Video of Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXT 3.0 (mirror)
Similar to the last Mac introduction video, someone put up one of Steve Jobs demonstrates NeXTSTEP 3.0, which is really cute. The site has basically been hammered off the grid for the moment, so I've posted a mirror of it here:
- stevejobs_nextdemo.gz (50 MB AVI)
If you're a Mac user, you'll probably need VLC or MPlayer to view the file. Mirror if you can, and use any mirrors that might be in the comments/trackbacks if you can.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 28, 2005, at 08:18 PM
Comments (21)
Posted by: Charles W at January 28, 2005 08:42 PM
Is it me, or did Steve Jobs have a mullet?
Posted by: salvador at January 28, 2005 09:06 PM
That's a really cool video and fun to see the old dock. Seeing the old services menu just made me sad. And does that old NeXT machine scrolls faster than my 1GHz iMac...? :)
Posted by: cereal at January 28, 2005 09:12 PM
did Jobs say "blam-oh" once? or was it more like "blahmo"?
Posted by: at January 28, 2005 09:12 PM
In the video Steve Jobs says "It takes a second to transfer because it's coming from the Mac, the Mac is a little slow to give it up"
Priceless.
Posted by: Sue Clearborn at January 28, 2005 09:27 PM
Way cool thanks! I saw this on OSNews this morning but the site was dead then.
Posted by: Maz at January 28, 2005 09:28 PM
You may want to consider telling people how to decompress a .gz file, or will OS X do it by default? It will decompress .zip, but I don't know what .gz is.
Posted by: Chucky at January 28, 2005 10:40 PM
You rock, drunkenblog.
Posted by: Ron at January 29, 2005 12:50 AM
djoPlayer will play this file too. Also, what year is this from?
Posted by: Allan at January 29, 2005 01:40 AM
The 50Mb AVI seems to be corrupted or truncated - the movie ends rather abruptly at 18:47.
Posted by: drunkenbatman at January 29, 2005 03:42 AM
The 50Mb AVI seems to be corrupted or truncated - the movie ends rather abruptly at 18:47.
I downloaded and double checked to make sure I hadn't futzed something; that's the length of the video. :)
*yawn* to bed with my ass.
Posted by: Carl at January 29, 2005 05:12 AM
What I find most fascinating about this video is that the difference between NeXT then and OS X today comes down to two things:
1. The web
(which was created on a NeXT box anyway)
2. iApps
Other than that, OS X is just a prettier version of NeXT, complete with a dock, font panel, and underutilized services. It's strange and sad to think about how little progress we've made since then.
OTOH, the iApps have made the computer much more useful, since now we can sort out our music, photos, and movies inside the computer in addition to just reading the Wall Street Journal.
Posted by: Oliver at January 29, 2005 05:42 AM
Does anyone know what year this is from? Must be around 87, 90 I guess.
Posted by: tech010101x at January 29, 2005 09:26 AM
This was 1991 or 1992. Interesting that the old NeXTstep Mail.app had voice annotation built in - but that's not in the current Mail.app.
Also back then, all NeXTstep apps had to be "Cocoa-type" ports and Adobe ported Adobe Illustrator, Altsys porrted Virtuoso (now Freehand), SAS ported SAS, Wolfram ported Mathematica, and Frame ported FrameMaker and so on. Today, most of the "pro" apps are Carbon apps - many of which are relatively poor ports to Mac OS X. The whole excuse that the big software developers have to completely re-write their code bases to make a Cocoa port is hogwash - many have done it before without re-writing. The real reason is that, even though the Mac platform still represents a huge portion of the pro app market, these software developers did not want a Mac OS X only port - they wanted a substandard version that could run in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X with the same binary. Therefore the app usually suffered under Mac OS X. It is only last year in the transition that many of these apps got Mac OS X only upgrades - and got a bit better. But many are still awful.
Posted by: Meeeeee at January 29, 2005 01:32 PM
Thanks for the vid! :)
Posted by: ex-NeXT-user at January 29, 2005 03:20 PM
The reason Mail.app in NEXTSTEP included voice annotations and the new one doesn't is that the NeXT used a proprietary protocol called NeXTMail instead of (or in addition to) SMTP. The reason for this is that MIME encoding of attachements had not really taken off yet. NeXTMail allowed RTF formatted text with inline graphics, audio, and video. Audio in emails was always a feature that demo-ed really well, but was not really that useful in real life.
Posted by: Bruce Hoult at January 29, 2005 03:43 PM
Thanks for the video!
btw, automatically unzipped and opened in QuickTime Player here, plays fine.
Posted by: Jon H at January 29, 2005 06:58 PM
"The reason Mail.app in NEXTSTEP included voice annotations and the new one doesn't is that the NeXT used a proprietary protocol called NeXTMail instead of (or in addition to) SMTP."
It used the standard SMTP. It'd kinda have to, otherwise it would only work on all-NeXT networks, and you couldn't send NeXTMail across the Internet.
NeXTMail was just a NeXT-specific packaging a message as something equivalent to an .rtfd file package, tar'd, compressed, and uuencoded.
Here's a Google Groups link to a post from 1991 which quoted Avie Tevanian's response about a question about the NeXTMail format. Avie includes instructions on encoding and decoding NeXTMail.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.programmer/msg/8743946523dcda99?dmode=source
Posted by: Jon H at January 29, 2005 07:01 PM
Carl writes: "Other than that, OS X is just a prettier version of NeXT, complete with a dock, font panel, and underutilized services."
I really wish Apple would do the Right Thing and put the Services menu on the right-click popup menu. When I want to define a word using OmniDictionary's service, I always find myself right-clicking.
Posted by: Jon H at January 29, 2005 07:07 PM
I'm wondering if the new Dictionary/Thesaurus app, which is apparently part of Tiger, will include an easter egg that was in NeXT's Dictionary.app.
NeXTSTEP, like OS X, supported the use of user photos, so when you received an email from someone, you could see a little picture of the sender.
Here's the easter egg: In NeXT's dictionary.app, if you looked up "gullible", it would display your own picture.
(Perfect if someone falls for the old "Did you know there's no such word as 'gullible'?" trick, and looks it up.)
Posted by: timor at January 30, 2005 02:17 AM
The openstep.de guys who you link to are complete idiots just whoring their domain. They keep putting up videos but dropping mirrors just to see themselves slashdotted even though no one can see the file because of their ineptitude.
I just wanted to post a quick thanks! Thanks in general for running this site and thanks in particular for hosting the couple of Apple vids over the past week. I'm sure the bandwidth usage must be murder, and I appreciate it.