Rixstep should be shortly rolling out ‘Past Masters’. Check this link for updates.
It would be nice to have screenshots. Oh well.
Things started optimistically with Apple's OS X at the start of the New Millennium. The world needed an OS standard that was safer than Pfizer's vaccines, Unix was the OS, but it also needed a desktop. Steve Jobs provided that desktop.
Working out of futuristic offices in Redwood City, and trying to keep to their grueling schedule, Steve's NeXT team tried to blow everyone's mind. But, deep down inside, the system was Unix.
Unix as a fundament blows Windows out of the water. Unix is scaleable. Unix, in the form of Linux, was first to the moon. But NeXT's FreeBSD predated Linux and Linus Torvalds said that, had he known of FreeBSD, Linux would never have existed. FreeBSD was for a long time the most prevalent server OS on the Internet.
But it needs dazzle if it's to please Steve Jobs. Multimedia is good too. Other fancy systems were available, but none understood where things were going. With its kinky application architecture, NeXT was poised to take over the hill.
Steve came back to Cupertino when the time was right - as a lowly nobody strolling the corridors. Six months after the merger, at a big summer holiday weekend, Steve sold all his Apple shares, caused a run on the stock, and was summoned to appear before a furious board. He promised not to sell for the first half-year and he held to that promise - before dumping it all.
Steve told the board that Gil Amelio wasn't right for Apple. Amelio had started draining the Cupertino swamp, but he lacked charisma. Steve walked out of that board meeting as the new interim CEO pf Apple.
Officially Steve ran the company, but actually the employees ran it. Steve took along his braintrust from NeXT. Avie Tevanian was there, now in charge of software engineering. Avie's NeXT partner, hardware designer Jon Rubinstein, was also there. And they could have just put NeXTSTEP on the market. After all, it was dazzling. It outperformed Apple's best line easily. It did things no other OS vendor could dream of. And it sported a patented programming language that Steve made sure to purchase before making the trek. Objective-C.
Objective-C
Objective-C is Smalltalk on steroids. Using the same basic model as Smalltalk, Objective-C uses the C compiler and the C underbody to streamline things to an extreme. Unlike the abominable C++, Objective-C doesn't mess with C innards or redefine C syntax. An Objective-C application without Objective-C is pure C.
Objective-C utilises messaging. That old Alan Kay idea of a desktop filled with sovereign globules all hanging out together, interacting with one another.
Some major names in the ISV market latched onto NeXT really fast. Many wanted to follow along to OS X. But Steve and Avie ran into trouble with the Maccie fanboys.
First was Steve's demonstration of the NeXT file manager known as File Viewer. It looked a bit like the file I/O dialogs in OS X today. Some new controls, a new way to look at some things. A very purist approach to object orientation.
Object orientation had become a dirty word in the industry. Everybody and his gender-fluid sister wanted to get on the OO gravy train. Alan Kay reminded the world that it was he who had coined the term, and languages like C++ were not what he had in mind!
Windows packs everything in one file. The accelerator table and other resources, dialog templates, etc, then uses a special resource compiler to reduce things down to a sort of object code, then the ordinary compiler licks in, then the linker, and viola, as Kelly Bundy used to say, you got yourself a Windows executable!
One file. Runs nice. Works wonders.
The NeXT application is actually a directory, Carrying the extension 'app'. But that part's hidden in the typical interface. Under that top-level directory comes a subdirectory called 'Contents'. Thanks, guys. Didn't they make that disappear on the phone? And under 'Contents' you get the code/resources division.
An architecture that lends itself to multiple hardware architectures and can, under the further subdirectory 'Resources', contain a shitload of independent files with icons and other types of images, and with the NeXT version of the Windows dialog template.
NIBs
Windows dialog templates are dead. They do nothing. A template gives the dimensions of the dialog, the placement within the dialog of all the controls. Nothing is 'alive'.
NeXT's NIBs - NeXT Interface Builder files - are said to be 'freeze-dried'. For they come alive when running. And anyone who's ever struggled with resizing knows how great it is with NeXT's Interface Builder automatically adjusting control sizes and placements. The dude who created the original, SOS Interface, so dazzled Steve that Steve rushed off in a panic to buy up all the shrink-wrap copies he could find. 'I want that on my computer!'
Unix was great with IPC - it had none - and it was great with pipelining, but NeXT offered arguably the first IDE where the thinking and the construction both were graphical. As for the programming model? Model-View-Controller, they called it.
The original Project Builder / Interface Builder lineup was dazzling. They'd undergone a cosmetic makeover in Cupertino, but they still worked as they had in Redwood City. And they interacted with each other. This was good thinking. Make instead a monster like Xcode and you're headed for trouble.
The compiler was very helpful as well, issuing tips and tricks as it built your application.
Crashes are rare in ObjC development, and project completion times about one-fifth compared with the rest of the industry. It's also been said that, if something you're working on seems too hard, you're probably not doing it right.
Apple was all-in with PPC back then. In addition to having an architecture Intel could never catch, PPC used its own instruction set, meaning malware shell code wouldn't have its desired effect. So OS X was essentially impervious to viruses at the hardware level.
Lots of people wanted to jump on the OS X bandwagon. One journo we knew, out of NYC and very well known in the industry, returned her gifted Mac because she didn't like the pinstripes. The early versions, up to and including 10.2 Jaguar, had subtle horizontal lines throughout, giving the eyes something to rest on.
We tried to convince her to hold on, as new versions would perhaps reduce the pinstripes, but she was adamant - she went back to Windows.
How anyone could use Windows after 'I LOVE YOU' was a mystery.