[bobanrocky]

What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS

[linguae]

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.

At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.

[pjmlp]

Yes, and the collaboration with Sun heavily influenced how Java ended up looking.

Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.

Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.

[flomo]

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

[pjmlp]

J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.

[flomo]

I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.

WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.

[pjmlp]

Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.

[flomo]

Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.

But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.

[flomo]

Three decades ago, they would relentlessly snailmail spam us with these weekly industry tabloids like 'ComputerWorld' and 'PCWeek'. These were always fun to read at lunch, even if they were all obvious advertisements, but certainly better info than vaguely remembering something from your stoner phase and then sticking your junk out.