Are Modern Macs Really NeXTSTEP in Disguise?
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I hope you have your bits-and-bytes diggin' gloves on, because it's time for operating system archaeology!
After playing around with Apple Rhapsody on my Toshiba Libretto, I started to really curious about the origins of Mac OS X and modern macOS. Is there anything in modern macOS left behind from the old days of Steve Jobs' NeXTSTEP?
Lets install NeXTSTEP on an old Compaq Presario and Apple Rhapsody on a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, compare them to Mac OS X and macOS Big Sur, and find out!
Thanks Ken from @ComputerClan for those glorious shots of your NeXT Cube, and Hypertalking ( / hypertalking ) for all the cool pictures of your NeXT software and hardware collection!
🍎 You can download my OPENSTEP disk image here (fifth download): macintoshgarden.org/apps/open...
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#Apple #NeXTSTEP #ComputerHistory - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Some cool developer history here: macOS and iOS developers today are fairly familiar with the NS prefix on NSString, NSArray, NSView, NSWindow, etc., which-shocker-stands for “NextStep”, but the prefix wasn’t always NS! The original Foundation and ApplicationKit frameworks for NeXTSTEP used the NX prefix for “NeXt”. It wasn’t until NeXT spun off the OpenSTEP platform that the prefix was changed to NS. ...mostly. If you look deep into some of the headers and API docs you can actually still find the NX prefix used in modern macOS!
Oh yeah, seeing this when working on an iPhone app years ago is what first led me down the rabbit hole!
Well, NextStep, with its deeply object-oriented implementation, used Objective C - which was the more performant way of getting something that resembled Xerox Parc's Smalltalk object-oriented language (emphasis of messages passed to objects). And so Objective C remained the predominate language for programming MacOSX and iOS - until the introduction of Apple's language, Swift. Definitely strong connective tissue on the software side of things.
Wasn't that NeXT Sun?
Didn't realize it was NX originally! Learn something every day! :)
With Apple moving to Swift from Objective-C and updating the APIs I don’t think it will be long before all NS prefixes go like NX, all be UI some with none tho what ever happens underneath it’s still NeXTSTEP
This is a bit old but the spinning color wheel at 19:10 is not a beachball. It is supposed to be the rotating optical disk on the first Next Machine. (Back then, the rewritable optical media was very slow and the spinning optical disk showed to the user that the OS was still reading from disk).
holy crap! so cool to know
Mac OS X absolutely was Nextstep made to look like a Mac OS.
NextStep with some Apple rebranding :-)
@@TheSulross I mean they definitely did change some things and add things but it’s definitely Nextstep underneath
"Look like" ... well, I would say "made to feel like" ... NeXTstep had some atrocious UX decisions, and by acquiring all the UX expertise from Apple, a whole bunch of NeXT usability issues were resolved. They also invested greatly in rewriting and improving performance ... Quartz was way faster than Display PostScript, NeXT's movie player was barely usable and QuickTime was industry leading ... but agreed, at its core there was more NeXT in there than Apple, especially once you strip away Apple backwards compatibility like CFM support and Carbon.
Fun fact about BreakOut, it was actually designed by Steve Wozniak while he was working at Atari! So I like to think its inclusion was a nod to another important Steve who was also no longer with Apple at that point.
ooohh That's why the Stickies app looks like a 90's software and feel out of place on Big Sur, good to know
Textedit is pretty much the same as well, IIRC (I'm just a few minutes into the video so far).
@@RamLaska I find TextEdit is very useful as a lightweight GUI plaintext editor.
@@marz6499 it launches super fast, and that’s its main advantage compared to Pages, which has come free on all Macs for at least a decade. For lightweight GUI text editors, I think AbiWord is a lot better than TextEdit.
@@marz6499 indeed. The UI is simple enough that the title bar adapts and it feels fine. Stickies, with its custom skinny window chrome, not so much lol
You don't know how to use them
The dock in NeXTSTEP could be on the right, left or bottom just like in MacOS; it’s just a preference. Also, notice the Services menu survives although no one really knows how to use it despite its power. Also note the entire concept of “The Browser” which was unique to NeXTSTEP and became the basic (and innovative) navigation for the original iPod. Steve would love to demo dragging and image of Mickey Mouse into a new Mail message to show off the power of Display Postscript... one of the most powerful innovations in NeXTSTEP and a huge reason why the UI looks so buttery smooth.
I think we need to think like the twin (but different) more like the same OS
This story is pretty cool. Tbh what's the funniest part? Well, there are a lot! 1) Machintosh (Mac is just a short version so technically they are still Macintosh) was a hippie so this is literally a hippie concept 2) this is the last Unix commercial and one of the two last BSD (PlayStation is FreeBSD and MacOS is 70% FreeBSD) 3) most of people think MacOS is literally the purest Unix porn 4) one of the greatest Gnu Linux file manager, Nautilus, is created by Andy Hertzfeld who wrote the MacOS's one.
What is the services menu?
I was involuntarily preparing for rock-paper-scissors as a Pavlov reaction to the way you rock your hand.
Yeah the gesturing is a little excessive and distracting
scissors, best 2 out of 3 tattoo arm guy?
@@MattDaddyPrime It's like watching Thing from the Addams Family show you computer software.
He's like the Chris Fixx for computers.
12:06 NeXT's logo was created by Paul Rand -- who also did IBM, Westinghouse, Cummins, and Enron.
Enron: the biggest scam ever
He also did the ABC logo
He sure does love crooked Es
Rhapsody was actually the original NeXTStep modified to look like Mac OS 9 with a special layer called Yellow Box which allowed NeXT to make calls into Mac OS 9 API for certain thing such as drawing and menus - which was how Rhapsody was able to draw a Mac OS 9-like UI on top of NeXTStep.
I worked at a Mac SCSI card mfg. in 1999 and when I saw the first release of Rhapsody with no desktop disk icons I emailed Steve and told him Apple was making a big mistake not putting disks on the desktop. “Boy are you wrong.” he replied. He later changed his mind for Mac OS X 10.0.
I love that app bundles are still basically the same thing throughout all iterations.
And, of course, current macOS actually still has the .app extension, but is just hidden by default.
Yeah, it's technically a folder and not an archive which was surprising decision for me
@@r033cx why should it be archive? To spend your time decrypting each time you run it?
As I recall it was also hidden by default in NeXTSTEP. Not sure why he didn’t have it configured that way.
@@r033cx it’s a weird quirk, but it makes exploring the contents for a program’s resources trivial in the command line, and relatively easy in the GUI file browser too. That matters less to end users but can be very handy for developers and tinkerers. Dependencies and linked files are eliminated
One thing that would have been cool to show in Rhapsody is how you can "rip" the menus off, which makes them feel similar to the ones in OpenStep. Basically, when you click to select a menu, just keep pulling it down and it will tear off...
They also tore out in the Pre-DP3 versions of Darwin/OS X. After Rhapsody but before Aqua.
@@themacintoshnerd Nice there's at least one OS that has implemented this. 😀
Tear-off menus are handy when using the same menu option repeatedly when doing something, or as a reminder to turn off a toggleable option in that menu when you're done with it. I got used to them in Second Life viewers (virtual world clients), and kinda wish more OSes or programs had them.
@@AaronOfMpls would be so nice for stuff like lightroom and ms office
Huh! I never realized os x server was Rhapsody underneath. Now this is edutainment. Nice.
If it wasn't that obvious... They all use the .app extension for their software.
@@TheNews1990 Nice call. I had no memory of it. It’s funny because I never messed with that release until I had to migrate some data and apps from an older G3 to another mac server. And , at that time, my OS X knowledge was pretty scant as I was doing Microsoft servers and DBA stuff for so long. Had to learn so much, including VMS and Oracle Pl/SQL for that gig.
@@JapanPop There was really only a name change and about-screen change from Rhapsody DR2 to Mac OS X Server 1.0. When logged in, it's hard to see much difference.
Great video. I still use my NeXTStation Turbo running NeXTStep 3.3 for focused writing. It's from 1992 and is so modern.
Thats awesome dude, NeXT hardware is so beautiful and timeless looking.
This really brought back some memories. I have been using Macs for over 30 years. When OpenStep 4.2 came out, I told a lot of my Windows using friends to grab a copy. I said that I wouldn't be surprised if Apple bought it because of the problems they were having with Copeland. BeOS wasn't going to cut it, in my eyes. In 96, I told them that Apple would rebound if NeXT merged since it meant Jobs would be back at Apple. They laughed. My favorite thing to do nowadays is to refer to my phone as my NeXTPhone. People just look at me and shake their heads.
The NeXTSTEP UI may be fairly familiar to Linux & BSD users of the late '90s: WindowMaker was a popular window manager at the time, which cloned a lot of the NeXTSTEP UI.
Windowmaker and Afterstep.
It was also a pretty big influence on the Windows 95 UI (e.g. the sharp rectangular '3D' style of everything, the window titlebar gadgets), something that was noted by reviewers of the time.
i use to use windowmaker a lot on netbsd back in the day
I have wmaker and gnustep on an Ubuntu laptop
On my Mac, I put the dock on the right edge of the screen like it was in NextStep. The whole thing totally works, and gives you back more vertical working area.
I only started using MacOS with the MBA M1 and don't know whether you are running an earlier version of the os. You don't need to move as it just disappears when you enter whole screen
I do that too. Also it's been able to do that forever
I prefer left, since right is for desktop icons.
I have the dock set to autohide which does the same thing
I do the same
Actually using macs and non-Retina screens (or with HID disabled) you should still have the exact same mouse cursor used in next step
What? No, the new cursor was introduced in macOS 10.2 Jaguar and only G3 systems were left with the default non-accelerated cursor.
Any so called apple software developper is really a NextStep developper.
Not anymore now that Swift is there. Otherwise, sure, where'd you think all those NS in NSString and NSObject and NSNotification came from :-)
That's like saying any Windows developer is really a DOS developer.
Fun look back, Sean!
From a developer's perspective, macOS literally is NeXTStep. The kernel is still Mach, the standard classes all use the NS namespace prefix, (NSString, etc), and the primary compiled language is Objective C, a language synonymous with NeXTStep.
NeXT supported more than one mouse button. Apple modified it to work with just one. Next had a menu palette you could move where you wanted it ala Photoshop, but Apple put it back as a top menu bar, NeXT had a Dock and a Clip, Apple combined them into one Dock. Under the hood a bit, Display PostScript was reworked into Display PDF and then ultimately removed because it just wasn't that useful in the modern age. Workspace Manager was tweaked and rewritten a few times to make the modern Finder, but many people (myself included) still prefer the NeXT columns view to the more traditional classic MacOS views.
There's a few efforts to make a fully open-source NeXTish environment using Linux as a base-recommended if you want to have a look some time. Dunno if it would make a good daily driver Linux environment though.
Window Maker is one of my daily driver Linux WMs, so it's got that going for it. I'd love to have a full GNUStep environment sometime, though, especially on my PowerBook G4.
I have wmaker on Ubuntu. It doesn't have good settings or a title bar, but other than that it's great.
@@coderamen666 If you want a classic NeXT titlebar, that's kinda what wmaker is. If you want to tweak the hell out of everything, then that's something else.
Before xrandr, I used wmaker and was happy with it. Since xrandr, I don't even think it's possible to configure virtual desktop resolutions as in the days of yore (I used them as a magnifier basically), so I've gotta use a compositing WM and need any wayland compositor to implement the same feature. I think that's most of them, but I doubt WMaker will get a Wayland port/rewrite.
These days I use xfwm4 and will continue doing so or switch to labwc-the latter needs a GUI config tool for most users today, though.
Basically Apple's variant of _NT_ taking over the Windows 9x line of operating systems while being only the same on the surface.
It's not all bad though as both scenarios show that the OS doesn't matter so much as long as the interface looks familiar enough and most of your software works on the new operating system.
I wonder if, in an NT/Linux/Darwin world, there’s still a place for a technologically simple OS similar to old Mac OS or Win9X
@@AllonKirtchik hardly so. MacOS 9 and before could not even do preemptive multitasking while Windows 9x managed memory so badly that they crashed once an hour and leaked nemory so that the system turned unusable in several hours. Those simple systems were too simple, and died for a very good reason.
@@AllonKirtchik
Nah.
MS DOS was on its last legs in the late 90s, having been in use for nearly 20 years. Windows NT was done because Microsoft wanted to takeoff on the Unix Workstation market. MS DOS only stayed around for as long as it did because it ended being way more popular than Microsoft expected it to and would not have survived.
@@AllonKirtchikRISC OS could work ime
Fun fact, if you look at Apple's macOS APIs for the Swift and Objective-C programming language today, you'll see that a lot of different classes and protocols start with NS (for NextSTEP)
Back when they were deciding what to do with the aging OS software there was a lot of talk about BeOS; I was really hoping for BeOS.
Have you ever tried Haiku?
@@ActionRetro yes I have. I tried it out in 2009. Did they ever complete that project?
@@jba2048 oh yeah it's progressed a TON since then. I have it as the sole OS on a ThinkPad.
@@ActionRetro may we be graced by a Haiku/BeOS retrospective video?
I loved BeOS as a kid when I played around with it on a Pentium II box. In Retrospect, while BeOS had advantages in file system technologies and multi-cpu support, NeXTSTEP fit Apples need FAR better than BeOS ever could have at that time.
I was hoping this would go deeper into the system internals, like look at the boot process, kernel logs, app APIs, what processes/daemons are running, file system, etc. But it's just 23 minutes of user-facing apps and shell stuff, kinda shallow.
Clearly modern Mac OS is just the latest version of NeXTSTEP. If you watch any of the early Apple/Jobs presentations on the subject, they're pretty transparent about the matter. Not to mention, MacOS still has all of the NX libraries (NX stands for NeXT), and XNU kernel and so on. But here's the thing, NeXTSTEP was always the next MacOS. That's why Steve called the company "NeXT," because it was next after the Mac. Since Steve brought both into existence, NeXT really was the "natural" evolution of the Mac, and it's fitting that it ultimately got to fulfill that role.
Absolutely love your videos. Been into classic macs ever since they came out. Always got them second hand. My sister was going to art school at the time and needed access to macs so I went and got quite a few second hand and even for free from one of my professors, Jary thank you for that!
The contrast between MSDOS, Windows9x, Linux and MacOS and later OSX always fascinated me and I have always been using all side by side... always.
Great historical overview.
A fellow side-by-side OS fanatic 👍
if you look through a lot of XCode, and various binaries throughout NextStep to Big Sur (including today), the NS.object directive is in there everywhere (NS standing for NextStep). They didn't bother changing it because it would have broken a lot of code presumably. It is still very much NextStep
The whole NextStep/Apple merger is really interesting to me. Kinda crazy to see just how much Apple "borrowed" from OpenStep.
"Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal." -Igor Stravinsky
MacOS X didn't borrow from NextStep, it pretty much WAS NextStep poured into a Macintosh mold, with extra Mac-exclusive trimmings added onto it.
@@RamLaska Yeah. Since they actually outright _bought_ NeXT, calling it "borrowing" or "stealing" is more than wrong. :)
Basically after cancelling the Copland boondoggle, they were in desperate need of an OS to ride out the end of the century with. Mac OS Classic, while light years ahead of DOS/Windows in some areas, was falling behind in multitasking and multiuser capabilities. While Windows 95 and 98 had preemptive multitasking (where the OS is in charge and tells the apps when to give up control of resources), classic Mac OS was still using cooperative multitasking, where the applications had to voluntarily give up control of resources, and that could lead to system-wide instability if an application misbehaved and wouldn’t relinquish resources. Windows had its own other troubles with multitasking, like awfully primitive memory protection, but that’s a digression too far for this. The point is, Mac OS Classic was an OS that had reached its limits in the 90s, and was not going to be able to carry Apple forward into the new millennium.
It just so happened that Apple’s management were driving the company hard into the ground, at the time, too. They bought Next not just for the OS, but for Steve Jobs. Officially, he was brought in in an advisory role, but he’s responsible for whipping the company back into shape. He took lessons from what didn’t work when he was with Apple originally, and what didn’t work with Next (they were not in great shape, either), and knew how to streamline Apple’s product lineup. Next was a convenient base for the future of Mac OS, because it had an industry-standard Unix core which was inherently built for the connected offices and homes of the imminent future. As for the NextStep GUI, it was more a question of why reinvent the wheel? They had something that worked, all they needed to do was dress it up to adhere to some Mac Classic conventions, like the menu bar being fixed up the top, and introduces some Next conventions in a Mac-friendly way.
@@fryke
I didn't mean it in that sense, but in the sense that Mac OS X is the continuation of Next/OpenStep. I can see how my statement was not communicated well, sorry.
@@RamLaska Huh? That's why I _agreed_ with you! :)
FYI: when using dd and other commands, specifying /dev/rdisk# is a lot faster than using /dev/disk#.
Interesting note... MacOS X Server/Rhapsody was the last version of macOS which had Display Postscript.
Well, the last version that had Display PostScript visible. Up until 10.3, the chess app was unchanged from NeXTStep/OpenStep, meaning it still used Display PostScript calls. However, due to how GCC implemented C, calls to functions without a forward declaration was allowed, so the (missing) headers didn't need to be included.
And even then, the Display PostScript functions were still around and could be linked in 32-bit code. In 64-bit code… they're non-external and thus can't be linked to.
You can always explore BeOS and its modern incarnation Haiku, Be was the alternative Apple could have chosen instead of NeXT. Then for the modern NeXT-like experience there's Windowmaker and GNUstep on Linux/BSD distributions
Aw man, I love Haiku. I've had it running on a ThinkPad for years!
@@ActionRetro Haiku R1/beta 3 released recently, will you release a video on Haiku when R1 goes gold?
@@lepidotos : Beta4 is out already.
7:00 I didn't realize/remember that ".app" started way back with NextStep.
On classic MacOS, there was no extension (of course), but the type code was "APPL".
12:27 Whoa, Boinkout has the classic Amiga boing animation as the ball. That's REALLY flexin' your mid-90s graphical prowess.
ב''ה, just lost a big digressive reply but this was so much the language of the 90s that it took someone else to point out Apple was doing self promotion by using the "application" term.
There was sort of a nice, though inevitably commercial origin in Raskin's idea the customer might care more about the results the technology could give them rather than having to understand specific programs or what the concept of programs were. They wrapped that into their whole 1984 ad schtick, creating the Apple cult idea that you'd be applied rather than programmed, if there was any difference.
Of course, aside from some good shit like Hypercard, much of the early Mac creative software was just "paper on a screen," though it's always a miracle anything ever works at all in prepress and such, and even that took the developers enough work.
ב''ה, is the best Bitcoin miner in PostScript retrocomputing by now? Also, can someone hand me the button that pays your rent that y'all got? I'm too old and busted to care about any of this now.
Thanks a great video as always. Enjoyed it. I have a NextStep machine running 3.3 Using MacOS now one of absolutely most annoying things (I am a Mac person) is all the time you spend going up and down to the top of the screen for the menu. I know NextStep abstraction of movable menus alarms people too but that was the first thing the dumped to get it Mac like and now one that drives me mad. Windows users have a hard time with menus being at the top of the screen and not being really in any way attached to the application windows.
As an original NeXT user going back to 1990, I loved this video! How do you use the VM image you posted? There is no extension on the extracted file, so it isn't clear.
You can just burn it to any kind of drive, no need for a file extension. Use dd, or win32diskimager, or disk utility.
Same question here, I want to run it in a virtual machine, not real hardware.
I guess I'm confused, then. I thought I'd be able to use it to run it in VirtualBox or VMware.
@@CygnusTM I think the issue is: he made a VM image to set this up, but he only uploaded the non-VM compatible disk image.
If you're using a real operating system like macOS, Linux, BSD etc, use "dd" to write the image to a disk or mounted disk image that your VM software likes, then you should be able to attach the disk or image to the VM. I definitely recall hardware compatibility being really sparse in OpenStep and Rhapsody is PowerPC only.
So, what about application compatibility? Will Mac OS X Server run existing NextStep binaries? How about Carbon or Cocoa applications?
rm -rf / as root will perfectly do its job on all the four :-D
Sudo rm -rf /
Well Mac OS X Server 1.0 doesn't even need this - it exploded itself all on its own!
@@JaredConnell you don't need sudo if you're already root :)
Go and delete system 32 ( ￣ー￣)
Hehehe devious.
if you "get info" on a file on OS X there's a tickbox for "stationary pad" which duplicates a file on opening for editing. I heard this has been about since the Apple Lisa, I was wondering if it's on NeXTSTEP in some way? would be interested in seeing the right click menus systemwide actually. wow i'm a nerd.
I still have a copy of "Mac os 8.0" aka Mac os 7.7.. I was a BeOS developer and system engineer. For awhile we thought that BeOS would eventually get bought up by Apple because it really was a better Mac OS in every way imaginable but application support. Heck BeOS ran better on my PM 7600 then Mac OS 7.6! That 604e based Mac was buttery smooth under most circumstances. But their CEO really screwed up that deal and they ended up buying up Next and using Nextstep, something I had been already familiar with. I got to mess around with all the betas back in the day, both X86 and PPC. When Apple claimed that they had been running x86 versions of its MacOS all along in 2005, it wasn't a lie by far. I had signed a number of confidentiality agreements so I couldn't write about it for years. Course now it's pretty much public knowledge, I can. But I was on these various teams back in the day because I had such intimate knowledge of Mac OS. If you look hard enough and find leaked betas and have the right hardware *cough* this era of software can be a lot of fun. I still own my 7600, now upgraded to a PowerPC g3 cpu and 256mb of ram. It can easily boot and run just about any Mac OS software from Mac os 7.5.1 all the way to Mac OS X 10.2.8 and beyond with a little not worth it hacking. Even with a ATI rage 128 video card 10.3 isn't that impressive on a 50 mhz fsb. That said BeOS 5.0.3 sure is. Only one of a handful of G3 enabled Macs that could run it as no new world Power Mac runs most of this era of software until Mac OS server..
AFAIR, apart from Gassee just wanting too much money for BeOS, they also had a big backwards-compatibility issue, as they were using C++, which hard-coded the order of functions in its v-tables (which was fast), whereas NeXT messages were (more slowly) looked up in a dispatch table, and therefore could have an arbitrary order. So adding new methods or removing them was very error-prone for BeOS (see also, why Windows had special "COM" objects added to its C++ - NSObject is basically modern macOS's COM object equivalent).
@@uliwitness That's a very good insight most would overlook but yes, your right here. If you've ever tried to run something like Python it's easy to see too. If it does work, it works not just slowly because of the extra layers, but it's highly unstable. We even had gotten flash to kind of work. Same problem. the API base just couldn't handle it. I think this could have been tweaked a little, but it would have required an extensive rewrite in order to bring over such tools natively. Be, inc sure didn't have the resources or need to do it so they didn't. I remember getting BeOS to boot on x86 for the first time using the PR demos.. it was a mess. A beautiful mess I admit, but a mess never the less. Each revision it got a little better and more stable but up until like BeOS 4.5 it was kind of a crap shoot. Unless of course your a nerd who loves a challenge... lol
interesting in that next.com redirects to apple.com - i thought it was well known nextstep formed the basis for modern macos?
its well known. you won't get any kudos for pointing that out here though, as though this video actually beat you to it... F that, kudos dude.
action retro doesn't like your comment... surprised?
You’re right; it is well-known. 😎
Well that’s because Apple owns the domain when they bought NeXT and they shut down the servers for the website and then redirect to the Apple website.
GNUstep
Yes, OpenStep survives to this day as GNUStep. You can even get a live ISO to try out: wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/GNUstep_Live_CD
(It may show up on distrotest.net later. I've asked the admin if s/he can add it)
The Garbage Compaq looks decent for a passive matrix. Congrats on the camera work, I suppose.
I’d like to see a closer look at the NeXTSTEP UI Builder and how (or whether) it’s been carried over to MacOS and GNUSTEP. I used to have a NeXT Cube (and regret having had to sell it) and got to play with the UI builder to practice making a couple of my own apps. It seemed very revolutionary at the time, and its code template generation feature was better than Android Studio had over a decade later, in my opinion.
Microsoft Blend blows every other UI builder out of the water in my opinion. Android Studio is sad.
You know, I don't actually know if it crashed hard enough to brick the partition. The manual for at least the first two developer previews for X proper states that Mac OS 9's startup disk won't see the partition for X and you have to tell the computer to boot the X partition from within the install disk, so I wonder if Server 1.x is the same way.
hey man, what drivers did you install on that OS4.2 image? i mean does it boot to basic vga soni can experiment myself in a VM or on real hw or have you insgalled anything specific to that compaq of yours?
So other things that are still with us, is the Library folder which is unique to NeXTStep and macOS, and also the "Services" menu in all apps.. Almost nobody uses this but it was an early way to automate certain tasks in a cross-app way.
What the heck, TextEdit: "Written in Java"! I would have assume everything was Objective-C.
Great video. Do you happen to know if the great marble game "Oxyd" really existed for NeXTStep? It exists on Atari ST, Mac, Amiga and Dos and it was announced for NeXT computers also. But I've never seen it run.
I'm not a Mac guy, but I do love finding old remnants from older operating systems in newer ones. In the Windows world, you can find similar nods to older NT versions, such as some of the old Windows XP era icons still being around in 11.
Thank you for this lovely video, videos like yours give me nostalgia for things I never experienced. Though I did grow up using Mac OS 8.6 and 9. I didn't properly know what Windows was until I was 10 I think, though I'd used it to play POD at school when I was 8 - the only Windows machine in the computer lab was for gaming. Though the Macs had games too, I actually feel game support for Mac was better back then, with Mac only titles, rather than Windows ports. Anyway, I'm off to play the Apple wrapper for GNU Chess.
We had a Compaq like that in our family when I was a kid
Am I crazy or I really saw the Amiga bouncing ball in the Demos folder, in Rhapsody OS? I stopped the video to see again, and I think it's the bouncing ball from Commodore. What do you think?
Cheers!
It reminds me vey much at the CDE (Common Desktop Environment) I used from 1993 to 1999.
What program do you se to run you virtual machines with these old oses the only virtual machine platforms forms I have played with don’t let you choose a lot of hardware to use beyond core count, ram and storage space
Enjoyed this trip down Memory Lane. 50% of my original switch to Mac was because OS X was effectively the next version of nextstep/openstep (the other 50% was that the G4 Cube was such a good looking machine!) There are tons of things that still persist in MacOS to this day - I think there are already comments on .app directories for applications, but many others too.
Biggest strange thing/quirk to continue is the Services menu - highlight something and use entries in the Services menu to pump it meaningfully into another app.
Biggest strange thing/quirk to be lost without lament - mouse acceleration which was so difficult (for me, at least) to get to a suitable rate.
Other quirks lost to time - tear off menus.
Obviously as time has gone on, lots of new features have evolved and I guess nextstep would’ve had to evolve too in an alternative reality if next had survived outside Apple. But I really loved the next 'look and feel' and preferred it to its OS X skin. Either way, the next/os x gui is the only gui for Unix that ever really made sense to me and I find the modern guis for Linux etc are nowhere near to my taste.
Maybe it’s time to dig out my os4.2 discs and create myself a vm - I’m not sure tracking down a compatible piece of hardware is viable for me. I guess a Sun SS5 might be a viable alternative - shame it appears the SPARC version won’t boot on better looking shoebox Suns.
I was drawn to Apple stuff since 1998 when the G3 came out :-) And then... Ah the G4 Cube! Only saw / tried one in 2002 in real life, at a computer fair in our capital city.
I was maybe 16 and thinking that I will never be able to afford one.
In 2012 I moved abroad and got a job at Apple HQ and worked there for 10 years :-)
@@tziuriky86 I still have my G4 Cube 😊 even if it 'just' largely sits on a shelf looking pretty - a machine that double as a piece of modern sculpture 😊
Next and Rhapsody have live window movement but what about resizing the window? That’s something I’d love to see
I’d also love to see more Rhapsody and Nextstep exploration
Like all the settings in system preferences and what they do and also more exploration of the features of the workspace manager
I was working at Apple in ‘96. A friend of mine had a beta of Copeland on a PowerBook. This was about a year before Steve came back. Gil Amelio was CEO. The Copeland beta crashed before it could reach the desktop. We tried restarting it several times, trying different ways to get it to boot. It was a mess. I was later given a Be Box in anticipation of that buy out. I was also given a MK Linux CD while at Apple. There was small group who favored that as a possible way forward. Then Steve came back and the rest is history. Those years were the golden era for operating systems. It’s all kind of boring now. Playing with these old computers and operating systems is a lot of fun. Grab was one of my favorite NeXT leftovers that just recently was depreciated. Good stuff!
I'll always wonder what might have been if Apple had ported A/UX to PowerPC, but based it on BSD instead of System V!
@@nicksterj That’s basically what Copland was going to be.
@@TheSteveSteele Really? I didn't think Copland had any planned Unix compatibility, though they were using a multitasking microkernel base.
I was going to say NetBSD was available for PPC then, but evidently the first PPC release (1.4) didn't come until 1999.
@@nicksterj What I meant was, I think that’s what the NuKernal engineers were thinking, except they may have had the “built here” mentality. Things were so fractured, the IBM/Apple partnership was in full swing, which led to massive feature creep. Nobody understood what all the projects that Apple was investing into were actually about. Apple still had an A/UX team, and MKLinux was actively being passed around Apple. We were all given Apple branded MkLinux CDs.
Anyway, what you said was basically what I was thinking before Sun, Be and NeXT were in the picture. I used to ask the A/UX guys why we weren’t going to build on what we already had. But, that wouldn’t have mattered. I remember hearing we had 90 days left and that Microsoft or Sun was going to buy us. Things were so bad that there was only one way forward. And miraculously, it happened. When Steve came back it was like The Beatles had just reunited and made their best album, or better.
@@TheSteveSteele Wow, that's amazing! I know Apple had NIH and there was no way they were going to go GPL with the operating system - so MkLinux was always a side show. I did try MkLinux on my G3-upgraded PM7500 back in the day, and while it was interesting, when you get down to the nitty gritty it's really just another Linux distro, despite the Mach microkernel. I remember thinking that since Mac OS X was going to be based on Mach, that I could run MkLinux and OS X simultaneously, or hot-swap between them. Then the ugly truth dawned. :)
I have mixed feelings about Jobs. It was good to see him return to Apple but I had doubts about whether he had the users' best interests at heart. He could be a strong motivational force, yet he played politics ruthlessly. The stories on Folklore are very enlightening! I was very disappointed that he let HyperCard, QuickTime and OpenDoc rot on the vine. They were getting old and obsolete but they had very advanced tech at the core and could have been pivoted into a 21st-century game changing platform.
Anyway I still have a lingering desire to turn NetBSD/PPC into an "A/UX 4.0" look-alike, but my knowledge and skills are nowhere near what's needed. And let's be honest, the desktop paradigm has advanced light years beyond "System 7 on Unix." :)
3:39 What's that big CS Module on the middle of your Control Strip??
Next Step machine might be reporting processor based on the slot. Believe it or not you could put a k6 into a pentium 1 sloted motherboard and it would work (You would get a much faster processor, but you lost a bit of the k6's speed. Still was a great upgrade for faster cpu speeds without upgrading the moboard. Used to have it in my dos machine until a thunder strike took it out..rip.) Maybe that's why?
A lot of and apps report the k6 line as a Pentium. It pretty much is just a souped up Pentium compatible after all.
Great video, clearly explained and good examples. Thanks!
In 1998 the first notebook can I see is like this Compaq Presario. For me, this machine gave me a good memories and nostalgia in from 1998 to 2002!
"...macOS kernel (XNU) has been around longer than Linux and was based on a combination of two even older code bases. On the other hand, Linux is newer, written from scratch, and is used on many more devices "....in a nutshell / kernel shell...lol
Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but the Blue Box (classic mode) using the PowerPC Upgrade Card startup sound is quite intriguing, and makes you question the development lifecycle for that feature...
So Rhapsody was the non-NextStep Mac OS also based off of Unix BSD? Were they mirroring what Next was doing?
No, Rhapsody was the first step in re-skinning NeXTstep to be more like macOS (The window borders are very similar to MacOS 9's), but still missing a lot of the Mac backwards-compatibility stuff. There were huge complaints when Rhapsody was announced, because every Mac dev would have had to rewrite their apps - including Adobe Photoshop and MS Word - because it *only* supported the NeXT command set. Apple then pivoted to MacOS X and introduced Carbon, which was a version of the old Mac command set running "beside" the NeXTstep bits of Rhapsody/MacOS X.
I did love the Aqua interface
I totally forgot about OpenStep running on NT. Apple could have provided it as an cross platform app development framework. Btw, the classic Mac had a universal menu first.
I'm pretty sure OpenStep on NT (or a modern iteration) (Red Box, I think it was called) is still used by Apple for iTunes on Windows, and was used for Safari on Windows.
@@MaddTheSane Why don't they release it as a SDK for Windows? It would provide an alternative to those non-macentric cross-platform UI frameworks.
I used Rhapsody on a PDQ; it was not very stable. I still have that PDQ. What do you do about replacement batteries?
Really cool deep dive archeology, thanks!
WoW Sean What A Great Compairison On Those Systems Great Video Learned A lot
There were two versions of Rhapsody out there. DR1, and DR2 (which what everyone uses)
What version of Pool has the problem as I want it and will it run on iOS15.4?
Modern MacOS is a perfect marriage of the best of both. It still retains key MacOS features such as the menubar and Finder.
Didn't Jobs and Woz work on Breakout for Atari before they started Apple?
I had a NeXT pizza box in '93 ... I use to dual boot NeXTStep 3.x and OS/2 on a PC for a while and and and ... welcome to part of my computing life. :D
This is my favorite talking hand channel.
I was working at a modem company in 2000 and received the public beta release of Mac OS X 1.0. We thought it was so cool. It was buggy and slow as hell, but man, it was pretty neat and we all knew it would eventually be a leap forward for the Macintosh platform.
the open command use to be able to open apps across network! not using x11, but I think using some display PDF stuff, kinda guessing on this last part? Would be fun to have that back... also mail app could use local SMTP server!
I mean, NeXT being Jobs’ redemption company, I’d imagine he brought a lot of traits from those machines to post-Scully Apple products.
7:18 you can actually still put the doc to the sides but not the top and I always wondered why that was 😂!
On early versions of OS X, Mail app was organized the exact same way as you shown in NextStep, with a vertical configuration with a list of mails on top, and opened mail on the bottom, down to the draggable divider with he circle in the middle
I seem to remember playing Billiards on NeXT machines in the early 90s, and I don't remember the physics being messed up. My guess would be that the animations sped up over time as machines got faster.
Have you tried running next step apps with OS X and an intel mac?
If you want the nostalgia NeXTSTEP-like on linux. You can try NextSpace from trunkmaster. It's better than WindowMaker + GNUStep. (Although NextSpace is still based on GNUStep)
I'm wondering if you have a video on BeOS, the MacOS that could have been (it was never going to be the next MacOS once they bought NeXT and to be honest, with The Steve over at NeXT, it wasn't looking good for them from the start)
Awesome video for sure. Ilove the vintage mac's
Thx for those infos first time i see details on next. I’ve been using macs since 95!
Every time I watch one of Action Retro’s videos part of me thinks it’s going to end with a Country Crock commercial. If you get that reference we can carpool to our colonoscopies!
Bertrand Serlet became Apple’s software boss when Steve hopped over from NeXT.
Prior to Swift, if you’ve written Obj-C, you’ve no doubt used NS_ prefixes in your code. Which is NeXTStep.
Do ya need a hinge cover for the predation?
I have an app I wrote in 1999 in OpenStep. Except for basic text drawing, it still compiles and runs.
Docks were a thing in the Amiga days.
You did a great job on this video. Thanks!👍
"Almost released?" What are you talking about?? I HAVE an original copy of Open Step. It definitely was released. At the time, it needed 32meg of memory to run well and at the time, I think that killed it cause memory was so expensive at the time. 50$/meg.
The pre-release versions of consumer Mac OS X had an even more primitive, blocky-style dock that more closely resembled the NeXT dock. It can be seen in an on-stage demo by Jobs. I just don't recall which event it was off hand.
James Thomson (of PCalc fame) made that first dock Jobs demoed. It was written so early that he couldn't use the standard windowing API yet, so there is a lot of manual labor involved that makes it look so janky. (AIUI he was basically talking directly to the Window Server and using neither NSView nor Carbon Controls) I think the version that actually shipped with 10.0 was not limited that way anymore and was substantially rewritten.
If you install Xcode and try to learn to develop for Mac you will soon notice a lot of the boilerplate function calls start with the initials NS.
I think it stands for "NeveronaSunday"? Or maybe NextStep.
It’s a shame that Apple never carried over the NXHost feature from NeXT/OpenStep.
With it you could start an app on system a, but have the app appear on system b. It’s almost the same way X11 lets you use the DISPLAY env variable to display the app on a different system (I’m butchering the terminology on purpose - no need to get into the wonky client vs server roles here).
Sure you can kind of accomplish this with things like VNC or NoMachine, but this was on a per-app basis, not an entire desktop. So you could have one centralized server displaying apps remotely on many workstations, or vice versa. (Concrete example: I worked on a network monitoring facility once where all kinds of X clients - network alerts, weather, topology maps… - were displayed in huge “War Games” style projection screens. It was really simple and powerful.)
Mr Action, you might want to play with this on your NeXT systems some time.
ב''ה, didn't they make this consumer ready in about 2016 before everything completely went to shit? I forget what they were calling it and the underpinnings, but it took some finagling as with Wayland and all the attempts to get past X11 as to direct rendering, what GPU would actually do the rendering, stuffing that into a headless framebuffer if it needed to be sent down the wire on a compressible protocol and so on.
The week or so where it actually worked flipping things back and forth from tablet to desktop was kind of cool.
Nextstep always reminded me of Lisa but way better. I tried getting it to run on a PowerBook Duo 230 as a separate system disk on the desktop hard drive. Man… brings back memories!
Dat Ben Franklin bridge wallpaper 🥰
I'm a bit supprised they still ship Mac OS with GNU Chess, they've purged most GPL from their userspace at this point. It must have survived the purge because it's still GPL2 rather than GPL3.
Not gonna like, Copland looks really good for an OS from 1996, Windows wouldn't look that good until Windows XP in 2001, 5 years later.