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.

[ZombiePhysicist]

https://www.makeuseof.com/xerox-invented-the-future-in-1979-then-handed-it-to-a-24-year-old/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other

So this is still incomplete, but this entire "Steve stole xerox" IP lore is wrong. Xerox licensed all access to their technology in exchange for early access to the Apple ipo. Bad deal on a number of levels, but far from the claimed "theft" that's been mythologized.

It also ignores that xerox "stole" all that gui/ethernet etc stuff from Douglas Engelbart from his development at SRI, and many people at Xerox PARC drifted there with "tech secrets" from SRI. Frankly there was so much amazing stuff that Englebart and English made happen, the byte level code still one of which, in someways still, hasn't been equaled.

Anyway, jobs did do interviews saying he was so blown away by the gui he "couldn't see" object oriented programming (still not as cool as small talk in many ways) and Ethernet networking, which he later brought to NeXT.

The other thing in the article and should be teased out of computing history that I've seen scant details on are that the Apple Lisa team claims to have been working on graphical bitmapped tech before those xerox meetings. It would be amazing to get details on what those interfaces looked like.

I remember working on early Apple 2 bitmapped UIs, like koala tablets and their rudimentary UIs.  I wonder if it was more like that?

[Rhetorica]

The other thing in the article and should be teased out of computing history that I've seen scant details on are that the Apple Lisa team claims to have been working on graphical bitmapped tech before those xerox meetings. It would be amazing to get details on what those interfaces looked like.

I remember working on early Apple 2 bitmapped UIs, like koala tablets and their rudimentary UIs.  I wonder if it was more like that?

We might garner some insight from generalizations based on contemporary non-Xerox interfaces: Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C.

To my mind, the major trends are:
- No pull-down menus; on-screen commands are basically hotkey reminders (e.g. F2=SAVE) without the hotkeys, and usually at the bottom of the screen, to approximate the cardboard reminder overlays/inserts often provided with larger software packages (somehow these still survive in nano)—the CADR Lisp machine has vertical middle-click "command palette" style menus but they're still shouty. It isn't until the post-CUA era that putting actions in the root menu falls out of vogue. Notably even today, Windows will wrap overly-long menu bars onto multiple rows, reflecting these roots.
- Clear descent from a split-screen terminal multiplexer: some interfaces may have tiling windows as the default, and little or no window chrome is present. The default application isn't a dialog box, but rather a scrolling text pane, but there's probably no scrollbar or other visual indication of scroll progress.
- Black instead of white as the default background color; the switch to "paper-style" white backgrounds is the quintessential Xerox-ism and is present on the Alto long before the Star—this is obviously another terminal-ism, but it's such an obvious-yet-shallow delineation that it bears a separate mention.

[ZombiePhysicist]

https://computerhistory.org/blog/inside-next/

A lot of stories here. Thanks @protocol7. Some on the IBM licensing, but the story they tell is incomplete. Still good.

[ZombiePhysicist]

There is no Doug Engelbart nor SRI without Burroughs. There is no Unix without Burroughs. No IBM. No Microsoft. No Apple without Burroughs. —Bob Burrough
https://x.com/bob_burrough/status/2083083054529302599?s=20

Interesting that Burroughs was predecessor to so much. The "small...less than 20lbs box" B210 around the middle of the video (~16:10 marker), not quite cube like, was for nasa but could have been an early desktop pc IF Burroughs just thought of the market.

A lot of this video shows techniques in 1963 that Steve Jobs would show in the next "machine that makes the machine: video (eg the mechanized solder bath and robotized computer assembly portions of the videos!):

Some more interesting history discussion here:
https://x.com/bob_burrough/status/1115144057670356992?s=61

[Rhetorica]

Burroughs generally doesn't get enough credit—which I'm sure is the first thing any Burroughs enthusiast would tell you. Another key innovation they put forward was the first high-level-only CPU architecture: before the Lisp machines, before the iAPX 432, the B5000 series was programmed directly in ALGOL. It had tagged memory and a number of other innovations that would later lead to the success of the "mini-fridge" era of 80s workstations.

Closer to home, I've uploaded the NeXT Merger documents from the Neue Horizontes disc. These were written (mostly) by Gil Amelio's team in January 1997, and are one of the few clear first-party sources we have of what Apple thought it was going to be doing with NeXT. It provides an interesting primary text for the third-party commentary on the Merger hosted by objectfarm.org, which has always been something of an exegesis: it refers to recent events but doesn't quite do all the work it could be doing to lay out the context. I previously reformatted these articles for a certain other forum, but alas, that copy is long gone. So here's to making that information visible to the Internet again!