Are Modern Macs Really NeXTSTEP in Disguise? 

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

holy crap! so cool to know

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.

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.

Enron: the biggest scam ever

He also did the ABC logo

He sure does love crooked Es

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

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?

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

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

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.

Thats awesome dude, NeXT hardware is so beautiful and timeless looking.

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

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.

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

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.

A fellow side-by-side OS fanatic 👍

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

What? No, the new cursor was introduced in macOS 10.2 Jaguar and only G3 systems were left with the default non-accelerated cursor.

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.

"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! :)

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft Blend blows every other UI builder out of the water in my opinion. Android Studio is sad.

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.

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)

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.

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 😊

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

A lot of and apps report the k6 line as a Pentium. It pretty much is just a souped up Pentium compatible after all.

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.

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.

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.

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.