NeXT history and folklore thread (lore, myths, stories, tales)

[ZombiePhysicist]

Inspired by another thread I started long ago on another site, I thought it would be great to to start a thread on NeXT history and folklore.

We're an ever sharing group of enthusiasts and once we're all gone only bad takes and wrong history will be left about NeXT like the issacson book.

I'd love to get folklore about the company a bit like Andy hertzfeld's `folklore site that has so many first and 2nd hand tales about the Mac's early days.

NeXT in many ways is more important and interesting. Not only did doom, the www and modern operating systems like macOS iOS come directly from next step, in many ways it was the most important development time for Steve.

In some ways the next years for Steve are like the missing years for Jesus where we have no idea how both grew to become the ment they were. With Steve he went from a raging toddler to a savvy and strategic business man. it is an important history that I hope will be shared and not forgotten.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/steve-jobs-unveiled-the-next-computer-on-this-day-in-1988-the-cube-would-be-used-to-develop-the-www-doom-and-quake

[ZombiePhysicist]

A great bit of NeXT history archeology in this separate thread that one of NeXTs biggest customers (of hardened "tempest" versions of hardware) was the NSA by our great @Rhetorica :

https://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php?msg=252

[ZombiePhysicist]

Here is some interesting history on the microsecond of how NeXT ran on AIX:

https://www.osnews.com/story/29649/the-curious-case-of-nextstep-on-aix/

http://ps-2.kev009.com/AIX-support-faxes/references/aixtips.txt

This history is super interesting. Short TLDR version is Steve Jobs jedi mind tricked IBM into licensing NeXTstep 1.0 for IBM systems early on. The agreement Steve did not give IBM licenses to upgrades, which they did not appreciate/understand when they entered the agreement. By the time IBM got NeXTstep going on their machines, NeXTstep 2.0 was out. IBM tried to get Steve to let them use the new version, but Steve said, pay me 1zillion dollars or something crazy, and IBM said get bent and gave up on it.

[jeffburg]

When I got my black hardware I got it from an engineer that worked at NeXT, then Apple, then Google lol. He was a true glory days of Silicon Valley engineer guy. I still email him occasionally. I should really ask him if he would be willing to share some of his stories from working at NeXT.

[ZombiePhysicist]

Dooo itttt! 

[ZombiePhysicist]

A great find of multiple interviews with ex-NeXT people by @jeffburg  from this thread:

https://nextcommunity.net/forums/index.php?topic=55.0

[ZombiePhysicist]

https://fortune.com/article/how-steve-jobs-linked-up-with-ibm/

The above is an article from forbes by @Protocol 7 share, about NeXT in general circa 1989 but somewhat around the IBM licensing of NeXTSTEP. It was shared in the discord <https://discord.com/channels/1407498171453538366/1407498172502380660/1519697157295177740> group, but I think worthy of posterity here for the community too!

The NeXT story is soap opera worthy. The "betrayal" of IBM is greek/Shakespearean in it f'd IBM but may have ultimately f'd NeXT itself even more in the contract terms, but set NeXT up as the perfect "poison pill" to take over apple. So its pettiness ended up serving NeXT well. Weird.

The saga is epic and sadly way beyond hollywood's ability to tell a tale. None of the steve jobs movies do well by the lore and myth and crazier-than-life reality of the jobs sagas.

By the "betrayal" what I'm getting at is that when IBM licensed NeXTSTEP they were tinkering with it to not keep it 'whole' and burried in the contract terms was that their license was limited to 1.0 of NeXTSTEP. Then, as NeXT was bleeding money, Steve wanted to pump IBM for more money for 2.0, and when IBM balked, NeXT said well youre stuck on 1.0 per the buried terms, and that helped the IBM project to die.

Weirdly, years later (when NeXT was somewhat more desperate to find its place and survive), NeXT itself 'bastardized' a perfect OPENSTEP on top of Microsoft Windows, which worked disturbingly well to let you run NeXT apps that would look and run native in Windows with tailored underlying NeXT libraries layer on windows.

Endless ironies.