NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened(computerhistory.org) |
NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened(computerhistory.org) |
It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.
> NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor)
Thor! I remember reading a little bit about it, and finding it incredibly exciting, but finding anything from NeXT's projects that never quite went public has been really hard.
This is a treasure trove.
Yes, please! That sounds absolutely fascinating!
YES!
you serious? post them already!
Yes! I've seen stills. Seeing the assembly in motion would be great!
Please share it. Would be much appreciated.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210
One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out in '89 or '90.
I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox.
NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats.
I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of NeXTstep.
> As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of the four personal computer standards (Apple II, Macintosh, and Windows).
1: https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-ab...
Was that supposed to be part of the humor of the article?
"Red Box, the planned PC Environment for Rhapsody on Intel hardware, never saw the light of day, although today’s Intel-based Macs have virtualization solutions from other vendors which allow them to run Windows or Linux alongside Mac OS X."
While iTunes, the App Store and the whole "Digital Life" stem from a Web-based Minivan Configurator, looking back at WebObjects as a product to enable that for others seems so contrary to what Apple is today.
That Old World of Software Product SKUs has been turned on its head to great effect, and I think it really is better this way.
The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.
The distinction is important IMO, because I beleave part of the ease of them supporting multiple platforms so easily is because it was all built around a microkernel.
Now Apple has more of a hybrid with XNU, but many of the core concepts of Mach are still there.
What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the minicomputer?
Instruction pipelining and memory caching to allow for "cheap" dereferences; a "flat" virtual memory; loadable modules that are source on disk and get JITed into native objects when loaded into memory... these are just generic features you could expect out of most architectures+platforms today. But those were the differentiating factors for the Lisp machine.
The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.
> The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95.
I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.
Next morning everyone in the company had a paper memo on their desks (the only one I ever remember - we all used email.) It said that cubes were to be properly displayed on top of desks only. No mention of the real reason for the new policy.
Was that in the original? Most machines were around 100-200MB at the time, if that. I was still on an amiga with no hard drive.
A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...)
We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY" stickers on them and had been stripped of RAM and HDs of course.
I'll freely admit that it was, in the main, not worse than MS-DOS, most of the time.
Systems 7, 8 and 9 had better font handling, prettier icons, a more comprehensive GUI experience (eg. drag and drop worked everywhere), and a richer desktop publishing ecosystem.
But with respect to multitasking, 32-bit application support, protected mode, and networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95 was way, way, way better than Mac OS.
Apple had a 11 year head start with the Mac. With Windows 95, Microsoft had finally caught up, and then some.
The only people who thought Win 95 = Mac 84 were Apple fanboys.
I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's deficiencies all the more apparent.
I was not a big fan of Win95 but it would be a far stretch to argue that System 7/8/9 where anywhere near it in terms of actual use without regular crashing, which plagued MacOS at the time. Everyone was familiar with the bomb icon back then.
I don't know about that - Macs with Mosaic and then Netscape were the internet surfing tools of choice in the Windows 3.x and 95 days.
Anyone remember winnuke?
Windows 95 was a collection of hacks that never should've worked but it put Apple behind the 8 ball to bring its OS tech into the present.
[1] http://forums.macnn.com/64/classic-macs-and-mac-os/44121/wha...
(It didn't have per-process memory protection, though, but it was a huge point of pride for Amiga users back in the early 90s)
They had made a LOT of work on that, and the driver model by the time System 9 arrived. What really failed on Copland was the 'userland' equivalent. At the time, Apple had gone into a completely bizarre way of designing complex APIs for everything and most of them had no use whatsoever. There were heaps of crap, like OpenDoc and many others and Copland was 'trying' (and failing miserably) to integrate all of that.
How do I know? I have a collector t-shirt with 'Copland Driver Kitchen' on it ;-)
It took years for Apple to even support preemptive multitasking, they were easily 5 if not 10 years behind (and still kind of are today).
We had two NeXT color slabs at the time when Win95 came out. We used them to help MS launch Win95 in Hong Kong. NeXT by then was gone as a company and the slabs were getting long in the tooth. We switched to SGI -- the SGI Indy wasn't graphically as slick as NeXT Step, but it it blew away ANYTHING out there. IRIX was a very nice BSD Unix. We built one of the first ISPs in Hong Kong on IRIX. Solaris had just come out, which was a buggy mess, and to me wasn't nearly as nice to work with as SunOS on Sparc 10s. We were running IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and not long afterwards, early versions of Slackware (which ran our Usenet servers). But even today, my fondest memories are using NeXT and SGI -- very cool, very expensive.
Surely not in a technical sense. OS2/Warp and NeXT already existed and BeOS would be released a few months later able to play multiple videos in real time (playing MP3 on Windows would preclude doing anything else with the machine for a few more years, lest you liked skipping).
What are you referring to here?
But I agree, it was very nice and I remember it fondly.
So not entirely true -- it's "only" true from the standpoint of typical User Experience.
It could also be a hold over from when memory wasn't so volatile.
It comes down to defence-in-depth.
That short time is usually between seconds and minutes.
A can of compressed air can extend it a bit, but a dip in liquid nitrogen can turn the dial up a long way. Other techniques may appear in the future.
You need to trust that one of your own people won't do any tampering to extend the RAM. Much easier to verify there isn't any on the way out the door.
Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...
Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch: https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png
It didn't plague the OS like it did in OS X though, usually it was accompanied by a progress dialog box.
Symbolics and TI both developed microprocessors for Lisp in the 80s. TI promoted their Lisp chip as the 'Megachip' enabling the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. It was the first microprocessor which integrated around a million transistor functions.
Both put the Lisp Machine for example on small Apple Nubus cards and inside an Mac II. The TI MicroExplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory were popular Lisp Machines.
This is a MacIvory board which contains a Lisp processor, a Weitek numerics chip and memory:
http://fare.tunes.org/files/pics/lispm/2003-01-19-lispm-maci...
A Mac II with a Lisp Machine inside:
https://i.imgur.com/b3XkHpS.jpg
This is a picture of two Symbolics NXP 1000 Lisp machines, which also use Lisp chip:
http://lispm.de/symbolics-nxp1000-inside/thumbnails/IMG_3044...
Basically the size of a typical pizza box machine at that time.
and now we know that at least on the NN side, what seemed like another silly toy was just a little more work and a little more hardware away from being demonstrably useful.
so anyways, I'm positing a maximum after which additional funding does active harm.
> The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.
Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in Austin Texas (and Doug Lenat's Cyc) took some hits from that one...
A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp code faster than the dedicated hardware!
But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went belly-up, unable to sell their hardware. The standardization of Common Lisp in 1984 did help somewhat.
The Japanese Fifth Generation project was oriented around logic-programming, was it not? I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.
It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but "support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower tiers.
I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs, before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.
Windows 95? Had the best bones? The underlying system was just terrible, there's a reason why the line would be replaced by NT two releases later.
