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107 points wmlive | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.392s | source
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masfoobar ◴[] No.42134749[source]
I am not an Apple user but I do enjoy the history of computers -- which (obviously) the timeline will reach the likes of Steve Jobs and Apple. As much as people give high praise to Steve and the rise of Apple... I personally value Steve more regarding his work on NeXT more.

To be honest, as someone who was into SGI computers as a kid, accepting the reality I would NEVER be able to own one, I hoped one day I would get to use or try one in the workplace. Of course, by then, technology had moved and these expensive machines are now affordable, simple a Windows PC with a good graphics card!

Getting back to NeXT, I heard "Next" thrown about when reading up on ID Software (Doom, Quake, etc) but never really appreciated what this was until later on. When I finally spent the time to understand that this "Next" was a computer, I started to appreciate how cool it was especially back in 1990! It made me appreciate how far ahead they were with programming/development tools. I mean.. Visual Studio finally caught up with productivity.. like.. 10 years later!

It is great to see the history of NeXT continue -- not just being "merged" into Apple but with OpenSTEP and others.

It also makes me appreciate less known programming languages that, one day, could become "mainstream" at any point. Hardly anyone knew much about Objective-C but became a popular tool for Apple developers with OSX. Thats why I always have a grin when people mock a less known language because "hardly anyone uses it" or "hardly anyone knows about it" -- that could change, you know.

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ptek ◴[] No.42141700[source]
But the RAM requirements were crazy, 8MB RAM in the late 80s which is understandable for what the machine the was offering.

Interface Builder is nice, I remember trying to develop GUIs on Amiga with intuition.library and wished that there was a drag and drop program to build the source code. Running NeXTSTEP 3.3 on Virtual Box and trying to get it running on my early 2000s laptop :)

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1. pjmlp ◴[] No.42145428[source]
Now imagine being at the university doing the graduation project porting a visualisation framework from NeXTSTEP into Windows (Objective-C => C++), because it was clear NeXT wasn't going to survive, and some stations were already gathering dust, after being replaced with PCs running Red-Hat Linux.

If folks had guess what turnaroud NeXT would go through, most likely my thesis would have been something else.