The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely:
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
> Sorry, wut.
Please avoid swipes and tropes like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely:
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/
NeXT was, at its core, about getting back to the other two things.
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.