[ratbeard]

From this story I take away:

- A Sr. Marketing staff member saw technical deficiencies in the project and pulled a _complete 180°_ literally days before showtime in front of a huge client, successfully.

- Jobs pushed his workers hard.. though the ends justify the means

- The NeXT computer pioneered nearly everything we take for granted today (mouse, networking, Objective C) in a package targeted at the high end consumer. Sound familiar?

Brilliant.

[edit: clarify meaning]

[awinder]

Why the mouse? That was a holdover from Steve’s time at Apple, which was famously “borrowed” from Xerox PARC. Unless next did something special with the mouse that I’m unaware of.

[rahoulb]

"borrowed" - Apple paid Xerox in stock to have access to their technologies.

Jobs said later that he took away the GUI and the mouse, when he really should have taken away the networking and Smalltalk. That's why NeXT used BSD under the hood and Objective-C as its development environment.

[awinder]

Huh I didn’t know about the stock angle. Apparently it was a purchase agreement since they were pre-IPO, not a giveaway. So he got some pre-ipo financing and a look at great research tech. Very cool deal, thanks for the pointer.

[PunchTornado]

I don't think anyone takes for granted Objective C today. It's not used but for legacy code. Awful thing anyway.

[ams6110]

Hardly awful. It was message dispatch object oriented programming. It allowed development of what was essentially the Mac OS X operating system and applications, in the early 1990s. Software that ran on a 25Mhz Motorola 68040. Years before Windows 95, and far more advanced and cohesive and productive than any other desktop computing platform. HTTP and web browsing was invented on a NeXT computer.

[wingerlang]

What makes you think it is used only for legacy code?

[jonhendry18]

If Taligent had used Objective-C instead of C++ they might have actually shipped something.