Comment by WillAdams
19 hours ago
Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work:
- Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design
- Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation
- Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel
- Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...) who created Objective-C
- Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible
- Mike Paquette who wrote Display PostScript (and then, repeated that by writing Quartz, née Display PDF after the Apple bought NeXT) --- his posts to Usenet:comp.sys.next.* are a hoot and well worth looking up
- John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep
(for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause)
That NeXTstep included a number of major advances/breakthroughs (7) was noted in the advertising at the time, suggesting that the reader of the ad could then create the balance for a total of 10 --- some of my favourite apps:
- Lotus Improv --- Lotus didn't dare kill of Lotus 1-2-3, so they wrote a new program, which had SJ sending them bouquets of flowers --- a recurring theme in _NeXTWorld Magazine_ was a list of applications which were wanted, and when developed were described as "in the bag" --- really wish I could justify Quantrix at work, or that someone would update the code for Flexisheet so that it would compile....
- Altsys Virtuoso --- v1 was created by the team behind Freehand v1--3, and v2 of AV was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Macromedia FreeHand 4 (a .vrt file could be opened by FH4 by changing the file extension of the .vrt file in the document bundle to .fh4)
- the map builder for a little game called _Doom_
- a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...) Pages.app by Pages, Inc.
Other ports were notable, but more prosaic w/ WordPerfect being notable for taking full advantage of Display PostScript and Services and being done in just 6 weeks time (easily done since they started w/ a working Unix version).
It is notable that for a long while, WebObjects was basically keeping the company alive, with major vendors including the USPS and Dell (that latter was a major embarrassment to MS, and their efforts to change Dell over did _not go well and garnered some notable press).
Sad my Cube no longer boots, it w/ a connected Wacom ArtZ, paired w/ an NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running Go Corp. PenPoint (and later an Apple Newton MessagePad 110) represent the high-water mark of my GUI experience and got me through college --- these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and a MacBook w/ Wacom One, but I still run Freehand/MX....
My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.
- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.
Caroline Rose also has an interview there, and it was also well-worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RikO_3jedlY
Thanks to both you and the GP commenter for the references. I've queued both of them up to download. CHM's oral histories are priceless, though finding the right ones to listen to can be difficult with the volume.
I was on the Virtuoso team at Altsys. Until Freehand was murdered by Adobe, there was still a ton of NeXT flavor in it.
Yeah, I was a beta-tester for Freehand/MX and argued then that the NeXTstep code should have been revived to make a Cocoa app rather than the MacOS front-end to make a Carbon app.
Weird to state all these details, leading with 'presumably'
I don't have the book, and I don't have much faith in writers, esp. when writing about NeXT, e.g., David Pogue writing in his column in _MacWorld_ and noting that Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad (correct) running Windows 95 (incorrect) since he couldn't be bothered to check that the ThinkPad model in question (I believe a 760C) was of course on the NeXTstep Intel compatibility list, and so, was of course running NeXTstep --- Lighthouse Design's Presentation.app was used as the model for Apple's Keynote.app
Will concede that David Pogue is a bit of a hack compared to the other biographers. I didn't think his recent book added much except for some stories from the Tim Cook era.
Wasn't PowerPoint also based on an application initially made for NeXT?
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