NeXT
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NeXT was a computer company, known to the public for its series of futuristic computers, and to the programming world for its development platforms. NeXT merged with Apple Computer in 1997, in a buyout estimated at $400 million, and no longer does business as a separate entity.
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Prehistory
In 1985 Steve Jobs began to regret hiring John Sculley as the new CEO of Apple and started a brief power struggle to regain control of the company. The board stood behind Sculley, and Jobs was stripped of most of his duties and banished to an office at the back of a distant building on the Apple campus unofficially known as "Siberia". After a few months of being ignored, he left.
A few years later he found direction, when he decided that computers really were his strong suit, and started visiting various universities to look at where the industry was going. He concluded several technologies were going to be the next source of change:
- PostScript, which appeared to be on its way to becoming the standard graphics language
- Mach, which seemed to be re-writing the whole idea of the operating system
- object oriented programming (particularly using the Objective C language), a hot topic in the research world
Later that year he collected these ideas into a product concept that he thought would be the next big thing: an object oriented toolkit, aimed primarily at the academic market, using PostScript as the display technology.
Starting NeXT Inc. with an out-of-pocket investment of $7 million, he hired seven employees (mostly ex-Apple folk from the Apple Macintosh project) and started work with Adobe on what would eventually become Display PostScript.
NeXT Computer
Soon after NeXT, Inc. was formed Apple brought a lawsuit against the company. In an out of court settlement between the two parties, as of January 1986, NeXT was restricted to the workstation market.
By the middle of 1986 it was clear that no existing operating system (OS) was capable of hosting the toolkit, at least not on a personal computer level. Instead of making and selling a toolkit, the business plan changed to making and selling complete machines running it on top of a Unix-like Mach-based OS. The latter would be created by a team led by Avie Tevanian, one of the Mach engineers at Carnegie-Mellon University who had since joined the company. The name of the company was changed to NeXT Computer Inc..
By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory for their first product, the NeXTcube. Stories about Jobs' demands for the factory and the cube are now legend, including the re-painting of the factory several times in order to get just the right shade of grey, and the institution of a series of time consuming changes to the production line so that the cube's expensive magnesium case would have perfect right-angle edges.
Another example of what appears to be hubris can be seen in the selection of a drive mechanism. At the time most machines shipped with hard drives of 20 or 40MB, onto which software (including the OS) was loaded using floppy disks. Even in the late 1980s this was starting to be a real problem, as the user needed to swap huge stacks of floppies to load the ever-growing applications.
This was even more of a problem for NeXT. Even the hard drive didn't solve their problem because the OS was several tens of MB, and the stack of floppies needed to load it would be bigger than the machine. Larger hard drives were available but they were terribly expensive. At the time a usably-large 640MB drive cost $4995.
So instead NeXT would try to do one better, replacing both the hard drive and floppy with a single removable medium. This was in the form of a 256MB magneto-optical device made by Canon. Magneto-optical drives were just coming to market, and the one in the NeXT cube was the first to ship. This was a very risky move considering the equipment didn't even exist during the design stages, and many have claimed it was used primarily due to Jobs' disdain for the floppy.
The Cube was based on a 25MHz Motorola 68030 CPU which had recently come to market, making it competitive with the workstation vendors like Sun Microsystems in terms of performance. There had been some discussion of using the Motorola 88000 RISC chip, but it was considered too risky as they weren't available in quantity at the time.
The 68030 was supported by the 68882 FPU for faster math, the 56001 DSP for multi-media work, and two custom-designed 6-channel DMA channel controllers which allowed much of the I/O to be offloaded from the main processor to boost the speed of common tasks.
The Cube fit into an odd spot in the computer market. It wasn't as fast as the latest generation of Unix workstations becoming available at that time, but cost about half as much. Comparing the Cube with more common Intel based machines was more difficult. The machine shipped with a huge 8MB of RAM (at a time when 4MB cost $1495), the 256MB MO drive, Ethernet, NuBus and a large "megapixel" (1120 x 832 pixel) greyscale display. Meanwhile the typical PC still used the 8088, the 8086 or 286 CPU, had either a 320x200 4-color or 640x480 black and white display, typically had no networking, and may or may not have a hard drive. Could those machines even compare with the NeXT at all?
Prototype Cubes were shown to standing ovations in October 1988, and a slew of magazines reviewed the system - all concentrating on the hardware. By 1989 the machines were in beta form, and they started selling limited numbers to universities with a 0.9 version of the OS installed. (When asked if he was upset that the computer's debut was delayed by several months, Jobs responded, "Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!")
The machines weren't ready for "real" sales until 1990, when they went on the market for $9999. At the time Jobs was concerned that the market was quickly stratifying and the window of opportunity to introduce any new platform was rapidly closing. Just after their release he noted that "this will either be the last machine to make it, or the first to fail".
When it was discovered that the MO drive led to very serious performance problems in real-world use (as well as costing about $100 per disk), NeXT as a whole gained a reputation for failure that would never rub off. Basically the drive itself, while faster than a floppy, was simply not fast enough to run a Unix based OS as its primary medium. But more annoyingly, with the OS loaded onto the disk, simply copying a file from one disk to another was almost impossible, as removing the disk removed the OS along with it. And since most other machines didn't have networking, and instead used floppies for moving data files around (the so-called sneakernet) it was equally difficult to move files to and from the machine.
This problem was rectified by 1991, when a new series of machines with floppy disks and hard drives shipped. A new line then introduced the newer and much faster 68040. The same parts were later put in a new "pizza box" case, creating the NeXTstation, which sold at a lower price point and became fairly popular. In the NeXT community, these machines were commonly referred to as the "NeXT slab".
With all of the attention focused on the hardware, the true gem of the system, NeXTSTEP, was lost in the hype. Nevertheless, NeXT staff frequently wrote articles in major programming magazines such as Dr. Dobb's, showing how some recent article's 3+ pages of code was implemented under NeXTSTEP in perhaps 10 lines.
A number of programs started shipping for the system, including the acclaimed Lotus Improv spreadsheet, and WorldWideWeb the world's first web browser. The system also shipped with a number of "smaller" applications built in that would actually improve the environment considerably without being obvious, things like the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Oxford Quotations, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and the Digital Librarian search engine to access them all.
In all, some 50,000 NeXT machines were sold. This was a tiny segment of the market, and proved Jobs' own words prophetic. Although the lack of success by other new desktop platforms (such as the BeBox) suggests that the age of unique hardware designs was past, it is an open question as to whether the systems would have been more successful had they avoided the performance and price problems by including a hard drive in the first machines, and had found a more cost-effective RAM setup.
One of the machines was used in 1991 by Tim Berners Lee when he created the first web browser and web server. This was the beginning of the world wide web as the world knows it today.
NeXT Software
By 1992 work had already started on a port of the NeXTSTEP operating system to the Intel platform. At the same time work began on replacing the 68000 series CPU's with the new PowerPC, which was starting up as a joint program between Apple, IBM and Motorola.
By late 1993 the Intel port was complete, and was released in the form of NeXTSTEP 3.1 (also referred to as NEXTSTEP 486). Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production. The company renamed once again, this time to NeXT Software Inc.
NeXTSTEP 3.x was later ported to PA-RISC and SPARC based platforms, for a total of four versions:
- NeXTSTEP/NeXT (for NeXT's 68k "black boxes")
- NeXTSTEP/Intel
- NeXTSTEP/PA-RISC
- NeXTSTEP/SPARC
None of the non-NeXT versions appear to have seen much use, overall. However, it did gain popularity at institutions such as the Central Intelligence Agency, First Chicago NBD, Swiss Bank Corporation, and other organizations, for the popularity of the programming model. At the time, the performance of the Intel platforms was quite limited (although not for long), and running it on the other two systems meant replacing their "native" OSes outright. One of the primary reasons for buying one of these platforms was to use specialized software that ran only on the their operating system/cpu combination (as opposed to today, where the most common use is as a server), and running NeXTSTEP meant giving that up.
At this point NeXT's attention turned away from supplying a complete OS, and along with Sun Microsystems they started an effort that would lead to OPENSTEP. This was basically NeXTSTEP without the Mach-based Unix underneath it, using some other OS instead.
The company had now come full circle. Originally intending to sell a toolkit running on top of other OSes, they had ventured into hardware, failed, and returned to selling a toolkit running on top of other OSes. Although OPENSTEP had an enthusiastic audience of developers using it for enterprise software and the like, it never attracted really large numbers of paying customers, and lack of revenue growth was a perennial problem.
New products based on OPENSTEP continued to ship, including OPENSTEP ENTERPRISE a version which ran all OPENSTEP applications and frameworks on Windows NT. The company also launched WebObjects which was one of the first Application Server platforms for building dynamic enterprise level projects. This technology is still in use in a few online stores including Apple's breakthrough iTunes Music Store.
End of NeXT
In 1996 Apple Computer purchased NeXT Software in order to use NeXTSTEP to replace the now outdated Mac OS.
Steve Jobs returned to Apple as a consultant, then as interim CEO (or "iCEO", echoing the name of Apple's new iMac consumer hardware), and finally as CEO. With him, he brought most of the NeXT executives, who replaced their Apple counterparts. Industry commentators summarized this by referring to the acquisition as "NeXT getting paid to buy Apple".
Over the next four years the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the Apple Macintosh PowerPC architecture, and the Intel version and the OpenStep Enterprise toolkit for Windows were kept in sync. The operating systems were codenamed Rhapsody, while the toolkit for development on all platforms gained the moniker Yellow Box. Apple added much of their facilities and tools to Rhapsody, including QuickTime and ColorSync. For backwards compatibility Apple added the Blue Box to the Mac version of Rhapsody to allow existing Mac applications to be run in a self-contained environment.
After two beta releases Rhapsody disappeared, and with it the Intel and Windows versions. The operating system was released as Mac OS X and the OpenStep toolkit was named Cocoa. At the insistence of existing Mac developers, Apple included a cut-down version of the original Macintosh toolbox that allowed existing Mac apps, with some modification, integrated access to the environment without the constraints of Blue Box. This was named Carbon.
However, NeXTSTEP's cross-platform capabilities were kept intact within Mac OS X. Every version was compiled onto both the PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures, even though only the PowerPC version was released. In 2005, Apple announced that starting in 2006, Macintoshes would be based on Intel CPUs instead of PowerPCs, returning the NeXT software back to the platform it was first ported to in 1993.
See also
fr:NeXT it:NeXT ja:NeXT pl:NeXT pt:NeXT
External links
- The Chronology of Workstation Computers (http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/workstat/)
- From NeXT To X (http://mlagazine.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=17)