After seeing my buddies at Studio Neat launch an amazing new patch, I fell down the rabbit hole that is the NeXT logo.
Dan and Tom linked to this video, which shows Paul Rand delivering his work to Steve Jobs and his team at NeXT. I hadn’t seen this before, and boy, I wish it were longer than a mere 80 seconds in length:
Rand did powerful and authoritative work when it came to corporate logos, as reflected upon by Jobs in a 1993 interview:
On January 5, 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the Aqua user interface for the very first time. Stylistically, it was a bold departure from what had come before, and was no doubt created with the iMac G3 in mind.
The changes were more than skin deep, and no where was the influence of NeXT’s software more evident than the Dock, a place for users to stash documents, an easy way to launch applications, and generally anchor the user interface to the bottom or side of the screen.
While working on another project, I came across a Steve Jobs interview that I hadn’t heard before:
I know WebObjects is the butt of jokes these days, but hearing Jobs speak about in 1996 has given me a new appreciation for what NeXT was trying to do with it.
Steven Troughton-Smith has written an epic blog post, tracing the evolution from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X through the lens of Mail.app.
What’s the most important thing to come out of Switzerland? Chocolate? Clocks? Neutrality? The largest, most expensive scientific experiment in history which may eventually unlock the very secrets of the universe and unify our understanding of the smallest particles with that of the largest of heavenly bodies? No, none of these things. The answer is, of course, is the Internet.
With that intro, Nutter goes on to write one of the best pieces on the history of Web tools that I’ve seen, complete with a look at its future.
Steven Troughton-Smith is a wizard.
On Dec. 20, 1996, Apple announced that it had purchased NeXT:
Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, will return to Apple — the company he co-founded in 1976 — reporting to Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio, Apple’s Chairman and CEO.
I came across this video while working on my book, and thought it deserved a link.
In it, the editor has cut together Steve Jobs showing off NeXTSTEP and OS X. It’s really fun to see how the features of the former informed so much about the latter.
I haven’t seen this video before, but it’s pretty interesting:
This article discusses processor compatibility for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP systems:
The Intel versions of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP have been tested on Intel 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro processors. These are the only processors Apple supports for use with NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.
I’ve written a lot about NeXT over the years, but this video with Michael Johnson really is full of good stuff. I was hoping to make it to this event at WWDC, but it didn’t pan out. Now I’m really sad I wasn’t there in person.
_via The Loop_The whole thing is worth reading, but this part jumped out at me:
Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.
We didn’t get the Lisa back until we got OS X from NeXT. Once we had OS X, that was the Lisa! But we had it so early … If we had just worked on it and developed it until it was at a personal computer price, we would’ve had the most incredible technology ever for GUI computers and we would’ve really owned it and had the rights to it. So Macintosh… the Macintosh failed, really hard, and who built the Macintosh into a success later on? It wasn’t Steve, he was gone. It was other people like John Sculley who worked and worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away.