First, lets start out with the obvious... Why would you take either
everything2.com or
Wikipedia(1) as a better reference than me? If I put the contents of these posts on my site, would that make the information more valid for you than me talking directly to you and answering your questions?
(2)
What I'm telling you is mostly from the NeXT community's point of view... the Mac community (specially back in the 1980s) followed Apple's party line on these events.
AlBDamned said:
This book was co-written by the co-founder of MacWorld so I think you could probably say he was in the community when the NeXT story was unfolding.
When started, MacWorld wasn't completely independent from Apple... in fact it was (to start with) part of Apple marketing for the Macintosh.
Ok, but this article says that the non-compete clause stated all NeXT computers had only (a big only of course but nevertheless) to be more powerful than the similar Apple product so it wouldnt compete?
Originally Posted by everything2.com
When Jobs promptly resigned, Apple sued him for dereliction of duties (hah!)....
I dont quite understand that (there has to be more to it) but it would link with the prices and specs you give above that make each NeXT system more powerful and better specced than anything Apple had.
Well, Jobs had no duties at Apple... and he had free reign of the company to go where he pleased and do as he pleased. And so he went around talking to people about starting up a new computer company.
At this stage the company they were talking about was aimed at the education market and Jobs presented his ideas to the Apple board to get their support... and more importantly, their financial backing. He honestly believed that Apple would help him do this.
The board, when seeing the people Jobs was going to take with him sued.
It was at this point when Next (as it was originally written) abandon the education market as anything more than a jumping off point into other markets. Rather than being an Apple partner, Next was to be a stand alone computer company.
This change (in Apple's eyes) upped the ante in the legal case. It was no longer about taking both key and non-key people from Apple, Next was now going to be a full on competitor with Apple.
This was where the non-compete clause came in. Next could sell in
any market other than Apple's core market, the desktop. This really only left open the workstation and server markets. It was the fact that Next was being forced into the workstation market that pushed Unix at them. They needed to be Unix based to compete as workstation class systems.
To think that the addition of Unix was for students is completely illogical. By adding in Unix, Next was adding on an additional $700 in licensing per computer that could have been avoided if Unix wasn't there.
No, Next wasn't designing computers for schools... they were designing workstations to compete with the likes of Sun and Silicon Graphics.
I cant find anything that says NeXT targeted the education market as a first step...
But that was while he was still with Apple and Next was going to be an Apple partner company... not a competitor or a stand alone computer company. Apple's rejection of Jobs and his ideas radically change the directions of what Next was going to be before Next was really fully formed as a company.
Furthermore, according to wikipedia one of the main connotations for the emphasized e in NeXT is supposedly education.
However, because the NeXT cube was shunned by its core market, it then had to try and break into the workstation market because:
Originally Posted by everything2.com
Although the press was in love with the machine, its target market, higher education, saw things differently. Although it came with a full array of programs including Mathematica, a reference library, and the full works of William Shakespeare, it was too expensive and loaded to be a personal computer, yet too underpowered to be a workstation, the computer was dubbed by NeXT marketing to be a "personal workstation.
Like I said, unless you think everyone at NeXT was a fool, the system they designed wasn't designed for students. It was designed for mid-range workstation use.
And it is major revisionist history to say that NeXT computers were
underpowered. Motorola's 68030 was a workstation class processor at the time, and Silicon Graphics had just previously been using the 68020 as their main processor.
Both Apple and NeXT were using processors that far exceeded anything used in Intel based PCs at that time. Further, NeXT started using the 68040 more than a year before Apple. The 68040 was as fast as the MIPS R3000 processor used in Silicon Graphics systems and the microSPARC used by Sun.
Like I said, the only reason for using Unix was because the system wasn't aimed at students or the desktop. And the inclusion of Mathematica is a perfect example of what it was designed for... high end mathematics (the area I first started using NeXT system in). Also Mathematica wasn't included on systems sold outside the education market. If you wanted Mathematica on a NeXT system and were not a student/educator, you were paying full price. But you were also paying to run Mathematica on the best system for Mathematica.
And how good was Mathematica on NeXT hardware?
Last month after a presentation I gave someone came up to me to ask about NeXT software and hardware. What they wanted it for was to run a copy of Mathematica on (which version 3 can still be purchased for NeXT hardware for $35).
(3)
Mathematica isn't software for students... it is professional software for mathematicians. A single user license of Mathematica today is about $1,800, which is more than twice the price of QuarkXPress.
These were designed as professional, workstation class, systems.
On the subject of the change from
Next to
NeXT, this was done when Paul Rand of Yale designed the NeXT logo. He took his inspiration from Robert Indiana's
LOVE painting. Rand's idea for emphasizing the "e" by making it the only lower case letter was to represent
education, excellence, expertise, exceptional, excitement and e=mc2. So yeah, education was part of it... but then again, so is Special Relativity and I don't see anyone saying that these computers were designed for just the physics market.
The LOVE painting and NeXT logo
Is it not necessarily that they got it all wrong and all right, just that the pieces came together better the second time round at Apple and Steve had learnt from his experiences and applied a better ethic?
Well, if you discount what I'm saying for what others are saying... then NeXT people were practically morons.
When you add in the factors I'm telling you about, you start to realize that to have made it to 1996 was an amazing task. And the fact that Sun was about to attack the desktop market based on a partnership with NeXT tells you where NeXT was at the time that Apple acquired them. NeXT had given up on operating systems by this point in the same way that they had given up on hardware in 1993. Handing that part of their business over to Sun would at least give people a chance to experience NEXTSTEP... even if it was Solaris underneath rather than Mach/BSD.
But NeXT wasn't about to go under at that point either. NeXT was going to keep the areas that made them money... OpenStep Enterprise (runtime environment for other platforms), Enterprise Objects and WebObjects.
And like I've said many times before, Sun was flush with cash at this point. They were more than willing to buy any company that they saw as being up for sale... and NeXT wasn't up for sale.
Well, except for when Jobs offered it to Apple.
Is there any recommended reading on the subject?!
I haven't found any good books on NeXT... not that tell the whole story.
Sadly, most skip the points of the settlement, what NeXT was aiming for early on, just how powerful NeXT computers were at the time of there original release (comparable in speed to both the low end Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations), and the direction NeXT was going with Sun before Apple bought them (which seems to be universally ignored by everyone).
All of those were major factors in the history of NeXT. But all those factors contradict the
legend of the NeXT's failure... which seems to be the only story worth printing.
(1) Wikipedia is full of errors on the history of NeXT, Rhapsody and Apple. A good example is that Wikipedia has TextEdit as being the replacement for WriteNow on NeXT computers. TextEdit was a demo app included with OPENSTEP and didn't become the default word processor until the release of Rhapsody. From NEXTSTEP 2.1 to OPENSTEP 4.2 the default word processor was Edit.
(2) The reason I'm willing to write all this is that it gives me an excuse to finally write it all down so I can eventually make a page on this for my NeXT site.
(3) I, personally, run Mathematica 2.2.2 on my PowerBook 3400c, PowerBook Duo 2300c and in Blue Box on my PowerMac 8600/300. While nice software, I rarely had use for any computer stuff in my area of mathematics. I do run Geomview on an OPENSTEP system though.
