[Kool_Aid_Man]

http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/...demo_large.mov

I was watching this and I was amazed. The Dock? Services? Mail? The folders: home, computer and network with similar symbols? Emphasis on networking with other OSes? That thing where you move around images in a text document and the text formats around it? Dragging folders to that bar on the side of folder windows?

So many stuff is from NeXT that got put into OSX. Is OSX like an update to NeXT in disguise? If so, then why don't we have that paste and link thing. That was pretty cool. And services actually had a purpose in Next. Everything in services is greyed out for me in everything except the finder where half of them are greyed out.

Some funny lines: "And sure enough there's Gary." "And sure enough there's Ralph." "He doesn't get a fancy little house but he gets a folder."

I don't know if this has been dicussed before but OSX is basically NeXT in disguise.

[strokemouth]

Inconceivable!!

[Big Mac]

Dude! Wow! You know, there already is a Captain Obvious on the forums.

The services are greyed out because for most of them you need to highlight some text first.

[sideus]

Who would have thought!

[tooki]

Welcome to 1999.

Mac OS X is the direct descendent of OpenStep (the successor to NeXTStep). It's the whole reason Apple bought NeXT.

tooki

[OptimusG4]

Originally posted by tooki:
Welcome to 1999.

Mac OS X is the direct descendent of OpenStep (the successor to NeXTStep). It's the whole reason Apple bought NeXT.

tooki

Or, more technical, 1997 (1996?) when Apple bought out NeXT and announced the plan of a modern OS based on NeXT technologies.

[tooki]

1997 is when Apple bought NeXT. 1999 is when the first Mac OS X product, Mac OS X Server 1.0, was released.

tooki

[off/lang]

Come on guys, you have to admit that this demo is pretty cool to watch.

Thanks Kool_Aid for the link.

[turtle777]

Le'me introduce:

Kool_Aid_Man, this is the Timeline !
Timeline, this is Kool_Aid_Man.

Can someone post the pic, please. I don't want to get bashed !

-t

[tooki]

Originally posted by off/lang:
Come on guys, you have to admit that this demo is pretty cool to watch.

Thanks Kool_Aid for the link.

Yes. It was fun to watch a month or two ago when it was first posted!

tooki

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Kool_Aid_Man:
If so, then why don't we have that paste and link thing. That was pretty cool.

Oddly enough, the Mac System 7 had that too (it was called Publish and Subscribe). No idea why this never caught on.

[Sophus]

Welcome to the club (yes it has been discussed before). There is a lot of NextStep in OS X.

I suppose you know the story. Well, at least NextStep had a better fate than BeOS. NextStep lives in OS X. BeOS is more or less dead unfortunatly. Lucky for us that Steve and the guys had been busy those years that Steve was out in the cold.

[tooki]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Oddly enough, the Mac System 7 had that too (it was called Publish and Subscribe). No idea why this never caught on.

I can see a number of reasons.

For example: In a business, P&S basically results in dynamic documents. As cool as that sounds, it's probably not compatible with a lot of the legal documentation requirements; big businesses have to know exactly what revision of a document was printed, or distributed, etc. Nowadays, with PDF workflows, it'd be possible to easily archive a static version, but back then, it wasn't necessarily practical.

tooki

[msuper69]

Boy. What's next?

[Cadaver]

I'm glad you've finally come out from that rock under which you've been living. Must have been uncomfortable for all these years.

[alphasubzero949]

Pages = The little demo with the document template. Who would have thought?

Don't forget the Interface Builder.
And the Terminal.
And TextEdit.
And Mail.
And Preview.

Apple must have stolen the taskbar...errr...Dock from NeXTStep!!!111

[Kool_Aid_Man]

Yeah I was 7 in 1999. Sue me. And I just saw the vid and realized. I never really even knew what NeXT really was other than what Jobs did when he wasn't at Apple. I saw the vid, I clicked, and I was like "wow they didn't even bother to change the names."

[OptimusG4]

Damn I feel old lol. Na, it's a cool video that you posted. Just that most of us knew this already

[Anand]

You almost forget how amazing nextstep was. There are still alot of features of Nextstep that should be incoporated into OS X. And this was the early 90's! Compare this to windows 3.1. Ugly.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by tooki:
I can see a number of reasons.

For example: In a business, P&S basically results in dynamic documents. As cool as that sounds, it's probably not compatible with a lot of the legal documentation requirements; big businesses have to know exactly what revision of a document was printed, or distributed, etc. Nowadays, with PDF workflows, it'd be possible to easily archive a static version, but back then, it wasn't necessarily practical.

I'd heard the APIs for it were just unpleasant to work with, so the only people who ever bothered were Quark. That seems more likely to me than the idea that it didn't have a place in big business apps.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by Kool_Aid_Man:
Yeah I was 7 in 1999. Sue me. And I just saw the vid and realized. I never really even knew what NeXT really was other than what Jobs did when he wasn't at Apple. I saw the vid, I clicked, and I was like "wow they didn't even bother to change the names."

You missed some cool stuff, dude. In college (1989-1993, and, no, you don't need to tell me how old you were then) my best friend worked for NeXT, so I had access to all the latest and greatest through him. NeXTStep was so far ahead of anything else around back than that going from it back to my normal 7.x/BSD systems was like a step backwards. When the G4s came out I felt like they were what the NeXT could have been all those years ago.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I'd heard the APIs for it were just unpleasant to work with, so the only people who ever bothered were Quark. That seems more likely to me than the idea that it didn't have a place in big business apps.

I can't agree. Lots of apps (such as all the Claris programs, WordPerfect, etc.) supported it. But I don't ever recall anyone ever using it.

tooki

[Chuckit]

Did ClarisWorks have it once it became AppleWorks? Because otherwise I guess I just managed to avoid all the programs that had it other than Quark. (And if AppleWorks did still have it...I guess I'm just a little thick.)

[TheIceMan]

Kool_Aid_Man: All teasing aside, thanks for sharing. I'm one of those who have never seen this video before and I'm also one of those, who although I switched in 2002, didn't do any research or knew anything about NextStep. So thanks for sharing. Note to the others who jumped on him, slow down. There are people who benefit from this and just because you know does not mean that others do.

[Wevah]

<-- Used Publish and Subscribe.

:/

[tooki]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
Did ClarisWorks have it once it became AppleWorks? Because otherwise I guess I just managed to avoid all the programs that had it other than Quark. (And if AppleWorks did still have it...I guess I'm just a little thick.)

You know, I'm honestly not sure! I stopped using Claris/AppleWorks as my primary word processor so long ago that I never got much use out of it under the AppleWorks name. And then Mac OS X came along.

tooki

[sideus]

"The Mac is a little slow to give it up."

lol

[theolein]

Thanks for that movie link kool_aid_man. I, for one, haven't seen it before. I actually owned a Next for a couple of years back in 1994/95, but, having no network, was a bit on the strangled side as to what it was capable of. I absolutely loved the GUI though, as it was a plain and simple no nonsense GUI with many parctical things built in, such as the shelf, which many here complained when OSX first came out.

The one thing that really amazed me in that demo, and that has still not made it to the Cocoa frameworks, is the DatabaseKit. that alone could really give Apple and OSX a big push in busineses and the enterprise. It's as easy as Filemaker and doesn't cost extra. I suppose one of the reasons that Apple hasn't included the db kit is that they don't want to take sales away from Filemaker, which is a wholly owned Apple subsiduary. Pity though. Perhaps Jobs will be able to get it included in a future update to OSX.

There are so many things in Next that have not (yet) been ported to OSX that I think Apple has a number of tricks up its sleave that it has yet to release though. For example, Pages is exactly the same as a NeXT application that was released in the early 90's. There were many extremely innovative apps for graphics, development, data modelling etc on NeXT that I hope will eventually see a rebirth on OSX.

As for Publish & Link (the same as Publish/Subscribe in System 7) being dropped the reasons that tooki gave are good ones, but not the whole picture, I think. He is right in that too much linking leaves you at mercy of source documents getting lost or changed. I know that Microsoft's OLE, which is similar, often leaves one in that situation when one has linked someone's Excell sheet into a Word document that the Excell sheet gets moved to another folder or deleted and one is left with a blank OLE symbol in Word.

However, in DTP, Linking is extremely useful, and that is where it was mainly used. That said, both InDesign and GolIve support this type of linking these days, so probably Apple doesn't feel it necessary to include it in the OS any more.

[Big Mac]

Originally posted by Kool_Aid_Man:
Yeah I was 7 in 1999. Sue me. And I just saw the vid and realized. I never really even knew what NeXT really was other than what Jobs did when he wasn't at Apple. I saw the vid, I clicked, and I was like "wow they didn't even bother to change the names."

Just so that you know, our responses to you were not meant to be rude. We're just accustomed to conversing with at least a slightly older crowd. Welcome to MacNN.

[Dog Like Nature]

Originally posted by theolein:
The one thing that really amazed me in that demo, and that has still not made it to the Cocoa frameworks, is the DatabaseKit. that alone could really give Apple and OSX a big push in busineses and the enterprise. It's as easy as Filemaker and doesn't cost extra. I suppose one of the reasons that Apple hasn't included the db kit is that they don't want to take sales away from Filemaker, which is a wholly owned Apple subsiduary. Pity though. Perhaps Jobs will be able to get it included in a future update to OSX.

Take a look at Core Data in Tiger.

[JLL]

Originally posted by theolein:
The one thing that really amazed me in that demo, and that has still not made it to the Cocoa frameworks, is the DatabaseKit. that alone could really give Apple and OSX a big push in busineses and the enterprise. It's as easy as Filemaker and doesn't cost extra. I suppose one of the reasons that Apple hasn't included the db kit is that they don't want to take sales away from Filemaker, which is a wholly owned Apple subsiduary. Pity though. Perhaps Jobs will be able to get it included in a future update to OSX.

I don't think the average FileMaker customer wants to set up a Sybase database and make an application in Project Builder and Interface Builder (which is what he is doing).

But as mentioned, CoreData seems to be a lot like Databasekit.

[GaelDesign]

Yes, Core Data should be great. From what I understand, it's built on top of SQLite, which is a very popular and fast open source SQL database with lots of third-party support. Apple ain't no dummy.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Man.... that takes me back. NextStep really was way ahead of it's time. (probably the reason it did not do so well either)

[tooki]

That and it costing a fortune. Like half the GDP of a small island nation. (OK, maybe not, but $1000 for an OS license was a damned big chunk of money, no matter how good it was, and it required really high-end hardware to run well.)

tooki

[Brass]

Originally posted by Wevah:
<-- Used Publish and Subscribe.

:/

Yep, I also used Publish and Subscribe for a few purposes. It was an excellent tool.

Used it in AppleWorks to share a letterhead amongst several document templates, so only needed to update it in 1 place. Stuff like that.

[SteevAK]

Anybody know if there is an app that similar to that digital library thing he demoed? It would be nice to have a network of friends who had searchable libraries shared on the net. I realize this can be done rather easily with FTP or other hosting solutions, but those aren't searchable like the digital library was.

[tooki]

Originally posted by theolein:
However, in DTP, Linking is extremely useful, and that is where it was mainly used. That said, both InDesign and GolIve support this type of linking these days, so probably Apple doesn't feel it necessary to include it in the OS any more.

That reminds me of one more reason why Pub&Sub probably didn't gain wide support in many pro apps: like many other innovative initiatives of Apple's, it's not supported on Windows!

TrueType GX and QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc and Pub&Sub are great examples of Mac-only technologies that died.

You can still see it today, with only pure Mac apps supporting Mac OS X's advanced typography, while cross-platform apps retain the basic text support (or create their own).

tooki

[Superchicken]

Lets just hope software houses get smart with supporting OS X tech. Otherwise we'll see Apple have to continue to pick up the slack.

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Superchicken:
Lets just hope software houses get smart with supporting OS X tech. Otherwise we'll see Apple have to continue to pick up the slack.

The thing I'm hoping for, which is quite exciting, is this: Apple produces many more technologies that can be bundled into apps almost for free - such as Core Image. Now, Adobe and the monolithic cross-platform companies won't/can't support such things easily without fragmenting their codebase. But the little two-man operation shareware companies can have a field day with them.

So all this tech will filter into the small apps, leaving the big contenders struggling to keep up.

Maybe it won't happen quite like that, but it'd be exciting!


Amorya

[milhous]

what's interesting is that nextstep's interface behavior is also observable in os x. notice how when steve clicks to compose a new e-mail. he'll click the new message icon which will depress the button for a few milliseconds at which point the composition window appears. likewise when in os x selecting a buddy on ichat and then clicking the audioconference button will exhibit the same behavior.

either this is behavior by design or it's been overlooked through the years. either way, it doesn't bother me.

[OmniX]

what's most remarkable to me about that NeXT demonstration is the speed and snappiness of the GUI. Even today on a fast G4 there is often slugishness in switching windows among and between apps.
I remember seeing a similar BeOS presentation back in the mid-90's; even running on relatively modest hardware, they were able to present an extremely responsive interface. As advanced and flexible and mature as OSX has become today, it still seems that responsiveness is an afterthought, a opposed to a design paradigm. I think much of this is in the Finder (which of course is using a lot of older Cabon code (what about that, Apple?), but imperfect responsiveness is evident in other areas as well...

[Chuckit]

If you look at the demos of OS X, it looks blazing fast too. I never used NeXTstep, but I doubt it was that much zippier than OS X (particularly considering the steep hardware requirements). BeOS, in my limited experience, was amazingly speedy on very modest hardware, but that's a 10-year dead OS.

[theolein]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
If you look at the demos of OS X, it looks blazing fast too. I never used NeXTstep, but I doubt it was that much zippier than OS X (particularly considering the steep hardware requirements). BeOS, in my limited experience, was amazingly speedy on very modest hardware, but that's a 10-year dead OS.

I had a NeXT cube, with a 68030 CPU. It was far more repsonsive than OSX is, but the same has also been true of almost every other OS on the market. But, then again, most of them don't do realtime Alpha blending or offer double buffering of windows. It's those two in particular that slow OSX' responsiveness down, and I sometimes think Apple should have made it possible to turn double buffering and alpha blending off for those who don't want it.

Still, it's not that bad and I don't really want to complain. The OS has improved leaps and bounds since 10.0.

[michaelb]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
BeOS, in my limited experience, was amazingly speedy on very modest hardware, but that's a 10-year dead OS.

Yes, due to a few things:

- it was heavily multithreaded, meaning that actions could appear to take place quickly, even though the system might have to chug over them for a while, meaning that the speed it was really one of perception

- the OS was only really used in "demo mode:" very few people actually used it beyond playing around with

- there were no apps, so it was impossible to compare, say, the speed of a Gaussian blur on a 30000x30000 pixel image, simply because there was no software to do such an operation or even load the TIFF in the first place.

(This last comparison would have shown no measurable speed difference: data coming off hard drive and floating point operations taxing the CPU are bottlenecks no matter how optimally an OS is written.)

BeOS had many great aspects but I for one am damn happy Apple didn't buy it instead of Steve's NEXTStep!

[theolein]

Originally posted by Dog Like Nature:
Take a look at Core Data in Tiger.

From what I understand, and was able to read about on Apple's Tiger developer page, CoreData is a controller layer between bindings and the app. Also, it seems CoreData works with either XML, plain text or SQLite. The thing that most impressed me about the demo of databasekit was that they had connectors for big commercial db's like sybase, oracle etc as well as the ability to basically put a quick db app together in interface builder using dbkit and immediately see the results of queries in your app. The demo showed Steve doing transparent SQL joins across db tables with no coding whatsoever. From what I understand CoreData is nothing like that.

And it's a real pity, because that feature alone would have made Macs viable in my last job. We had a $60,000 Navision db, which allows you to do similar things with very little coding. Imagine if you could knock an app togther in 5 minutes which queries your db and produces custom reports for management!

There are other apps which do this, but they either tend to be Microsoft only or based on Java, which is rarely a pleasant experience client side.

[OmniX]

Originally posted by theolein:
I had a NeXT cube, with a 68030 CPU. It was far more repsonsive than OSX is, but the same has also been true of almost every other OS on the market. But, then again, most of them don't do realtime Alpha blending or offer double buffering of windows. It's those two in particular that slow OSX' responsiveness down, and I sometimes think Apple should have made it possible to turn double buffering and alpha blending off for those who don't want it.

Still, it's not that bad and I don't really want to complain. The OS has improved leaps and bounds since 10.0.

i guess i would respond by saying i think (at least for me) responsiveness is more important than prettiness. alpha channels et al. are really nice, but maybe Apple should have waited until the hwardware was up to handling it with no hit to responsiveness before introducing all the flashy eye candy graphics...

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by michaelb:
- there were no apps, so it was impossible to compare, say, the speed of a Gaussian blur on a 30000x30000 pixel image, simply because there was no software to do such an operation or even load the TIFF in the first place.

I don't think anybody was claiming that BeOS somehow made your CPU faster. The question was one of responsiveness and overall speed. Also, while there wasn't much software, there wasn't as huge a dearth as you seem to think. There WERE image editors, for example. Tucows used to have a whole section dedicated to BeOS until they decided that supporting a dead OS was kind of pointless.

[OpenStep]

TIMELINE PLZ PS XOBX HUEG

[himself]

Originally posted by Kool_Aid_Man:
http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/...demo_large.mov

I was watching this and I was amazed...

Dude... that is so cutting edge. And classic.

[milhous]

if only we could get a glimpse of the future, say 10 years from now, to see where jobs want to take os x. i'm still betting we'll see 3D holographic displays. hopefully, the forums will still be around, so we can look back and see if i'm right.

some exciting times to be a mac user i say.