Full Circle: A Brief History of NeXT
- Good-bye, Apple
- Objective-C and Display PostScript
- The NeXTstep Interface
- New Hardware
- NeXTstep Becomes OpenStep
- Hello, Apple
Full Circle: A Brief History of NeXT
- Good-bye, Apple
- Objective-C and Display PostScript
- The NeXTstep Interface
- New Hardware
- NeXTstep Becomes OpenStep
- Hello, Apple
Steve Jobs' career at Apple was unique. His unconventional leadership helped create Apple's two most important products of the 70s and 80s: the Apple II and the Macintosh. Unfortunately for Jobs, the CEO he had recruited, John Sculley, was not happy with the risks Jobs was willing to take. After a short power struggle that left Sculley in control of Apple, Jobs left the company in 1985.
After puttering around for several months, Jobs decided that he would return to the computer industry. He invested $7 million to create a brand new company, NeXT Inc.
Unsatisfied with the software available at the time, Steve set about building a team of software developers to create a new programming environment that would run on top of another operating system. The environment would be object oriented, which to an end user means that programs could share information and features.
Jobs also hoped to integrate many of the features that were only available on high-end workstations and Macs, including a WYSIWYG interface, an intuitive user interface, and a fully multitasking operating system (which the Mac did not yet have).
Reluctant to release a brand new operating system and computer, NeXT searched for a host operating system for their environment. The company considered SunOS and several other Unix derivatives but was unable to find a platform where all of the features Jobs wanted could be implemented easily.
Jobs went to several Macintosh developers and sold them on the idea. Because of Apple's copyright policies, several unreleased programs that had been developed at Apple were owned by developers, who now worked at NeXT. As a result, the first commercial product that NeXT released was WriteNow, which was developed in tandem with MacWrite (it was meant as a fail-safe in case MacWrite didn't pull through).
WriteNow generated some needed revenues for the company and also attracted new investors. In early 1986, Ross Perot became the second largest shareholder in the company.
Still focused on development of the new operating system and computer, Jobs recruited Avie Tevanian, a major developer of the Mach microkernel, to help create the new NeXT operating system, later dubbed NeXTstep. (Mach was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon and was meant to be a proof of the microkernel concept.)
Instead of incorporating many features into one large kernel, microkernel operating systems contained only enough code in the kernel to act as a basic interface between the software and core hardware. Everything else was handled by other programs, called servers. Each server sent data to other servers through the microkernel.
Carnegie Mellon managed to port BSD (a version of Unix developed at UC Berkeley in conjunction with Bell Labs in the 1970s) to Mach, where each part of the system functioned as a server. This structure lent itself well to an object oriented operating system, and Jobs was enthusiastic about the proposition.
The hardware that the new software ran on would be almost as important as the software itself. A slow, unresponsive computer would reflect poorly on the software. As a result, the hardware engineers were eager to adopt a high performance CPU. At the time, several new RISC designs were being introduced, including the ARM, MIPS, and SPARC.
Hesitant to adopt one of the more established (and very expensive) processors, NeXT wanted to adopt Motorola's RISC chip, the 88000. Unfortunately, the 88000 would not be available for several years, and its biggest customers were moving to new chips (Apple had intended to use the 88000 in its Jaguar system, right). Instead, NeXT adopted the 680x0 processor, the same CPU that was used in the Macintosh and early Sun workstations.
At this time, NeXT's efforts attracted Apple's attention. Because so many NeXT developers were from the Macintosh team, Apple accused NeXT of stealing Apple's intellectual property. Apple sued, and in an out-of-court settlement, NeXT was barred from competing with the Macintosh. As a result, NeXT was relegated to the high-end market not populated by Macs. NeXT was also allowed to continue marketing any unreleased software that the former Macintosh developers had created at Apple.
Work on NeXTstep pressed on through 1986 and 1987. It was relatively easy for the developers to port Mach and BSD to the new hardware platform, but it proved more difficult for the group to create the new servers that would differentiate NeXTstep from its competition. Objective-C and Display PostScript were the two most ambitious project.
In order to have an object oriented operating system, an object oriented programming language was required. C++ was not available at the