Tam has a great article on how the Mac faithful haven’t been quite so happy since their product has gone main stream. I have been a Mac user since 1992, so I’ve been working with this platform for a while. Of course, the truly geeky among us know that we have not witnessed the Triumph of the Macintosh, but have in fact witnessed NeXT take its rightful place in the world of computing! The original Macintosh died in 2001, and what everyone has been using since then is really a jazzed up version of NeXTStep that now runs on a very expensive and stylishly designed Intel PC.
12 thoughts on “Mac Gone Mainstream”
Comments are closed.
The even geekier realize NextStep took source code from BSD.
Only some of it is based on BSD. NEXT used (and MacOS X still uses) a microkernel architecture based on Mach, rather than on BSD’s monolithic kernel model. It uses BSD’s network stack and process model, but its architecture is pretty different overall.
I’m such a geek that I have a NeXT. :D
I remember all the hype when it came out. Oooh, it’s got a MO drive. Whoops, it’s got a sky high price too …
I did at one point. I have cubes in my attic, but whether they still work or not I don’t know. I’m doubtful. The hight of next geekness is having a color next, but I never got that far into the cult :)
I bought a color one off TD. It is totally awesome. And by awesome, I mean sweet.
*bow* I am not worthy.
When that Mac Mini thing came out I asked a Mac-loving friend of mine what he thought about it…and he went off ranting and raving about how terrible of an idea it was. He was upset that Macs were going to be so affordable, even though they were lower-end.
I asked if a budget PC with all of the Macs supposed stability and superiority wasn’t a good thing, and if it wouldn’t perhaps open the Mac market up by convincing some to step up to top-line Macs. He would have none of it.
After a long discussion, I came to the conclusion that he was mere a Mac Elitist who hated to see the “masses” be able to afford a Mac of any sort.
A jazzed-up NeXTStep with a full set of MacOS APIs?
Carbon ain’t exactly NeXT stuff, and hell, if NeXTStep had had Cocoa it might have had a chance…
(I’m only enough of a geek to have a Mac Cube, which is too slow to be useful. As the fastest NeXT cube, IIRC, was a 33mhz 68040, I’ll pass. I don’t run my Quadra 700 either, for the same reason.)
(I’m also glad I’m not a True Believer, despite having used Macs since System 6 [alongside DOS and then Windows and since ’94 or so, unix]; I got a Mini right before the Intel switch, and I think it’s great, and that it’s great that people buy them. Now my Main Mac is a Core2 iMac, and it’s also great.
OS bigots confuse me.)
Isn’t Cocoa derived from Openstep?
I’ve got an old NeXT machine out in the garage. I’ve got a VAX out there, too. Makes a great plant stand.
Cocoa is so much derived from OpenStep that most of the objects in the API are pre-fixed with “NS”.