I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole; one would hope this was where we were going as we got better at architecting software (as individuals, as a field), but disappointingly in retrospect it appears as a kind of high-point, after which we continued to descend into ball-and-twine mediocrity. For Reasons economic and and social that I think people could argue about a lot, but we don't because in part because as a field we don't seem to even agree on what excellence in software architecture/design even means anymore.
But what I want to talk about instead is:
> Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to shame.
I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?).
But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to shame". ActiveRecord is very similar to EOF in design, by 2020 nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features.
Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is mostly as good as EOF haha (and doesn't have anything of note that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark!
AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of it's designers had experience with EOF.
As a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) who started a company that did custom NeXT development, I both strongly agree and strongly disagree.
The technology really was great. Their understanding of object orientation was superior. The developer tools were wonderful. The user experience was generally a delight. We could develop custom software in a fraction of the time of people using the tools of the day. NeXT had a true vision of the future.
However, what they didn't have was much understanding of economics. The only reason that NeXT wasn't a complete commercial failure was that Apple's board wanted Steve Jobs back. If not, Apple might instead have bought out Be. And if Apple had succeeded in developing their own next-gen OS, both NeXT and Be might be minor footnotes these days. Even prior to the deus ex machina buyout, NeXT was on a slow and steady path to failure. They'd gone from an integrated hardware vendor to an OS-on-other-hardware vendor to a dev-tools-on-other-OSes vendor, and it's not clear that would have worked either. Once the acquisition was announced, they promised to take care of the people who had stuck with them and then did jack.
I took a few lessons away from my time with NeXT. 1) Just because I thought something was technically superior didn't mean it was commercially viable. 2) Being too far ahead of the market is worse than being behind it. 3) Never trust a "visionary leader" to look out for you, no matter what he says. He's in it for himself and the vision; the little people are expendable.
But you're definitely right that it made using other stuff painful. I stopped doing GUI development altogether rather than shift to Windows, which was incomparably awful by comparison.
NeXT was also mostly ahead of the market on the software side. Their machines were a very tough sell compared to the price and performance of other UNIX workstations of the time (which is why I know SunOS and not NeXTStep).
All the vision and all the software quality in the world won't make you competitive in the 90s UNIX workstation market if your machines are underpowered, and we were used to garbage software anyway. Chasing the "personal workstation"/PC market also would never work. DOS/Windows was far too strong and the Macintosh deep in a niche. It's very unfortunate.
NeXT failed on the hardware cost side because they wanted to be a personal computer and not a workstation. They were priced for neither market.
I looked very seriously at Unix machines around the time NeXT came out, having been converted to that religion in college. NeXT started at around US$6500, and that was with the optical disk only. The equivalent-ish Sun box (Sun 3/80) started at around US$15k with disk as I recall and went up in price really fast if you wanted more memory/disk/etc. About the cost of a new Honda Accord at the time. And the Sparcstations were out at much higher performance (and price...I seem to recall around US$22k for a usable config).
On the other hand, you could get a nicely decked out 386/33 for maybe half the cost of the NeXT, or a 486 for a grand or so more. And it ran tons of software, even if it was garbage. Even Unix.
I don't think you are disagreeing with anything I said, let alone strongly -- I didn't say anything about economics!
Thanks for sharing though!
I suppose it may be that technical excellence has never been economically viable, and NeXT survived as long as it did only by fluke.
> technical excellence has never been economically viable
I think Google search would like to have a word with you.
I suppose it may be that technical excellence
has never been economically viable
1. It's generally orthogonal to economic viability
2. ...unless you have such a lack of technical excellence that it actively sinks the company because you can't execute at all
Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate a bit why GUI development for NeXT was (and probably is) superior comparing to Windows GUI development (even if we include Borland's effort).
At the time of NeXTâs heyday in the early â90s, most GUI programming was textual. Youâd call add(button) and button.text = âHello Worldâ to build up your GUI, and have to wire up the events from your button to take specific actions. Quite a lot of GUI programming is still like this, even now.
What NeXT brought was a GUI editor that allowed you to drag a button from a palette and onto a window (or view). You could then change the text on the button by double clicking on it and renaming the default text. You also got to determine where and how large the button was in relation to the rest of the window.
Most GUI builders could do this, so what was special about Interface Builder?
Two things stood out. First, you could specify how the button reacted to window resizing. There was a âsprings and strutsâ layout mechanism that allowed you to say which parts were fixed offsets and which were variable. You could also say if the button would resize, and if so, in the X or Y or both directions.
The second thing was the ability to connect the button to an action. By Ctrl clicking and dragging, you could wire up the default action to a âselectorâ â in effect, a virtual method call, on the owner of the button. This owner would be populated at startup, typically the application (controller). So you could have your code with the responder and another team build the UI, and they would join together at runtime.
You could also use properties generated by code as well - you could connect the buttonâs field to an objectâs property (aka an outlet) so that changing the code changed the UI.
The fact that you could drag and drop connections from UI to code, and from code to UI, as well as building a responsive UI, was really what stood out.
This still lives on in Xcode today; IB and PB begat Xcode and IB which begat Xcode. The ânibâ format - Next Interface Builder - was a binary format file containing the descriptive state of the Ui and the wiring requirements, which was renamed âxibâ when XML became all the rage is the same thing. The fact that IB has been subsumed into Xcode still hides the fact that is whatâs happening under the covers.
I think itâs important to realise that this was in an age when Windows 3.1 was all the rage, and we had only just got out of 256 colour VGA while Next station had 16 million.
Nowadays with everyone doing MVC programming with the web, it doesnât seem so important. But then there was a time when no one wrote unit tests because it was seen as pointless; but it is from these seeds that ideas become mainstream.
> I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole [...]
The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.
I couldn't say how similar a 2020 MacOS bootlog is at this point to anything that was in NeXT, and wouldn't assume that whatever you're seeing now that you find inelegant was there in NeXTStep 20 years ago or longer. I mean, maybe, but I wouldn't just assume it and judge NeXT for it. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
In any event, the boot log is not something I had occasion to pay attention to in NeXTStep, I couldn't speak to it.
NeXTStep/OpenStep had a great development environment and was full of innovation but even in the '90s it had old BSD components that were rarely updated and it really wasn't a great unix. Mac OS X has followed that pattern. Also Mach was inherently slow so running OpenStep on x86 hardware was slower than Linux or Windows - in Mac OS X they finally gave up on a pure microkernel and flattened the kernel to reduce the overhead of message passing through the BSD personality layer to Mach. But folks running OpenStep were running it for the RAD development tools and EOF that let you quickly design a UI with a very usable ORM that allowed you to take a desktop app and turn it into a webapp via WebObjects seamlessly. They complained about the *nix layer even then, but the unix layer was adequate and you could compile newer versions of tools you needed then as now.
After Apple bought NeXT, they upgraded the Mach component from 2.5 to 3.0 (from Appleâs MkLinux project). But it was always a hybrid kernel in both NEXTSTEP and macOS.
âMac OSâ pre-âXâ (9.x and prior) or âmacOSâ post-âXâ (11.x and newer)?
They obviously don't mean pre-x as that would have no bearing on NeXT. Probably just collqually using the current name to mean mac os(x) >= 10.0
Personal experience: Around 2005 I was looking for a platform for a new web app, after some years out of development but having worked extensively with NeXTstep and EOF in the 90s.
After watching DHH's video and reading the Rails book, it reminded me so much of my previous experience with NeXT technology that I had no other choice but to go with Rails.
The dynamism of Ruby had a lot in common with ObjC's runtime. And reading about ActiveRecord at that time I also had the feeling that its authors had worked with EOF before.
All in all, NeXT built great stuff. I still own a NeXTstation Color that I got in 1992 (one of these days I should try to turn it on again). And it's a testament to the quality of that software that some pieces that I'm still running today, like Apple Mail, trace back almost directly to tools I started using back then (NeXTMail).
Yep, people don't often comment on how similar ruby and ObjC are, in fundamentals.
I think it's because both of them were so influenced by smalltalk, more than ObjC influencing ruby necessarily. But not sure.
But I'm still very curious if AR's creators knew EOF, yeah. I haven't found DHH mentioning it; not sure if there might be forgotten other person/people central to original AR architecture.
WebObjects itself was nice in many many ways (I think it's encapsulation of form handling is far better than anything anyone's managed in Rails)... but made a fundamental mistake in trying to keep a fundamentally stateful architecture and apply it to the web by putting what was effectively an opaque state ID in every single URL. This was a basically bad design for the web (although also provided for forementioned good encapsulation of form handling. :) ).
But yeah, the sense I get in my career is that we spend a lot of time trying to reinvent something that already existed, and getting close to being as good as it... then collectively moving on to the next language/platform and doing it again. With not a lot of progress. Up to and through the 90s, it seemed like there was actual progress in software design and architecture at the high-level, the level of affordances for developers to efficiently create reliable maintainable software, but it seems to me have stalled -- perhaps in favor of huge advances in more low-level stuff, better/different languages/language paradigms, etc.
And I'm upset I didn't get an opportunity to properly work with WebObjects. WebObjects with Swift would revolutionize the web - IMHO - it was gone too soon.
Seems like some demos around 2019 are still available: http://www.alwaysrightinstitute.com/wo-intro/
I coded fulltime in WebObjects from 2006-2008 making webApps in the health care industry.
During my Software Engineering degree I learned the difference between a Library and a Framework, but it wasn't until actually using the WebObjects Framework that the light bulb went off in my head. It was a pleasure to work with, and clearly very, VERY well thought out.
EOF was great, and every time I made a new NSArray() it brought a smile to my face.
When I was an intern at Apple, I somehow finagled my way into some long-time managerâs backyard cookout. A lot of Apple old-timers were there, including Blaine. Really neat guy and a great raconteur. Thatâs when I realized engineers of that era were cut from a different cloth.
Many of that era are/were formally educated as electrical engineers.
Yep, you really needed to know the intimate inner workings of the CPU and each digital chip from the keyboard input to the display output to produce code that would make a quality product.
It took years of experience that you could only gain through hands-on work, to know how to debug hardware that's why gray-beards are so valued in hardware vs in software where people talk of ageism.
When your hardware/low level software doesn't perform as expected you can't google/stack overflow yourself out of the problem, you need to grab the datasheets, the schematics, an oscilloscope, a soldering iron, hunch over patiently and devise a way to debug the issue out as no one else can help you.
Hardware engineering is now just as challenging as it was back then but due to the commodization of hardware along with the rise of China and the downfall of high-tech giants like IBM, Philips, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Nortel, Ericsson, etc most hardware jobs disappeared or moved overseas and pay went significantly downhill compared to software engineering(at least in Europe).
You find a lot of these guys in the space industry.
Iâd dare to say that there were educated as engineers.
Majority of software engineering courses doesnât really teach you how to be an engineer. Itâs much closer to trade school than proper engineering.
Trade school? What kind of college did you attend? Most CS curriculums I've seen are full of math (science), computer science (compilers, algorithms, etc) and engineering (computer architecture, etc).
It's a mixture of science and engineering, leaning towards the science. Far far away from a trade school which would teach you practical skills (java, git, web development) and try to get you into the labor force ASAP
Could you elaborate on what it means to you to be "educated as engineers"? What qualities or learnings are stressed in that model that you think current CS education misses?
Yep, ain't no better Software Engineer than an Electronics Engineer. This is particularly true for systems programming.
Care to elaborate?
One of my first experiences with Unix was getting an angry email from Steve Jobs.
He had a default message in the NeXT mail client back in the early '90's. I for some reason felt it was a good idea to send him an email and enable 'return receipt'. He replied, fuming at the violation of his privacy and never answered my question.
Edit: The internet never forgets, the default email in question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4
He was mad at you because he didn't like his software made by the company he owned?
That is perfectly, perfectly believable. He was never interested in being accountable to others. As Steve Wozniak said, "He had very, very, very negative sides and he didn't seem to care what other people felt."
Actually a lot of success people are like that. For successful careers you got to be comfortable stepping on others' toes and persuading others to do things in your way. Human nature. Most of us are just herds who secretly want to be led by a strong, charismatic leader.
ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
I love reading stories about Steve Jobs at NeXT. He had been fired from Apple and wasn't on the winning team but he was still fighting to build great products. I know he's a controversial figure but he did great things.
Personally I find that Steve at NeXT is far more relatable than post iPhone Steve.
Here is a rare instance of Steve Jobs actually backing down from an argument... with Paul Rand, over the specific shade of yellow used on the letter 'e' in the NeXT logo: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056684/remembering-the-design-l...
Heard a lot of story and this about him talk to the story guy about his wife passing away. Canât imagine it happened in Steve I. It is cruel to say the best thing happen to Beethoven is his deaf. And Steve his being fired. But life service you lemon and sometimes it is the good thing. Less arrogance as he was quoted to say.
Hello gpt3
Probably just not English-as-a-first-language. GPT3 will typically have great grammar/spelling but nonsense meaning, but if you allow for slightly odd or near-correct word choice, the gp comment is pretty clear.
Idk, could be but given some anti-mainland posts I've seen from them I lean towards non-native speaker from HK
Wait this is some AI?
Wow, 81 comments and not one mention yet of the NeXTcube. That perfect 305mm x 305mm x 305mm (1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot) magnesium cube was hell to produce, but gorgeous to look at. And, it was the machine that the original web server ran on at CERN. [0]
I've kind of always wanted one of them, but I've also kind of wondered if I'd be disappointed by it, if I got one. After all, it only ran at 25mhz.
What I'd really like to do is get an empty case and put a modern PC inside it. That would be awesome. You'd probably have to gut the case and put in new mounting hardware, but a mini-ATX or micro-ATX board would definitely fit in there. There should be room for drive rails and a PSU, but I wonder if ventilation would be a problem.
Perhaps the most fitting thing to stuff in there would be a Mac, or, maybe, a Hackintosh.
---
[0]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-comput...
Iâm not a fan of taking old computers and âharvestingâ their cases. People used to do this a lot with the original Macintosh models. Often they would turn them into aquariums. Now all those computers are collectorsâ items, and many of them have been butchered. The original NeXT computers are much more rare than those Macintoshes. In my opinion they deserve to be preserved for history.
That's a good thought. I wonder if such a case mod as I propose could be done non-destructively. That is, if you were done with the modern PC inside, could you easily re-convert it back to a NeXTcube? I have no real idea, since I've never seen inside of one. :/
Software guy going hardware here, throwing down on machining hardware here in China next week. Funnily enough, I actually saw magnesium being machined for the first time on Monday: a part for a medical device. The machinist said it requires different coolant (white in his case) but sources online say you can go dry as well. You also need different fire suppression systems in order to safely machine it, as the chips may burn from friction on blunt tools or excessive feed rates. I wondered why bother, so I just looked it up, assuming in the NeXTcube case it was aesthetics. It does not match aluminium in terms of its thermal conductivity, but allegedly may be one-third lighter, more dent-resistant, more easily machinable, and better able to shield electromagnetic radiation and dampen vibrations. Seems a lot to pay for some nominal benefits unless specialist applications demand it. PS. Never saw a NeXTcube except in a museum maybe, but earned some of my first Unix software money programming embedded cryptographic applications for the abortive Cobalt Qube and Raq ecosystem, incidentally the only MIPS target I've ever written for, but no doubt NeXTcube-inspired.
As far as I know, Wikipedia is wrong and it was not a perfect cube.
cube: 305 mm x 305 mm x 315 mm
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co82323...
It was called the NeXT Computer. Only later models were called the Cube.
This seems kind of pedantic, since the "NeXT Computer" and the "Cube" where both cubes. They needed to change the name after the slab (NeXTstation) was released.
Theyâre different models I think. The slower one is the Computer and then later theyâre Cube with a faster chip.
Would Steve Jobsâ have been tolerated these days, in a post #MeToo era?
Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today?
(Assuming he didnât mellow or adapt with age.)
These people still exist. They run some of the major tech companies that produce products tech people love.
The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO.
Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.
I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.
The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.
How'd you like Amazon?
I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability Engineering.
She has since moved on from that.
Abusive/abrasive bosses are still celebrated today. Jeff Bezos runs a company where employees urinate in bottles because they aren't given time for a bathroom break and asks employees in meetings "why are you wasting my life". Tim Bray has some stories to tell about AWS too. Elon Musk abuses his employees, his shareholders, his companies, and everyone else on Twitter nearly every time he opens his mouth. It's almost cheating to mention Elizabeth Holmes. Same with Travis Kalanick.
I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.
It is interesting to note though that despite all his faults Jobs had very long, sometimes decades long, extremely fruitful work relationships. Woz, Andy Herztfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive... etc. And at Pixar too. Such high caliber people wouldn't stay around if it was so terrible or there was no redeeming quality.
The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground?
Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?
> Assuming he didnât mellow or adapt with age.
He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative elementâa way to construct Jobs's personal archâand I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy.
And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute.
Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat.
1: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
> The Web was happeninâ (invented as you may recall on a NeXT workstation) and we lost
This is true but not entirely.
I have recently for no productive reason become interested in computers built by different nations early in in the computer revolutions.
There was so much competition, so many ideas, so many opperunties.
Anyways I live in Norway now and Norway had a company called Norsk Data that I had never heard of until about a year ago.
They designed their own hardware, and operating system. For a while they made a "super computer"
Some highlights: The NORD-5, the world's first 32-bit minicomputer - beating the VAX, often claimed to be first - by 6 years
ND-570/CX, was at the time it was released 32-bit supermini ads i 1983, 7.1 Whetstone MIPS
Their greatest claim to fame aside from what listed above but closely related, they delivered the computers for the CERN colder back when that was starting up.
They also delivered computers to help create F16 flight simulators.
For a short period of time Norway had best in class computers. I had no idea.
To the relevant part, sorry about the long wait
Norsk Data claims: " The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN.[4] They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML. "
It is partially backed up by https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=19....
I have only seen ND machines in the museum and on the web. I wasn't around at the time so its based on Norwegian documents for the most part.
I do know that there were Nord server used in the Norwegian military up until at least 1995. The ginormous task of creating the replacement system took a very very long time
The very early origins of Norsk Data was at FFI, a defence research agency. (Kinda like (D)Arpa)
Oh that brings back some memories. An old manager of mine at Apple had moved into Apple from NeXT with the WebObjects team. We had a lot of black hardware and tons of NeXT docs, etc. and ran the Austin corp NetInfo server. He worked with Jobs for WebObjects demo/keynotes. He told some stories about Jobs, mostly about things he would throw when demos went badly.
I still have a lot of NeXT swag that was eventually given away and have a color turbo slab gathering dust.
What swag do you have? I'm working on a private collection museum to showcase NeXT to Mac OS X via Rhapsody...
I'll try to follow up this eve. I have a S3 Project Team magic 8 ball for my work on the Mac OS X Server 1.0 release (sadly the fluid somehow leaked/dried, but I still cherish it), a lot of magazines and developer docs, and I think some stickers as well as other branded materials.
Thank you. Email is my username here at hey.com if you want to do that instead :)
Get a daily email with the the top stories from Hacker News. No spam, unsubscribe at any time.