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Comment by bcantrill | Hacker News Reader

For anyone interested in the history of NeXT, I highly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing."[0] (And I regret that I may have personally had some role in the current outsized prices of used copies -- my apologies!) We also had a really interesting Twitter Spaces discussion of both the book -- and on NeXT more generally.[1]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316.Steve_Jobs_the...

[1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-spaces/blob/master/...

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Wow. That audio chat was obnoxious. Nerds laughing at themselves about how smart they are (in hindsight).

NeXT was attempting to bring OOP programming to the masses, along with some really excellent for the time (and even now) rapid development tools.

Try some of the applications (FrameMaker, Mathematica, IB, etc) on NeXT. Then try the equivalents on Sun (which they were holding up as the exemplar in that audio chat), not even in the same ballpark.

They actually got very good traction in financial services and a few other areas. Just too late.

As for the hardware, they were 3 years too early for what they wanted to do. Had they held in until 1996 they could have had a fast enough machine for the price target they wanted. (Say 100mhz, 32meg ram, ~gig disk, high res colour).

Edit: Of course it turned out NeXT was right once they got a large enough market for it when they acquired Apple.

Sorry you felt it was obnoxious; certainly, I came away from the book much more interested in NeXT than I was going in. (The NeXT view that Sun was their primary competition was surprising to me for the reasons you outlined.) That said, there were a bunch of decisions that NeXT made that were highly questionable. (Stross's book is well-researched, and goes into many of these.) But I think it's also clear that the NeXT experience informed Jobs at Apple, where those mistakes (especially with respect to the market) were not repeated.

On a related note, I was shocked to read in Steven Sinofsky’s (excellent) Substack[1] that Gates in the early ‘90s saw NeXT as the primary rival for Windows in attracting developers. Enough so to have stood up multiple teams “chartered to compete with NeXT”.

[1] https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...

The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make the Mac after all). Disappointed they couldn't have it, they went out, got a bottle of tequila and got drunk.

Half way through the bottle one of them said "You know what? We could build Smalltalk on top of UNIX!". and thus was born obj-c and Nextstep.

There are still things that nextstep is more than ahead of the bleeding edge with. Time tends to erase perspective. Here's an example:

    // get a connection to some server
    id server = [NXConnection connectToName: "exampleserver"];

    // Then use objects on that server.
    List *aList;
    Widget *aWidget;
    aList = [server widgetList];
    aWidget = [aList objectAt: 0];

NB: This example is fantastic for building distributed apps. BUT accessing objects made a local proxy copy of the object. So you wouldn't want to run your world weather model through it - it would copy gigabytes of data over the network.

Also, as you can probably imagine it was horribly insecure, with no encryption. It was the late 80's, early 90's.

This isn’t so far from the truth. NeXT era Steve Jobs:

I had three or four people who kept bugging me that I had my rear over the Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally went over there. They were very kind and they showed what they were working on, and they showed me three things.

But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two.

One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system, there were a hundred Alto computers, all networked, using e-mail, etc., etc.. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they’d shown me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life.

The simplest way to explain NeXT is Steve getting back to those other two things after turning the first thing into a product with the Macintosh.

Except that Objective-C originally did not have anything to do with NeXT, it was latter when NeXT a acquired a license to use it for NeXTSTEP.

"The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332

same as you, i came away from reading that book much more interested in NeXT (and steve jobs as well)

its a great business case study (especially if you read it knowing what comes later) imo

Another interesting resource is Jobs speaking at the MIT Sloan School of Management while NeXT was in the process of pivoting to enterprise rapid application development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI

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