RDJ2]

We had a few NeXT workstations at school back in the nineties. I was so in love with the UI that I contributed to an opensource Windows version for a while. On Linux my UI was always something that looked like it.

[@RockwellAIM65]

I miss First Responder in Display Postscript. You clicked a window and it ALWAYS came immediately to front and was complete. You felt like you were the driver, not the computer.

[@awksedgreep]

Used and loved wmaker for years. Thank you.

[@cinskybuhsrandy5099]

@@awksedgreep Window Maker was my first UI, but i switched to KDE when i had enough ram...

[@stevehofer3482]

In 1991-92 I taught a class for paralegal students at our local community college. I asked Next to come in and demo their workstations, with the idea that this would be the type of technology that the students would be working on 5 years in the future. The demo was amazing. They brought in 2 68040 workstations, one with color, one monochrome. The screen resolution was mind blowing. Next’s email seemed like something from science fiction, with seamless integration of voice. The catch: the price. Within a few years, I bought a Mac with an LC68040 processor, so it was almost as fast as the Nextstation, but it was nowhere near as capable. I’ve owned at least one Mac ever since then, and even now, MacOS seems a bit dumbed down.

[@abdelali9279]

Everyone's like "see you on the next video" but this guy was the only one to actually make The Next Video for real.

[@samsthomas]

A great video on a great series of hardware/software. I had a NeXTStation for 6-7 years that I used primarily as a terminal for reading email and programming on other Unix systems. You forgot to talk about that incredible keyboard. If I could find a modern keyboard with the same typing feel, I’d buy a dozen of them.

[@sd3693]

The speaker thing was only on the colour NeXTstations, not on the monochrome ones. The monochrome stations used those nice NeXT monitors that the Cube did.

[@genius1a]

Wow, as a kid of the time (but on the MS- and DR-DOS Side of the action) I really appreciate your thoughts and insights on what NEXT and its Software ecosystem was. Aside from the glorification it got later. Pretty impressive nevertheless! Your little hints from the programmers perspektive are helpful to better get to know some things that had to be fought on the backside of things. The video content with graphics and hardware shown blends nicely with your fluent commenting and supportting background music!

[@byteborg]

They did fat binaries for multi-architecture support as well. Something rarely heard of in the 90s. I never seen it actually running on PA-RISC, but it was one of the supported architectures, 68k, x86, SPARC an PA-RISC, IIRC. I think of this as an important technology of Next that was brought over to Apple, when it comes to changing your hardware architecture for the platform. Apple did this transition very smoothly several times now, 68k to PPC to x86_64 to Arm64. I think of it as a much overlooked but important detail that Next could already do such complicated feats in the 90s.

[@jsrodman]

Yeah, multiarch is a natural consequence of App bundles. you just ship the binaries side by side in different filenames with native executables.

[@byteborg]

@@jsrodmanactually, I think it's quite a bit more intricate: both companies did provide multiarch frameworks/libraries with platform-specific optimizations as well. It's quite nontrivial, when you look at the big picture.

[@MrMegaManFan]

I got to fiddle with a NeXT cube now and then my first two years in college, so this is very nostalgic for me. Thank you!

[@awd42]

The Sound Box was only for the color machines -- the original grayscale (not just monochrome -- four shades of grey!) NeXT Computer had the speaker (and later microphone) and audio/keyboard jacks in the monitor, which incidentally was also powered by the computer itself. When they later released the NeXTDimension board for true color displays, the NeXT color monitors were made by other companies (Philips/Fimi, Sony, and Hitachi) rather than being manufactured in-house, and didn't have any of the other I/O. You'd either use a dual-head setup with a grayscale and a color monitor, or connect a sound box to the monitor port on the mainboard and plug your keyboard into that. The mouse always plugged into the keyboard, similar to the Macintosh. Fun fact: very late models of the NeXTStation used ADB keyboards and mice (and revised models of the sound box and mono monitor). These are kinda rare though. So when it comes to the "slabs", the mono ones require the NeXT grayscale monitor, and the color ones require both a Y-cable and a sound box. Never plug a monitor directly into a NeXTStation color! The monitor uses only the three coax pins of the 13W3 (it's sync on green); the other pins are for the audio/keyboard/mouse and some have voltage on them. The Y-cable splits those out to a DB-19 connector and a 13W3 with only the RGB pins.

[@daevidcrawley6936]

Brilliant video, loved it. I worked with Apple computers as a summer job when I was 16, during 90 - 92 and as much as i loved Apple pc's...I fell in love with the Next pc's. I even ordered a glossy brochure.....wish I still had it.

[@awksedgreep]

Used wmaker for years. Enjoyed the vid, thanks for putting this together.

[@msorn3]

He was not CEO in the 80s. He was just the chairman John Sculley was the CEO.

[@SMASHINGblargharghar]

This is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. Keep it up!!

[@philipthatcher2068]

This was one of my favourite videos on one of my favourite topics. Very well researched and presented.

[@marksterling8286]

Great video, always enjoy NeXT stories. I remember Sun did something similar with the speaker box on some of the sparcstations. Also remember the days of Sunos getting repackaged with open windows and becoming Solaris must have been around 1991/2. I was using an SLC workstation around that time.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I was quiet fond of those SLC workstations.

[@mgabrysSF]

Sun and Microsoft (both) invested in NeXT to gain access to IP - as well as OpenStep installation options for Sun workstations and - actually, I can't recall how it was supposed to layer on Windows NT - but it did for a time (somehow - I'll have to deep-dive to get a better picture on that). The purchase price from Apple for NeXT was essentially to cover the investments 100 percent from Steve, Ross Perot and Canon (hence the cash options on the buyout).

[@JoshTolbertUrbana]

We had a graphics designer that loved his NeXT slab, but the machine died...So we replaced it with a Mac. I was assigned this task. Our graphics designer had a rooster-crow sound when the in-built e-mail client saw a new message. Well, we had NFS homedirs...So we flopped his Mac on his desk, set it up to talk to our OpenLDAP and NFS file servers, had him log in...He started his mail client, and the rooster crowed. The amount of continuity even in basic configs between NeXTStep and OS X was really surprising at times.

[@soyroberto2527]

I remember watching Job's on a Next VHS that came with the workstation and I was totally impressed by the demos and presentation, I immediately fell in love with it. I always like NeXT heaps starting with the Logo, and great corporate image. I even got a Nextstep version to run on Parallels (Intel Mac). And was totally happy when learned that NexTStep was to be the foundation of the MacOS

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

OSX Server came out in 1999/2000. I was using it to write code in 2000. OSX client (aka 'OSX' was 2000). OSX server was basically nextstep on powerpc

[@RockwellAIM65]

OSX Server was basically NeXTStep with a lot of things broken... and it ran half as fast.

[@ScottPlude]

Have I ever told you how much I enjoy your videos? Yes... emphasis on YOUR videos. The sense of humor is fantastic. Just the best!

[@poofygoof]

I had a cube with an external DAC/ADC that plugged into the DSP port. The 56k has a serial bus (predecessor of i2s?) to transfer digital audio.

[@stevebriggs6469]

Ditto. Both the cube and the pizza box had external DACs via the DSP port.

[@whiskeysk]

Just like Atari Falcon030 with Steinberg accessories? Never knew Next had this!

[@john_stevens]

some fellow travelers. I have both a 030 cube updated to 040 and later a color pizza box. I loved nearly everything about NeXT. even stood three feet from Jobs at a NeXTExpo for about 5 minutes as he dressed down a three party developer. wonderful little video too - thanx.

[@Peter_S_]

I had dual motherboard cube (one 030 and one 040) I put together from repair parts just for the 56K dev environment. I worked at the Northern San Francisco Bay Area NeXT dealer and we only sold a hand full of them while at the same time we were the largest Mac dealer West of the Mississippi.

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

nice video. not with you on objective C. As A nextstep developer from 1993-2001 (will, webobjects by the end with java, but you still had to do some objective C here and there). Back then your choices were C or C++ both of which sucked big time. Now, it should have died sooner than it did I grant you, and should probably never had ended up in iOS, but back then, to have a real OO language that was actually usable was amazing. Combined with EOF it was lightyears ahead of anything else. I loved my days on Nextstep, openstep, webobjects and EOF. You'd be turning applications out in literally weeks compared to watching dev teams 10x the size taking years with big windows mince or X. Even into java and J2EE - EOF (re-written almost entriely in java by then, but still with some Objective C here and there) was like a flying car to J2EEs Ford Model T. Happy days.

[@wtfusernamecrap]

Full ack. Objective-C might not be the most visually pleasing language, but it’s features were awesome. The disdain in this video is childish.

[@topquark22]

I had a NeXTstation. It was the coolest, best UI ever! I owned that machine from 1991 - 2001. When the WWW became a thing, I used the NeXT to surf the web. Unfortunately, it took literally minutes to render a single JPG image. Machine sent for scrap in 2001;. Sorry to see it go.

[@stephenlittle7534]

I loved the Next icons. And used to copy them off my mate office computer and use on my windows one. And then there were all those folks who made all those really nice icon folders with coloured folders and designs with rine stone design on them. Good old days.

[@Rickmakes]

Those were designed by Susan Kare. She also designed for Mac and Windows amongst others.

[@justinmorgan7851]

The icons were created by Keith Ohlfs, as well as most of the rest of the NeXT GUI. There are some good articles about him and his NeXT icons if you google him. OTOH, Susan Kare did Mac icons.

[@TheBauwssss]

Bro, your videos are motherloving gosh darn enjoyable to watch!! Especially your voice, your peculiar manner of speaking and your choice of words, all the lovely antics and the funny demeanor you sprinkle all throughout your videos add so much personality to them, which I think is in turn a large part of what makes watching your videos so exceptionally enjoyable 👍🤓 thank you for making these vid bro,they are truly a sight to behold and very much epic indeed!

[@professoraarondsouza5255]

SO LOVE YOUR RETRO NOSTALGIA, MY CHILDHOOD & YOUTH.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

5:10 I hunted around online, and there has been a paper published in the last couple of years on the history of Objective C, first at PPI/Stepstone, then later at NeXT. It appears it was NeXT that decided to implement it on top of the GCC core from the GNU project. That article seems to imply that the open-sourcing of the resulting compiler was done with no big drama, yet I recall Richard Stallman relating that they had to be strong-armed into it, because they were trying to dodge the fact that they were building their product on code licensed under the GPL.

[@Steven_Edwards]

Next didn't want to open source their objective-c frontend preprocessor because, they wanted to abuse the licensing terms. Eventually they did. It's part of the reason they put so much support in to clang. Jobs hated the terms of the GPL and wanted to be able to close the source on whatever if he could. Clang is under an X11 or BSD style license so legally they can have their own closed source libraries.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

6:10 No, OS X never used Display PostScript. By the time Steve Jobs (and the crew of NeXT) had ended up back at Apple, Adobe had decided to give up on Display PostScript, which had never been a big success.

[@mojoblues66]

Although your answer is technically correct, they used Quartz 2D which is very similar to DPS.

[@monyschuk]

It's actually not mentioned in the video - but there was an OS X before OS X - one that the original Apple folks (Gil Emilio and crew) intended to ship; it was code-named Rhapsody. Once the "reverse-takeover" was complete and pretty much every exec at Apple had been replaced by their counterpart at NeXT, Jobs decided to ditch it and do it over with the OS X everyone now knows. But Rhapsody *did* ship, and it actually *did* use Display Postscript for its window server.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Rhapsody, Yellow Box, whatever names were given to the various attempts to repackage NeXTStep -- all were failures. Along with Display PostScript.

[@MaddTheSane]

Rhapsody was axed because it lacked Carbon APIs, which long-term Mac developers demanded. And Quartz could easily be called Display PDF. That and licensing costs prevented Apple from using DPS without having the OS cost a lot.

[@MaddTheSane]

@@monyschuk I think you're confusing Copland and Rhapsody. And yes, Rhapsody was released as Mac OS X Server 1.0. Fun fact: The 2D versions of Chess that came with Mac OS X 10.3 and earlier still called Display PostScript functions… despite the definitions not being present in any headers.

[@EntropicRemnants]

Nicely done. Lived through that period (I'm 66) and you're telling me things I had no idea of, lol. Also I agree with others who have complimented your "storytelling" style.

[@u0aol1]

Very enjoyable episode, I knew most of what you spoke about but you have a great way of breaking things down!

[@vapocalypse]

I work with Perl every day. Your comparison with Objective C made me spill what I was eating! Thank you!

[@koma-k]

I remember reading about the NeXT Cube with its DSP and 256MB MO drive in either PCW or Byte... closest I ever got to one was an IT trade show where it was demoed on a stand next to Apple's (whose computers I somehow always managed to unintentionally crash at those shows). Really wanted one, but it was well outside my means as a college student. Ended up buying an Acorn (origin of the ARM CPU) a little later, so at least I stuck to the more "esoteric" end of the spectrum 😛 Speaking of rare and "odd" computers, an episode on Linn's object-oriented computer would be interesting (that's Linn as in the Scottish turntable/audio gear company)...

[@MountainDewComacho494]

Our statistics lab had Next computers. This was 1991. Their purpose was to run Mathematica. They were well ahead of their time. The ones we used also had an XD floppy drive. This was a floppy that stored an astounding 2.8 MB, which was twice the standard floppy at 1.4 MB. The only real problem is they cost four times as much. Our university bookstore sold the Next computers for about $4,000.

[@Brodda-Syd]

Fantastic historic video. Well researched and brilliantly delivered. I'm 56 and have lived this, I'm very impressed with your knowledge and presentation. Thank you

[@BillyBobDingledorf]

I like the Mathematica reference. One of the few things from the 80's that is still alive and well today. My father is well into his 80's, smart as hell, and still uses it regularly.

[@cjmillsnun]

OSX did not use display postscript. They went for a watered down version. Display PDF, which Adobe let them have royalty free (I bet they regret that one)

[@plotfi1]

Objective-C is great at one thing: writing stable OS APIs. It wasn’t until Swift (like 5.8 or so) that there was a viable replacement for ObjC’s ability to easily write APIs that don’t break with future versions of the language and operating system (this is called ABI stability). You can achieve this using bare C, but you don’t get higher level constructs. Microsoft created COM and the like to get similar stability for windows.

[@leeselectronicwidgets]

Great video, you've managed to stitch together so many different aspects of the products / features back then. I agree that most people won't have remembered just how stunning the Unix-style desktops were for resolution and features vs PCs/Macs - it's certainly why I fondly remember the original Solaris machines with their cute optical patterned mouse mats! But, don't diss Perl, m'kay! Early web was running loads of it! 😄

[@RetroBytesUK]

Oh god that mouse mat, I have such memories of that mouse mat and how poorly they faired in a shared lab. Having been forced to matain perl written by others lets just say I have experience of some of the worst aspects of spaghetti code 😅

[@leeselectronicwidgets]

@@RetroBytesUK Hopefully none of my crazy early web Perl, i wince when I think back but it got the job done!

[@BertLensch]

I had a number of Next Cubes and Next Colors in a storage closet when I was at Georgia Tech in the early 2000's and never really knew any of the history about them. Since they were part of a National Science Foundation grant, I was never able to surplus them so they just sat in storage. Sad to think about it now that I know some of the history about the company and why those machines are important.

[@davidmatten8519]

CMU had (has?) a whole building wing under its grass quad ("Wean 3600") whose hallway is locked, and thus became the CS graveyard for the stuff they weren't allowed to sell off from concluded research projects. Not sure how it didn't qualify as a fire hazard, given that it filled much of the hallway to the emergency exit. They had stuff that was pretty hot only a few years earlier, and there was some kind of program to outfit things and loan (not give!) them to students, but mostly they'd just be used as dumb terminals. In 1992, there was one NeXT cluster for general student use (alongside mostly DECstations, fewer Macs and then PCs. Maybe a Sparc cluster?). Some departments had dedicated HP or Sparc clusters (ECE was one), and SGI. NeXTs were sold in the campus computer store alongside Macs and some PCs, but I didn't know anyone who bought one - not a lot of value for an undergrad, and grad students had access to their lab machines (still no NeXTs that I saw).

[@grantgoodman8415]

Love your channel, just discovered it today. Keep up the good work!

[@anthrobug]

You had me until the last comments. From OS X currently retaining the skeleton of Next to the impact on devices like the iPhone & iPad, you under-appreciate the influence Next & it's engineers had on Apple and the industry.

[@cdanilsson]

Who here has got a NeXT? I have a Nextstation TurboColor complete with monitor and everything. Haven't used it for ages, but it is an awesome piece of tech. The build quality with the magnesium alloy shell is nothing short of amazing.

[@mrkitty777]

I, but virtual running in virtual box.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The turbo colour very posh, you've got a few mhz on me there 😁

[@cdanilsson]

@@RetroBytesUK Those few precious MHz! :) I remember it being a hassle getting the usual GNU stuff running on it back some 15 or 20 years ago, can't imagine it being any easier today! Or for that matter finding any helpful forum posts when running into problems; they are probably all long dead and buried by now...

[@mgabrysSF]

which monitor - the super rare Trinitron 17" color - the Phillips 17 (more like a 16 - there was a lot of 'dodgy' screen measurements at the time - which landed the vendors in court) or the (ungodly heavy) Hitachi 21?

[@cdanilsson]

@@mgabrysSF As far as I can tell it is the Philips one, it says FC16AS on the back so unfortunately no Trinitron. Yeah the screen sizing was an odd one back then, probably much because of it only stating the size of the tube. Never mind that the usable screen area was a fair bit smaller!

[@CollinBaillie]

23:41 - Did you miss the video overlay of various GUIs?

[@RetroBytesUK]

I did it would seem, it was there. It looks like I accidentally deleted it while tweaking another problem I'd spotted with that bit just at the end.

[@AndrewRoberts11]

FYI: The 1973 Xerox Alto (~2,000 units) was the first platform to ship with an OO based OS, with apps being developed in Smalltalk, a trend the the 1981 Xerox Star (~25,000 units), and 1985 Xerox Daybreak (28,000 units) would maintain. As to the GUI, Acorn's 1987+ RISC OS, had a dock (at the bottom), context menus, solid drag-able windows, anti-aliased fonts, a task manager, and self contained application directories (but prefixed with a "!", rather than suffixed with .app), and ran on ARM hardware. Acorn's unreleased 1987 ARX OS even had a Mach like (micro kernel), that NeXT and later macOS, iOS, ... derivatives would similarly adopt. You also failed to mention NeXT produced only ~50,000 boxes, in its history, that's fewer units than the proprietary GUI system shipping: Xerox, let alone, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Atari, Commodore, Acorn, and not forgetting Apple.

[@billymania11]

Mr. Retro, an excellent presentation on Next. I learned some stuff and it helped connect some dots I was not aware of. Really good work!

[@drxym]

I was in university when some reps came around to demo the Next machines and boy were they gorgeous looking devices. That said our labs had some pretty decent Sun workstations and I don't think the uni was going to fork out for replacements and they didn't. And while the desktop was better than X by a mile, I don't think it was especially mattered to us since we lived in the shell and if we wanted graphics we'd walk next door to the Mac II lab. And from a price point, dear god was it expensive.

[@snoazll]

I envy that chopstick, it now has a touch of history.

[@famailiaanima]

There used to be so many operating systems back in the day, I wish we could have that today.

[@1pcfred]

No. Run Linux.

[@alangiles4616]

A VERY interesting video. I would love to have owned one. My only complaint is the bloody Quintet of The Hot Club of France, with Stephane Grappeli fiddling away on his violin in the background. He always sets my teeth on edge. For a sophisticated machine, I'd recommend The George Shearing Quintet (the early recordings are also out of copyright).

[@RetroBytesUK]

I have at lot of love for the George Shearing Quintet.

[@GRAHAMAUS]

There is nothing wrong with Objective-C. 95% of people who object to it (pun intended) have never actually built anything with it. Those who have (I am one), don't mind it one bit. It's actually very powerful, expressive and even elegant if you squint a bit. To my mind, Swift wasn't strictly needed, they could have made Obj-C 3.0 instead. Moving from C++ to Objective-C when OS X came about was the biggest single boost in productivity in my entire career - I stopped having to spend much time just keeping the language happy, and could focus on intent instead..

[@RetroBytesUK]

I did over play my dislike of obj-c for comic effect a bit, its definitely the apparence of the code that put me off rather than somthing wrong with the language as such. I've heard the object classes for NeXT Step where quiet nice and well thought out.

[@dr.feelicks2051]

You make this very palatable. I’m informed where it counts. Great fun.

[@fallous]

A minor nit, but NextStep wasn't the first OOP GUI/operating system. Smalltalk on the Xerox Alto is over a decade prior to NeXT.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I should have said first commercially successfully. Some how Parc never managed to capitailise on its creations, everyone else did though.

[@fallous]

@@RetroBytesUK Yeah, Xerox had the foresight to create PARC but then through a combination of conservative management (mustn't threaten photocopier sales!) and the 1975 FTC consent decree failed to really benefit from PARC's creations.

[@brianoconnell6459]

I recall in the early 90s, they had a similar dock to the NeXT Dock available as a shareware addon. It worked fairly well as an accessory to System 7 back in the day.

[@Anomaly188]

Doom was developed on a NeXt Step Workstation that John Carmack had paid $11,000 COD for. He also had to walk to the bank in the mid-December Wisconsin winter to go get the money because he didn't have a car at the time.

[@Astinsan]

My understanding is the Dsp port was a serial communication type interface. Isdn modems would use them. It’s based on a European terminal type.

[@OlaInTheClouds]

Copeland was released, pretty good actually, more known as System 9.2.5 had most of the features. I attended it's funeral at WWDC 2002

[@1pcfred]

Here I am watching this video in Window Maker which is the successor of Afterstep, a Next lookalike for Linux. Doesn't really act like Next, but looks like it. I don't really use it so much for how it looks but the low resource use. Window Maker is a pretty minimal Window Manager. It's one step up from the "box" WMs. Window Maker actually has a GUI configuration utility. That's about all it has.

[@pauledwards2817]

Runs very nicely on Sun and HP boxes too and still a joy to use, but then the web, where all old hardware and operating systems fall over but enough software is around for free legally to make Nextstep still cool.

[@nangld]

Objective C is actually better than C++ for UI and easier for beginners overall. It is dynamically typed and doesn't have C++'s pitfalls. People still struggle creating good UI with Qt or plain C (GTK). It also created an ecosystem for Apple, since Objective C programs are nearly impossible to port to Windows or other Unixes.

[@archivis]

I used Nextstep machines at university loved them their usability was awesome. My favorite system. Tried to find a used one. for a while. Did get a osx mac that was awesome until it's power supply decided to go boom . Went back to using cheaper x86 machines, as I am poor.

[@christopheroliver148]

The big U/I things I miss from then are NeWS and Display PostScript. It was many years after my SunOS and NeXT experience that I stuffed the Adobe red book into my brain, but I think I would have very much enjoyed using PostScript for UI rendering.

[@VirtualLunacy]

We had them in the Navy when I was stationed in Hawaii - 92-95. We had some cool programs running on them and I got to learn quite a bit while working on them. We didn't have "IT' people so much and computer-savvy people were relied upon to be admins and to troubleshoot on our own. Fun times.

[@drhoads08]

Dude, I am LOVING all of your videos!

[@reedfrey8745]

Objective-C and the software it made possible is the best legacy of Next.

[@CobraTheSpacePirate]

Great channel! Really liked the "Itanium" episode!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks, I rather enjoyed making the Itanium episode.

[@mallninja9805]

Man I miss the turn-of-the-century menagerie of unix OS's and the hardware they ran on. At one point I had a pair of Sun Ultra 10s, an IBM 44p, an HP (something or other), a little Next pizza box _and_ an SGI Fuel tower on or around my desk at work. Those were good times.

[@1pcfred]

Linux uber alles!

[@benjamindepaz8429]

Really cool video! And the X in the Mac OS X is a Roman Numeral. It was the version that came after Mac OS 9. So it’s pronounced Mac OS TEN. But great storytelling.

[@Leonards-leopard]

That’s not entirely true. It’s a play on words - x as in Roman 10 but also x as in unix, in which it is based, so can be pronounced either way.

[@jaydylantyler]

@@Leonards-leopardno, it’s always pronounced ten - never ex.

[@gnustep]

Dynamic languages are inherently superior to static ones. It is easier to do things in a dynamic language like ruby, smalltalk, or ObjC. Jobs chose ObjC since it was a descendant of smalltalk.

[@TheJamieRamone]

Hi Greg! It's not a descendant of SmallTalk, it just coincidentally shared much of the syntax. Lookup Brad Cox's oral history video for The Computer Museum here on KZbin. He goes into that. He also dispels the myth that it started as a C preprocessor (or macro package). It was always a full on compiler.

[@rydmerlin]

Wow this brought back some memories.

[@hicknopunk]

The computer where you plug a keyboard into a speaker, which then connects to the monitor...and the keyboard is the power switch!!? How exactly did this machine fail on the consumer market?? 🤣😂

[@RetroBytesUK]

🤣

[@kamertonaudiophileplayer847]

The number of ports is amazing especially comparing with current Macs.

[@tezinho81]

In one bank I worked in IT, they ran Nextstep on a very specific model of Compaq which happened to be compatible with the build they used. If I remember right is was a pentium2. It was basically a pre-osx hackintosh. It was a very, very niche application.

[@Nilboggen]

The DSP port was for the motorola 56000 that was a digital signal processor (which is what I think the DSP on the port stands for) and could do high quality audio and double as a fax machine/ modem.

[@arnaudforgiel268]

Obj-C still rules and is a great way to learn OOP...

[@maded2]

NeXT Cube came first as it was NeXT first workstation computer (wikipedia is wrong), it was let down by the magneto-optical being very slow, which means everyone have to buy a SCSI HDD for it as well. I used NeXT Cube for my first Objective-C project and then moved on to NeXTStation.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I thought magneto-optical speed was OK (I had a SCSI drive for my Mac), it was the cost of the cartridges that was a problem. 256MiB was a lot of storage in those days, and not having smaller, cheaper capacities available put many people off.

[@maded2]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 it's the write speed which is very very slow.

[@RockwellAIM65]

The MO was not only slow, but if it got one spec of dust on it the thing would lose all your data! They were not a lot of fun. There are subsitute MO drives available for NeXTStep that are very reliable, but I'll not go into that here.

[@trizvanov]

I remember the library at Columbia University had several of those. I've never seen or heard of Next before and it was quite an odd experience to be using them.

[@tubbiele2]

My approach to what was Next was using the Window Maker window manager. A real pleasure to use. Pity I don't have the time to make it adapt to my current needs

[@richardtwyning]

You missed the fact that the CMU computer was named 'Andrew' after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. It was one of my favourite episodes of BBC's Micro Live in the early 80s when 'Freff' visited CMU and did a report on the system and did a demonstration of one of the workstations.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I liked that they put the name Andrew in loads of things e.g. Andrew Filing System, the whole Andrew project would be worth a video of its own.

[@davidmatten8519]

'Andrew' was the name of the overall (much broader) educational computing system project from which the 3Ms spec emerged, not the name of the computer itself. The specific hardware (and spec) was pretty incidental. They perhaps called the prototype(s) an "Andrew Workstation", but eventually any brand of machine (mostly DECstations, ironically, see below) on campus that offered the various common tools built using the Andrew Toolkit (ATK), accessing the AFS distributed file system and using single signon credentials was called an "Andrew" workstation. The Project was funded by IBM concurrently with DEC funding Project Athena at MIT. AFS (and later IMAP) was the main thing that emerged from the project that made it into the wild and had a wider impact. Athena produced X and Kerberos, but a poorer file system, so they sort of cross-pollinated each other, with MIT adopting AFS, and CMU adopting Kerberos, X, and Zephyr instant messaging from Athena. (IBM's funding was why we ended up with giant Token Ring connector ports in the rooms all over the campus, rather than more svelte RJ45, even if you were connecting to Ethernet or AppleTalk, and even in new buildings built after TR cards became harder to find and support and mostly un-economical on consumer/student machines. A note for another episode, I guess). The bespoke "Andrew" machines, if they were ever widespread on campus, were long gone by '92 even though the overall project was ongoing. Campus PCs and Macs did not meet the ATK qualification at the time I was there, so they didn't get the "Andrew" designation, though they did support AFS and Kerberos, in a fashion, and you could use those services as mounted volumes from your personal dorm or off-campus PC or Mac. On the other hand, the PC clusters could run Doom contests, so there was that (until it caused some kind of broadcast/multicast storm and a patch was demanded). The Andrew machines just had NetTrek.

[@andrewgjkgjk]

The comments about objective-c in this video completely miss the most important point about the language and the things it enabled within the NeXT ecosystem. NeXTSTEP was a big factor in the adoption of NeXT systems in industry, because it allowed for rapid application development and an object oriented approach that permeated the operating system to a much deeper level than in other platforms. This was a direct result of objective-C's features, which included C-like performance, nothing but a very thin runtime focused on dynamic dispatch, and ... well, dynamic dispatch. The latter technology was a key element enabling the Interface Builder, which in turn was a key element in rapid application development. The next closest thing in terms of GUI app development was Visual Basic, which had a host of problems and was a Microsoft techhnology (i.e., not "unix like"). The object oriented GUI wasn't hampered by objective-C as is implied by the video, rather, it was directly enabled by it and would have been nearly impossible without it. The other GUI technologies at the time all relied on code generation, which was much much worse to deal with.

[@deckard5pegasus673]

I really love that you called out Objective C. I worked at a company and we wrote Windows software in MFC C++(this is way back in 2000, 2001), but truthfully I was always just a C guy, my C++ was always as much C as possible, just using the minimum in other words classes, but absolutely no templates, etc. We wanted to make a version of our software for Mac OSX, so we bought one of the first mac minis to come out in 2005. I programmed everthing in Carbon(HIViews, etc.) and C++ . I actually loved C++ Carbon. But then some years later Apple deprecated C++ Carbon and said everything had to be switched to Cocoa Objective C. I started looking over how to port the C++ to Objective C.... it was not too long after that I decided, I am no longer developing software for Apple...

[@senjaz]

You could have kept the C++ backend and rewrote the UI in Obj-C. Hardly ideal but it was possible to help reduce the effort required in situations like yours. I completely disagree with you about Obj-C and the Foundation & AppKit frameworks. I thought they were so much better than everything else. Since Obj-C was layered on top of pure C I'm really surprised you didn't feel better about it. C++ was like but not the same as C.

[@deckard5pegasus673]

@@senjaz In 2007, I made a SDK that wraps win32, posix and X11 calls, and Carbon Mac. It has it's own rendering, widgets, window management, etc. I suppose it is like Google's Aura, but I didn't know about Google's Aura until recently. When Mac switched to cocoa, I just dropped it, which probably was rash on my part. Also the SDK in Mac used a lot of BSD system functions(file access, pthread, etc.), the Carbon was for GUI,EventLoop, CreateNewWindow, CFString, etc. I want to keep the SDK to the bare metal and no bloat like GTK,MFC(at that time),dotNet, etc. I probably could have looked at the source of wxWidget, etc. to learn the cocoa api for UIs, but I just didn't have to for more problems.

[@deckard5pegasus673]

@@senjaz In 2007, I made a SDK that wraps win32, posix and X11 calls, and Carbon Mac. It has it's own rendering, widgets, etc. Maybe like Google's Aura, but I didn't know about it until recently. When Mac switched to cocoa, I just dropped it. Also the SDK in Mac used a lot of BSD system functions(file access, pthread, etc.), the Carbon was for EventLoop, CreateNewWindow, CFString, etc. I want to keep the SDK to the bare metal and no bloat like GTK,MFC(at that time),dotNet, etc. I probably could have looked at the source of wxWidget, etc. to learn the cocoa api for UIs, but I just didn't have to for more problems.

[@deckard5pegasus673]

I have a SDK that wraps win32, posix - X11, and Carbon. It has it's own rendering, widgets, etc. When Mac switched to cocoa, I just dropped it. Also the SDK in Mac used a lot of BSD system functions(file access, pthread, etc.), the Carbon was for EventLoop, CreateNewWindow, CFString, etc. I want to keep the SDK to the bare metal and no bloat like GTK,MFC(at that time),dotNet, etc. I probably could have looked at the source of wxWidget, etc. to learn the cocoa api for UIs, but I just didn't have time.

[@deckard5pegasus673]

When writting applications I did a lot in BSD system calls, for file access, pthread, etc. and just used Carbon for EventLoop, CreateNewWindow, CFString, etc. I probably could have looked at the source of wxWidget, etc. to learn the cocoa api for UIs, but I just didn't have time.

[@benketteridge9150]

Cool story, except that you're completely wrong about Objective-C. Having professionally developed systems using it, I can say there's very little wrong with it. And compared to C++, it is aesthetically just fine.

[@notsig11]

Objective-C always seemed well suited to a microkernel based OS to me too. I only ever wrote toy apps on my NeXT machines but man it was a great development environment. IB was amazing especially for the time.

[@davidioanhedges]

Display Postscript - capable of showing what your documents would actually look like when printed out ... which was at the time a fever dream of most systems ... Apple originally launched on providing a printer that could print documents that looked good ...

[@---jc7pi]

Next was not the first object orient UI btw, Sun NeWS was based on PostScript but they extended with object orientation, multiple incoherence and all kind of stuff. You could write an app in that version of PostScript. In fact, the Display PostScript used by next was very much a lesser version of that idea. Sun NeWS would make a great video.

[@RobbCochran-l2u]

So Many Computers back then used the Motorola CPUs... Sega, Commodore, Amiga, ... honestly I don't know how Intel x86 beat out the Motorola CPUs honestly, I mean maybe Motorola just got comfortable? There are a LOT of "Not Intel x86 Based" CPUs out there that are just Un-Tapped Potential really... x86 i think was just "Convenient" or Easier to program for back then, but now days I think we should Dig Up these Old Architectures and have a look at Improving them... I'm convinced that the only reason some of the Architectures "Died Off" is because they were limited by their "Die Process Sizing" and how many transistors they could fit on the Die at the time... now days, I believe we could easily EASILY improve these old Architectures ... some of them did things even better than Common Processors do today - and often Current Processors even implement some of the hardware instructions of these old chips even if they're Undocumented - and people are even discovering New Undocumented Tricks these old processors can do to this day... Computers are Amazing really -

[@Scoopta]

I'm confused, how does this monitor, speaker, thing connect. The speaker connects to the monitor port but doesn't have a video out to go to the monitor so where does the monitor plug in??

[@delscoville]

Jobs demo, what I rememebr the most was the sound demo. That is what impressed me. But I had been doing music on comuters since the Atari 400/800 and VIC 20, and yes I already had a Commodore 64, and an Atari ST at the time of that demo. Keep in mind that the top synthesizer at the time was the Yamaha DX7, Although now that I hear the music from it again, it really doesn't sound any better than a DX100 with 4-operator FM synthesis. (but better than Sound Blaster)

[@mattl_]

What’s the best way to do a follow up video on this?

[@thefenlanddefencesystem5080]

So you find Objective-C *objectionable*? Yeah, yeah, get me coat.

[@RetroBytesUK]

🤣

[@bankoleogundero9446]

11:22 Wow!!! That's one neat insides. Better looking than some machines today.