The NeXT Big Thing

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are on a workstation that is running some flavor of the Windows operating system. Some of you may be running Linux or, like the author, might be a Mac user, but it’s still a Windows world as far as most homes and businesses go. Windows has come a long way since the early days of graphical interface operating systems, and most of the gripes I have with it boil down to interface design and arcane system architecture. The fact of the matter is that as of Windows 2000, the Windows operating system finally achieved a level of stability that made it a usable, if inelegant, work environment. In Windows’ defense, early versions of Mac OS were just as glitchy and likely to crash.

If you are something of a Maverick, you may not have been running Windows at all back in the day. There were alternatives that offered better stability, more sophisticated user interfaces and the ability to do things that weren’t possible on an early Windows PC. Amiga and Atari both offered systems that were ahead of their time, and still retain a large following on the internet. BeOS was similarly influential. Open source efforts are underway to keep all three of those systems alive. Linux and the free BSD’s were starting to offer users the ability to have industry-class unix in their homes, but still relied on a then primitive Xwindows GUI environment that wasn’t very integrated or sophisticated.

In the 90’s I was one of those mavericks, and I still feel that the system I used and loved is the greatest graphical user interface offered to date, and I continue to use it’s descendant. In 1989 NeXT Computer released NeXTSTEP 1.0, and the lucky few who ever got to use the system saw the future of computing.

When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, he wasted no time in forming a new company, NeXT Computer. Steve created a core of ex-Apple and unix developers, and they went to work building a new hardware platform and operating system based on the Mach microkernel and the University of California’s BSD operating system, which was the original alternative to commercial unix.

By 1989 both the hardware and the operating system were ready. The operating system, NeXTSTEP 1.0, was a completely graphical environment that utilized postscript for it’s display model. This was important if you were a publisher or artist using NeXTSTEP, because what you saw onscreen exactly mirrored what the printed output would be. Also different was that the OS was written using Objective-C, a superset of the traditional C programming language that was object oriented. This meant that programmers could write frameworks that could be used by many applications, cutting down development time since shared frameworks could be used as libraries that could be referenced by any application that needed them.

Take a look at the screenshot on the right. What were you using in 1990? MS-DOS? Windows 3.0? Mac OS? Whatever you were using, NeXTSTEP turned it on it’s head. Unix stability. Display postscript for perfect graphic design, publishing and printing capabilities. It was revolutionary. Unfortunately you needed a $10k NeXT cube to run it on, and none of us had one.

Fast forward to 1993. NeXT and Sun collaborate to make a version of the NeXT operating environment that stripped all dependency on the Mach kernel and the proprietary NeXT hardware. In 1994 OPENSTEP replaced NeXTSTEP with OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP ran on NeXT, Sparc, HPPA, and Intel processors. If you think back to 1994, you still weren’t using a desktop that was capable of much. OPENSTEP had 32bpp color at any resolution your monitor could handle, built-in TCP/IP, object oriented libraries to assist developers get OPENSTEP applications and interfaces up and running in a fraction of the time it would normally take to do so, sophisticated email with rich text and image capability, and the world’s first web browser. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP made a particularly good environment for developing cross platform applications. In fact a little shareware game you may have heard of was made on NeXT hardware: Doom.

By 1996 Apple had given up on it’s development of a replacement for the aged Mac OS in favor of buying an existing project. Candidates for purchase included financially troubled BeOS, and OPENSTEP. In 1997 Apple purchased the intellectual property of NeXT Computer, bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold after a 12 year absence. The last version of OPENSTEP, 4.2, was released by Apple and would be the final version of the NeXT Mach OS that would wear the familiar gray and black that NeXTies had become accustomed to. Work began immediately transforming the NeXT Mach OS into the new Mac OS. The initial project was named Rhapsody. I had a developer’s release of Rhapsody, and believe me, seeing the Apple logo when booting up your Intel PC back in 1999 was like waking up on another planet.

March 24, 2001 saw the public release of Mac OS X. Mac OS X was, for all intents and purposes, OPENSTEP 4.4 with a shiny new Mac OS interface on top. There were birthing pains for people on both sides of the fence. Apple loyalists were freaking out because the OS was so radically changed. NeXTies were appalled at the gumdrops and rainbows interface Apple had imposed on their beloved desktop. My initial reaction to seeing OS X was that Apple was targeting 9 year old girls.

By this time OPENSTEP was getting a little long in the tooth. Two areas where the NeXT Mach OS came up short were 1) lack of posix compliance and 2) lack of commercial applications. Lack of posix compliance meant that while the NeXT Mach OS was BSD unix under the hood, it was difficult for the average user to get unix source code to compile on the system. I had been using FreeBSD in addition to OPENSTEP for years because FreeBSD gave me a better unix system to work on. However I always kept coming back to OPENSTEP because the desktop was so elegant that I wanted to spend my time there if possible. Since I was part of a very small community of people using the system, commercial applications for OPENSTEP were scarce. There just wasn’t a lot out there beside what NeXT had given you and what you could port over from the linux/*BSD community.

Reluctantly when OS X 10.1 was released in September 2001 I purchased a G4 Power Mac so I could run OS X. My initial distrust of what Apple had done to my beloved OS was belayed when I ran OS X the first day. This was OPENSTEP, regardless what they had done to the gui. On top of that, since OS X had updated the unix foundation (which was now built on FreeBSD instead of antiquated BSD 4.3), getting unix source to compile on OS X was a breeze. Commercial applications were abundant, at least from the perspective of an obscure OS user like myself. It was everything I could have asked for, to my surprise.

I’m on my second Power Mac now, and I’m about to purchase a Macbook Pro so I can publish while on the road. If you haven’t used OS X I can’t recommend it highly enough. The beauty of OS X is that it’s perfect for adept tech geeks and grandmas alike. The interface is simple, but not at the expense of having been “dumbed down”. I haven’t met anyone who used a Mac for more than 10 minutes and didn’t think it was worlds better than a PC running Windows. It makes me happy as a former NeXTie that the OS gets the chance it never had back in the day, and that people are actually using it.

If you’re a little on the geeky side like me, try getting your hands on a copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 and setting up an old PC you don’t use anymore with it. It will shock you what was available back in the day of Windows 95 and Mac OS 7. I still boot up OPENSTEP now and then for nostalgia’s sake. It was beautiful, sophisticated, and it paved the way for a lot of the elements we take for granted in an operating system today.

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