NeXT

From Free net encyclopedia

NeXT was a computer company, known to the public for its futuristic black hardware, and to programmers for its outstanding object-oriented development platform. NeXT merged with Apple Computer on December 20, 1996, and its software was the foundation for Mac OS X. NeXT was headquartered in Redwood City, California.

1 Prehistory
2 NeXT Computer
3 NeXT Software
4 End of NeXT
5 See also
6 External links

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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 months 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, Jobs hired seven employees (mostly ex-Apple employees from the Apple Macintosh project) and started work with Adobe on what would eventually become Display PostScript. The first major source of venture capital was Ross Perot (who also ran for President of the United States in 1992 and 1996), who invested $US 20 million in 1987 for 16% of NeXT's stock.

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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 hardware division was led by Rich Page, an Apple veteran who had designed the Lisa. The name of the company was changed to NeXT Computer Inc..

By 1987 NeXT finished construction of a completely automated factory in Fremont 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 gray, 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 40 MB, 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 640 MB drive cost US$5000.

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 256 MB 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 25 MHz 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 mathematical performance, 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 was an odd fit 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 8 MB of RAM (at a time when 4 MB cost US$1500), the 256 MB MO drive, Ethernet, NuBus and a large "megapixel" (1120 x 832 pixel) greyscale display. Meanwhile the typical PC shipped with 640 KB of RAM, 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 often did not have a hard drive.

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 US$9,999. 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 US$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 as the primary medium for a Unix-based OS. 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. Image:NeXTstation.jpg

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, and Mathematica. The system also shipped with a number of "smaller" applications built in that would actually improve the environment considerably without being obvious, such as 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.

Image:First Web Server.jpg

A NeXTcube 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.

In the early 1990s, John Carmack used a NeXTcube to build two of his pioneering games: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

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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 automated factory in Fremont was sold to Canon. 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, NeXTSTEP 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 NeXTSTEP 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 their OS/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 that 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, such as Apple's breakthrough iTunes Music Store.

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End of NeXT

On December 20, 1996 Apple Computer announced its agreement to purchase NeXT Software for about $400 million, mostly in cash. The main purpose of the acquisition was to use NeXTSTEP as the foundation to replace the then outdated Mac OS. This option was preferred to either pursuing in-house Copland efforts or purchasing BeOS.

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. He brought with him 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 for Intel disappeared and the PowerPC version became Mac OS X Server 1.0. Two years later, a consumer version was released as Mac OS X 10.0. The server version was brought in sync soon after. The OpenStep toolkit was renamed from Yellow Box to Cocoa. Rhapsody's Blue Box became "classic". At the insistence of existing Mac developers, Apple included an updated 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. Many of the interface features from NeXTSTEP were carried over into Mac OS X, including the Dock, the Services menu, the Finder's 'browser' view, the extremely sophisticated text system (NSText) and system-wide selectors for fonts and colors.

NeXTSTEP's processor-independent capabilities were kept intact within Mac OS X. Every version was secretly compiled onto both the PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures, even though only PowerPC versions were released except for Darwin, in which both was released. On June 6, 2005, Apple publicly announced that starting in 2006, Macs would be based on Intel CPUs instead of PowerPCs, returning the NeXT software back to the platform to which it was ported in 1993. On January 10, 2006, Apple released an Intel-native version of Mac OS X along with the Intel Core Duo-based iMac and MacBook Pro. On February 28th Apple announced that it was replacing the PowerPC based Mac Mini with a Mac Mini running on Intel Core Solo and Core Duo processors.

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