Joseph Spiros
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2022–2026
35:07 · 184K views · Apr 7, 2020
A 35-minute demonstration of NeXTSTEP Release 3 by Steve Jobs. It shows the object-oriented development environment and features such as dragging a live chart between apps.
Cited as a primary source for what NeXTSTEP could do and how Jobs pitched rapid application development.
5 comments from Hacker News
NeXT, for one. They didn't exactly die miserably, given their technology is what ultimately still runs Apple's OS software and APIs. NeXT's business model was based on objects to some extent at least and they were enthusiastically selling object-oriented software as a business feature, rather than a technical matter only software developers care about. Here's Steve Jobs demoing NeXTSTEP's object-oriented development environment: this video The way he explains it, it makes perfect sense (as one would expect): In an ideal world, an object-oriented software development approach not only allows non-technical people to define requirements but also enables them to compose and build applications from existing components without having to write a single line of code.
Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else. For example, in this video at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that version of Objective C worked. I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at best. But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast") and they wanted to let third party applications do their own thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the application, what's their product? Never let profound world changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar company, I guess. I think of it, in my muddle headed imagineering way, this way: [LINK] I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and you've got your spatial interface.
Still, the Web might have never existed without Objective-C, which is moreso my point. From [0]: > A second phase would almost certainly involve some programming in order to set up a real system at CERN on many machines. An important part of this, discussed below, is the integration of a hypertext system with existing data, so as to provide a universal system, and to achieve critical usefulness at an early stage. > (... and yes, this would provide an excellent project with which to try our new object oriented programming techniques!) TBL March 1989, May 1990 Objective-C had a wonderfully pragmatic approach to OOP, though it remained tied to the systems it was on because of the standard object libraries that enabled it. NeXT promotional materials really liked to showcase its suitedness to rapid application development, whether Jobs himself doing so [1] or in a staged competition with Sun [2] [0] [LINK] [1] this video [2] [LINK]
I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager? Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about? [0] this video
this video has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Computer" and then moves into hitting the "Network" icon globe that shows other computers on his local network.