About bankruptcies
Just as it wasn't a roll of the dice that caused the birth of the Renaissance in Italy and not in Finland, so it wasn't a roll of the dice that caused the iPhone to originate in Apple. Just as it was enough for the Italian humanists to look at the environment, imbued with classicism, that surrounded them with new eyes, so for the people of Apple it was enough to take what they had elaborated and pour it into a new mould. Nokia could not have created the device of devices, which was originally a company that manufactured plastic boots. Nor could it be Samsung which had specialized in the production of spaghetti and then in the refining of sugar.
Almost half a century of Apple's obsession with user interfaces, ease of use, the indissoluble integration between hardware and software, driven by the holistic vision of its boss, could only lead to something as revolutionary as the iPhone. Likewise the pervasive classical heritage of the Italian landscape and mentality resulted in humanism and the Renaissance.
It is one of the many paradoxes that punctuate the march of technology that iOS, the software that powers the iPhone, was born from the legacy of one of the five biggest failures in the history of the computer: NeXT. NeXT was the company started by Steve Jobs after his exit from Apple in 1985. He built futuristic workstations powered by an equally futuristic software, NeXTstep. Called by Steve Jobs “the true gem” of NeXT innovation, NeXTstep was too far ahead of its time. It was one of the greatest failures, of course, but also one of the most seminal experiences in the history of the computer second only to that of the Xerox Parc in Palo Alto. NeXT was also the gym where Jobs learned to meditate and correct his mistakes. The other great leadership school was Pixar where Jobs learned a lot from Edwin Catmull and John Lassater.
Apple, a NeXT with a different name
The story of the NeXT has been told many times and most recently in great detail by Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs. Suffice it to know that in 1996, NeXT's technology and all of its employees were absorbed by Apple following Jobs' return to the company he co-founded. From there began the long march towards today's Apple: 1000 dollars of investment in 1995 Apple shares would be worth 117 dollars today. Those who arrived with Jobs from NeXT to Apple had traveled that long and arduous path similar to the one Xenophon describes in the Anabasis.
But this is known. One thing, however, is known less. NeXT technology and especially its operating system, NeXTstep, has relentlessly fed Apple technology for over 20 years and the men and women from NeXT have been placed in the most responsible positions of the apple company. So much so that at one point there was no mystery about the existence of a sort of "NeXT mafia" or "NeXT caste", so important was the influence and remuneration of the people who came from that experience, the NeXTonians.
The NeXTonians
Among the NeXTonians who moved to Apple in prominent roles is Avie Tevanian, the mastermind behind the software architecture of NeXT and later Mac OS X, who remained at Apple until 2006 as Chief Software Technology Officer. He comes from NeXT Scott Forstall, who was responsible for IOS software development until October 2010. Craig Federighi, Tevanian's successor and now responsible for the entire software area at Apple, is also a NEXTonian. Among them there is also Budd Tribble, one of the founders of NeXT, to whom we owe the famous definition of "reality distortion field" with regard to Jobs' vision. Budd returned to Apple in 2002 and served until 2015 as vice-president of Software Technology.
Recently Scott Forstall, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in a meeting organized to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, told how the iPhone was born in the mind of Steve Jobs and how it was created by the team that he himself together with the other managers who had been called to direct it. We will deal with this testimony in another post. Now let's deal with NeXTstep and its legacy at Apple.
From NeXTstep to Mac OS X to iOS
That between NeXTstep and iOS there is a relationship of direct filiation, mediated by Mac Os X, is something that goes beyond any reasonable doubt. A large number of classes that make up the architecture of the iOS development system (named Cocoa and then Swift) have the prefix “NS” which stands for NextStep. Even before iOS, NeXTstep had become Mac OS X which in 2001 was released as the operating system of the new generation of Macs.
The graphical tool, part of XCode (the iOS development environment), to build the user interface of applications for iOS devices and to combine the various elements that compose it comes directly from NeXT. It hasn't even changed its name, it's called Interface Builder and produces a.nib file (short for NeXT Interface Builder).
Even the "X" included in the name of the new Mac operating system is no small clue: it stands for NeXT or, perhaps more likely, stands for UniX, which in addition to constituting the core of NeXTstep is also the core of Mac OS X. We don't know the origin of this "X" anyway, but there is a very close relationship between all this.
That Jobs wanted to preserve and build on the legacy of his 10 years of hard work and travail at NeXT is beyond question. During that experience, free from any external constraints and with the capital provided by Ross Perot and Canon, he had implemented his vision of making the computer the smartest of household appliances.
Unix and the Mach micronucleus
Like NeXTstep, Mac OS X and iOS are based on Unix, the portable operating system developed in Bell Labs and released in 1969. The main feature of Unix is its ability to run timesharing applications. Timesharing allows the computer's main memory (CPU) to distribute its time among multiple tasks and multiple users. This means that if an application crashes unexpectedly for any reason, this event does not cause the entire system to crash and consequently other timeshared applications.
Unix easily allows multitasking, memory protection and the execution of programs and services in the background, i.e. without direct user control. All properties that the operating systems of the first personal computers did not have. For example, a Unix-powered system may be playing a piece of music while printing, the user is processing a formula in a spreadsheet, and a second remote user is downloading a file over the network from that computer's resources.
To develop the NeXTstep system architecture, Jobs called on Avie Tevanian who had worked on the Mach project at Carnegie-Mellon University. Mach, which will become the NeXT kernel, was built on a radical approach known as "micro-core architecture" whereby the operating system had to outsource as many functions as possible in order to improve its stability. A principle contrary to that in vogue at the time.
Objective-C
Like NeXTstep, Mac OS X and iOS were developed in Objective-C, an object-oriented programming language derived from the C language. Objective-C allows application developers to use pre-set blocks of code (objects) to develop certain routine functions, without the need to program them from scratch. The objects are a sort of prefabricated components that can be assembled to obtain a specific building, as is done with lego.
In a 1995 interview, Jobs stated that object-oriented programming would revolutionize the way we create software over the next 20–30 years. And so it was.
Some applications still used today on the Mac or iPhone are the evolution of the software initially developed for the NeXT platform. Among these Numbers (initially Parasheet), Keynote (initially Concurrence), Pages, OmniGraffle (initially Diagram!).
Objective-C had been created by Brad Cox, a brilliant developer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, as an evolution of SmallTalk whose great potential Jobs had immediately sensed during his legendary visit to the center in 1977. Jobs obtained from Cox the license for the use of Objective-C in the NeXT and in 1995 Apple acquired Stepstone, the company founded by Cox, owner of the language.
AppKit Framework
Along with the Objective C language, NeXT also developed a set of ready-made objects to be used to develop software. These objects were collected in a framework called AppKit which at Apple became Cocoa for OS X and in 2008 Cocoa Touch for iOS. In addition to relieving developers from the onerous task of developing routine parts of the software, AppKit allows the most disparate applications to put the user in a position to use the same methods of using some functions, relieving the user of any learning problems.
Interface Builder
Interface Builder is a graphical tool that allows developers to build a user interface by dragging and dropping the elements (buttons, text boxes, pop-up menus, windows, etc.) from a palette that make up a graphical interface. In addition to presenting a defined graphic aspect, these elements have all the necessary functions incorporated. The palette can be extended with new objects which, once built, can be dragged into it and from that moment made available like the native objects. The legends of the objects self-localize according to the language selected in the system software.
Interface Builder was built by French developer Jean-Marie Hullot whom Steve Jobs called to work on NeXT in 1985 after seeing a demo that convinced him he had
got his hands on a “killer app”. Interface Builder was not integrated into NeXTstep, but offered as a standalone application together with the Sofware Development Kit. Apple then integrated Interface Builder into Mac OS X and iOS. With Interface Builder, on a NeXT computer, Tim Berners Lee, at Cern in Geneva, developed the first prototype of WordWideWeb.
PostScript displays
While all operating systems of the nineties used raster graphics (i.e. built with grids of pixels) to display text and icons on computer screens, NeXT used vector graphics (i.e. dots, lines, curves and polygons) to display icons, text and illustrations. The quality of a vector image is vastly superior to that of a bitmap or raster image because it is able to take advantage of the maximum resolution of the device where it is viewed. While in raster graphics it is the resolution of the image that determines its display quality.
The technology used by NeXT, to obtain vector graphics on video, was provided by Adobe (the home of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat software) through a tool called Display Postscript. NeXT engineers completely rewrote the Adobe tool engine to fit the object-oriented operating system.
Mac OS X and iOS now use a different tool, called Quartz, for displaying graphics on screen which, however, uses the same concept of vector graphics. Quartz produces Postscript-like vector images using the PDF rendering model. The abandonment of Postscript is essentially due to the costs deriving from the acquisition of user licenses from Adobe.
The Bundles
OS X and iOS both use a way of managing applications derived from NeXTstep. These are bundles, i.e. a directory that allows you to group the executable source code and all the resources, including plug-ins, necessary for the operation of an application. All of these files reside within this package without being compiled into the executable as is the case with Windows. The operating system, at a low level, sees the bundle as a set of files and the user as a simple icon. It is a solution that greatly simplifies the operation thanks to the simple hierarchical structure of the directories.
The file manager
The Finder is Apple's file manager that takes care of navigating through disks, folders and files. With Mac OS X the Finder was completely redesigned on the model of the NeXTstep file manager which in its essence is similar to that of Windows. In addition to the simple list of files or related icons of a directory, typical of Mac OS of the origins, Mac OS X also introduces a hierarchical type visualization completely analogous to that of NeXTstep. This structure develops in contiguous windows showing the contents of the directory or of the selected resource so as to have visualized the entire path of the resource within the file system.
There are many other aspects that Mac OS X and iOS have derived from NeXTstep and its experience, truly one of the most seminal and learning experiences in the history of technology.
And then, threefold cheers for failures!
