Steve Jobs parked in Handicapped spaces and kicked old ladies?

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Steve Jobs was a weird arsehole... His biography goes into great detail about that. But the simple truth is Apple products were better with him around. He was tireless in ensuring that a product did exactly what it was supposed to to. Nothing more, nothing less, and that is a painful process... But it was something he was good at.

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The Mac incorporated a lot of really interesting, innovative ideas in its day. Unfortunately, most of the really good stuff either never caught on with anyone else (the Resource Manager and the forked filesystem,) or has since been forgotten (intuitive, heavily standardized UI) - especially now that Mac OS is just BSD with a shiny skin on it.

Actually of the original Mac... Only the GUI was really interesting...

And modern Mac are not just "BSD with a shiny interface", they are in fact NeXTStep machines. Vastly superior to the original Mac.

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The GUI was not an apple invention, they "borrowed" that from xerox.

Jobs paid Xerox for the right for his team to visit the PARCS development project... The PARCS people weren't happy about that, but the Xerox managment were happy for the shares in Apple

Jobs almost caused Apple to go belly-up.

John Scully actually... Jobs had left apple by 1985, and set up NeXT computers, which  is the platform we now think of as a Mac.

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Como?

@bloodline - The OS'?  Definitely NeXT.  The hardware? Pure PC.

Pure PC? And antiquated view, I run Apple's NeXT operating system on Macs and iPhones and iPads... It's the same OS, and some pretty exotic hardware, especially the iPhone 5S!

So Mac? A trademarked name.

Yeah the Mac is just a brand name, because the public wouldn't have bought an iNeXT Cube.

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OK...we already know the first browser was written for a NeXT box, AND now you've referenced the author of the browser.

Which answers your question really...

And I still don't see how NeXT offered a vital advantage in creating a browser.

Until you have had a chance to play with either OpenStep, GNUStep or Cocoa, I guess you'll never know.

The maturity of the aforementioned frameworks and the simplicity of the InterfaceBuilder coupled with the runtime flexibility of Objective-C make development of complex software (like a web browser) rather simple.

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I guess I'm just too jaded having worked with fairly decent GUIs when Win 3.0 was just being introduced and, of course working with some talented programmers.
While I can see the advantages, I can can also see it just would have been more work on another platform.

NeXTStep was the first of the modern operating systems (perhaps BEOS was the second?), operating systems built from the ground up using object oriented paradigms. Where Model-View-Controler abstractions were rigidly enforced, where complex applications could built quickly from a large well developed frameworks with little need to understand how the frameworks worked and no fear that an OS update would render your application broken, where event loops are a distant memory...

Even my (our) beloved AmigaOS feels old and clunky when compared to NeXTStep.

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Who cares what system was used so long ago.
If it had not been NeXT it would have been some thing else.

With all due respect, this has to be the dumbest comment in the thread, and it has plenty of competition!

The point was that NeXT was the first proper object oriented operating system, designed that way from the ground up. As such building a complex application in NeXT was (and still is, in many respects) much easier and quicker than on competing systems.

If it wasn't for that ease and simplicity, the web may have taken much longer to be developed, and possibly not developed and certainly not in the open form we know today!

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Lately, all you do is rabidly defend work that is a derivative of earlier research.
First Linux, and now this.

Um... Everything is derivative of earlier research. That's called development of technology.

I will defend something if people are delutionally being unfair about it. My only irrational hatred is towards Java, I'm quite sure Java is a great language and VM now but I just don't like it

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Java is a perfectly fine language. Unfortunately, it's a perfectly fine language that's chained to a terribly crappy runtime library and VM... :/

As I said my hatred is probably irrational, but coming from C/C++ and Obj-C I find Java horrible. I feel like I'm coding with boxing gloves on when I use it.

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With all due respect, this has to be the dumbest comment in the thread, and it has plenty of competition!

Its amazing how some people have to use arguments as "if this and that had or had not happened, then this and that would not have been, thus this and that..."

Welcome to to the concept of cause and effect.

Look Steve Jobs was not the second coming of Jesus.

He might have been, I don't know, I'm not a Christian... But I honestly couldn't care less what Steve Jobs was or wasn't. I'm arguing about the importance of NeXTStep in the history of computing.

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Had Apple not bought NeXT then NeXTStep probably would have sadly faded into irrelevance like the Amiga, BeOS and Plan9.

But we'll never know.

One could argue (and I will, ) that had Apple not bought NeXTStep, then probably apple would have faded into irrelevance.

The alternative on the table at the time as BeOS, but that lacked any real software at the time, had no real world usage and wasn't a mature software platform. Plus the NeXTStep deal meant that Apple got Steve Jobs back, and he was the only arsehole capable of fighting Bill Gate.

One day I'll give ObjC yet another chance and it will finally click into place and I'll begin to love it. Maybe.

Once you get over the syntax (which took me months), it really is awesome... That said all my recent work has been in Obj-C++, which gives me the best of both worlds

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Had BeOS gotten the spot as the official successor to classic Mac OS, that would've changed drastically. The Mac was still far less of a niche market at that time, so there would've been plenty of development for it. Such a pity they didn't go that route...if they had, I'd still be a Mac user myself.

I too like BeOS, and used BeOS 5PE for about a year between 2001-2002. But in 1996, it was nothing but a lot of good ideas, promises and hot air... NeXTStep offered a mature, stable, proven platform with an extensive software and developer base. For the money BeOS were demanding from Apple, they weren't able to offer much.

In the end the NeXT deal worked out best for Apple, they got a solid OS, a first class/mature engineering team, a competent CEO and a software platform surprisingly well suited to the mobile devices that eventually came to dominate their product line up.

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شعورت بيشتر از اين نميرسه. جواب انسان ابلهي مثل تو، خاموشي است. قاعده كلي ام اينه كه وقتم رو براي فردي كه حد متوسط شعورش

I don't know what this means, and I'm too tired to google... But I do like bacon (frankly, the only thing stopping me being vegetarian actually)... It's not for everyone one though, it's all for me!!

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شعورت بيشتر از اين نميرسه. جواب انسان ابلهي مثل تو، خاموشي است. قاعده كلي ام اينه كه وقتم رو براي فردي كه حد متوسط شعورش

Don't worry. Google only mutilates this and makes it unintelligible.

Did you know that I'm allergic to molluscs? Octopus, squid, muscles, oysters, clams and snails all poisonous to to me, it's very difficult being in a relationship with a Chinese woman :-/