I've been building my own editor and gui toolkit, but modeled on Cocoa/OpenStep and similarly found tuning terminal performance involved more about tuning memory access and storage. That sounds somewhat similar to the experience in TFA.

Nope. Until they saw that (a) CocoaJava was a complete dud, not just technically, but also in terms of developers buy in and (b) Cocoa/ObjC was accepted well by a large part of the dev community.

> > "Garbage collection is deprecated in OS X 10.8. Use ARC

> ARC is garbage collection,

In terms of the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" refers to the failed attempt to introduce a tracing garbage collector. Apple/OSX always had reference counting (introduced by NeXT pre-acquisition with Foundation in EOF and later in OPENSTEP 4.0), which technically is also a form of garbage collection, but again in this case the terms are distinct.

> So they need to sell ARC as the great saviour, so much better than "GC".

Again, in the Apple ecosystem, "Garbage Collection" always referred to the tracing collector, even before they had to abandon it due to it not working.

And ARC is markedly better than their GC, but only arguable and at best marginally better than the reference counting they had pre-GC, and in some significant sense worse. Which is why I generally don't use ARC. For my style of programming the benefits are minuscule and the drawbacks real.

And that's really sad, because earlier Mac OS X (and even OPENSTEP to a degree) was an Eldorado for boutique developers, not least due to frameworks like Cocoa and Objective-C (despite all the hate it seems to get).

If you knew C, it was not hard to grasp Objective-C (at least it was much easier than say C++ and MFC on the Windows side of things).

There are many people working to extend NeXT, Openstep and even Rhapsody. Not to mention emulation projects and deep dives into XNU source, early Darwin source and shoehorning kernels and libraries into various places.

The Epson NX was purpose-built to run NeXTStep, for example, and bringing support for machines like that and the Canon object.station into 86box is a pet project of mine.

Join us https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=5286.ms...

- OPENSTEP 4.2 --- for use on a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ tablet

- Newton MessagePad

I've been waiting for Apple to make a product which I want to use since the Newton was shut down, making do w/ a succession of Windows tablets and a Wacom One display attached to my MacBook, and a Kindle Scribe (recently upgraded to a Coloursoft), and a Galaxy Note 10+ --- being able to use the same stylus on all of my devices is quite nice.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad

is highly recommended.

Also, Jerry Kaplan's wonderful:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

touches a bit on the early history of it as a pen computer project.

Still have my ThinkPad 755c, and still a bit bummed that I was never able to get OpenSTEP to run on it. (It's worth noting that when David Pogue complained of Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad after the purchase of NeXT by Apple that it was running NeXTstep and not Windows 95 as he claimed.)

Really wish the Lenovo Yogabook 9i was a ThinkPad model (so that it would have a Trackpoint) and that it used Wacom EMR stylus technology --- wouldn't've been able to resist that.

Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.

Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.

I don't think Apple under Jean-Louis Gassee would have successfully made these steps. Apple probably would have ended up getting purchased by some larger tech company by the end of 1999; Apple almost got purchased by IBM sometime around 1992-1993, and in early 1996 Sun made a serious proposal to buy Apple.

1. There were far more users of the classic Mac OS than there were users of NeXTstep/OPENSTEP. Mac OS X has many of OPENSTEP’s underpinnings, but it wasn’t OPENSTEP 5.0; it was Mac OS X, a continuation of the Mac but with new underpinnings. The interface was different enough to represent a new direction for the Mac but without turning the Mac UI/UX into that of NeXT.

2. At the time NeXTstep was under development (mid-late 1980s), the case law surrounding UI look-and-feel and how much borrowing and inspiration one could have before it became infringing wasn’t settled. Apple had lawsuits with Digital Research and Microsoft over whether GEM and Windows infringed on the Macintosh’s look-and-feel. Recall that NeXT was formed after Steve Jobs’ failed coup at Apple against then-CEO John Sculley. Apple sued NeXT due to Jobs’ poaching of key Apple employees who worked with him on the Macintosh and allegations that NeXT was going to use Apple’s intellectual property (in some ways NeXT could be thought of as the evolution of the “Big Mac” project Steve Jobs worked on before his departure). They ended up settling out of court, but given Apple’s litigious nature and given the history of how NeXT came to be, it was very wise for NeXTstep to feature a UI/UX that was a radical departure from the Macintosh. While I don’t think a lawsuit about right-hand scroll bars would succeed, having them on the left helps defend against allegations that NeXTstep ripped off the Mac.

Let me do that w/ a MacBook Neo and iPad Air pair which look as if they belong together and which fit nicely into a bag and afford me the option of taking only the iPad Air and Apple Pencil when I want to travel light, and maybe I'll come back to the fold (the last thing I bought from Apple was Mac OS X Public Beta, before that it was OpenSTEP 4.2, and the last thing Apple made which I truly liked wholeheartedly was Snow Leopard).

Oh yeah, make the Apple Pencil work on an iPhone....

Instead, these days, I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, Book 3 Pro 360 (two of them, panic-bought a spare when I though the line was being discontinued, it's now up to a Book 5), Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (replacing a first-gen unit) and a Wacom One display connected to a MacBook (purchased by an employer) and more Wacom styluses than I can easily count....

The high watermark of my graphical computing experience was using an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint w/ FutureWave SmartSketch when mobile, and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ --- I've tried pretty much every thing in-between since, but when things were finally getting better, Microsoft did Fall Creator's Update and everything came crashing down....

I'd really like for Apple to make a device trifecta which I would actually be willing to buy.

I had the privilege of working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple when he ported Quake III Arena to Rhapsody, Apple’s internal name for the OpenStep/Mach kernel based MacOS X. I enjoyed John's reminiscence about working with Steve and Apple and thought I would share a few of my own memories from that time which provided me with some of the most satisfying moments and lessons of my career.

John was the first game developer I ever worked with. Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him.

John agreed to come to Cupertino and meet with several teams to share his development experiences with them. I picked him up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. He stood unassumingly in the lobby, framed in the background by a Christmas Tree.

On day one, we met with several internal teams at Apple. I was accustomed to see 3rd party developers emerge somewhat awed by their meetings with Apple engineers. In John’s case the reaction was reversed. I’ve never seen anyone grok complex systems and architectures so quickly and thoroughly as John. Amusingly, he walked around the Apple campus unrecognized by all but for the occasional, former NeXT employee.

On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John's.

That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse.

Steve’s jaw muscles visibly tensed and he became stone-faced. Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent.

John kicked off the meeting by saying, “So I’ve been working with MacOS for the past month and here’s what I learned.” His #1 concern (at an extremely high level) concerned OpenGL permissions and security for which he felt Apple needed a better solution than what he’d learned about the day before in meetings with the graphics team, even if it came at a slight cost in performance for 3D games. This was, suffice to say, typical of John in that he was approaching an issue from an objective engineering perspective and arguing for the most technically correct solution rather than pushing for something that might be of benefit to his personal projects.

Steve listened and abruptly said, “That’s not what we’re doing!” Then he looked at the three Apple employees in the room and asked, “Is it?” I confirmed that what John was raising as a concern came from a meeting with the graphics architecture team the day before. Without batting an eye, Steve stood up, tramped over to a Polycom phone and dialed from apparent memory the phone number of the engineering director whose admin informed Steve that he was at an offsite in Palo Alto. Steve hung up, sat down, and about 30 seconds later the phone rang with the engineering director on the line.

Steve said, “I’m here with a graphics developer. I want you to tell him everything we’re doing in MacOS X from a graphics architecture perspective.” Then he put his elbows on the table and adopted a prayer-like hand pose, listening to and weighing the arguments from his trusted director of engineering and from the game guy with the bloody smiley-face T-shirt. And what happened next was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever witnessed about Steve or any Silicon Valley exec. Early on in the discussion, the Apple engineer realized that “graphics engineer” in the room was John Carmack. And he realized that he was going to need to defend his technical decision, on the merits, in front of Steve. After extended back and forth, the Apple engineer said, “John, what you’re arguing for is the ideal …”

He never made it to the next word because Steve suddenly stood bolt upright, slamming both palms onto the desk and shouting, “NO!!!!”

“NO!!! What John is saying is NOT the ideal. What John is saying is what we have to do!!! Why are we doing this? Why are we going to all this trouble to build this ship when you’re putting a TORPEDO IN ITS HULL?!!!!”

All of this was said with the utmost conviction and at extremely high volume. To his credit, John, seated directly next to a yelling Steve Jobs, didn’t even flinch.

What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. Steve listened to both sides and made a call that would have long lasting implications for MacOS.

As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment.

After the meeting ended, I walked John to the Apple store on campus (this was before there were actual Apple stores) and asked him on the way what he thought of Steve’s response to the mouse comment. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.”

Good call, John