
NeXT vs. Sun (1991) [video] - infodroid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg
======
api
One of the things that really disappoints me about computing is how GUI
development is such a horrid treadmill of constant reinvention and total
reboots with no overall cumulative progress. The Web is just now reinventing
things with React and components that were perfected in several different
desktop systems at different times. Something about UI development makes long
term reuse and depth building impossible.

I think one factor is that good UI and UX is nearly always proprietary, so
these great platforms get built but then ultimately die when the market moves
on.

~~~
wtallis
There's nothing dead about this UI platform. It got a new theme in 2001 and is
still going strong today. The colors have shifted over the years and the
scroll bars switched sides and have mostly faded away, but it only takes a
glance at the code to see that it's the same platform at heart.

~~~
dredmorbius
Except that some elements _have_ changed massively.

You no longer have window-independent focus. You cannot bind hotkeys to
windowing events. You cannot toggle through _all_ windows via alt-tab, you
can't set focus-follows-mouse.

Source: I've been use WindowMaker (a NeXTstep clone) for 20 years.

~~~
wtallis
I really don't see how some tweaks to window manager behavior to make it more
accessible to Mac and Windows users are more fundamental and massive than the
aforementioned change to scrollbar behavior to make it more accessible to Mac
and Windows users. They were all _noticeable_ , for sure, but from a
technological perspective they were all quite minor.

Plus, I'm not sure how many of the things you mention are even changes
relative to genuine NeXTSTEP rather than just differences from WindowMaker's
imperfect emulation of it. Focus-follows-mouse was an X11 thing WindowMaker
shoehorned into its NeXT-like environment; genuine NeXTSTEP was click-to-
focus, though it could be hacked to emulate focus-follows-mouse:
[https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Mi...](https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Misc94-II.html)

------
hayksaakian
'interface builder' 1991 reminds me a lot of interface builder from xcode in
2016

~~~
kitsunesoba
Interface Builder remained nearly unchanged all the way up until Project
Builder turned into Xcode and shortly after IB got blended in. Here's a
screenshot from IB under OS X 10.2:
[https://cl.ly/0J1g1p1m0T3C](https://cl.ly/0J1g1p1m0T3C)

I personally liked the two being separate applications. IB is still great
today, but it (and Xcode) slowed down noticeably when the two combined.

~~~
meddlepal
I had almost forgotten about the horrendous horizontal pinstripes in early OS
X. Looking back it's hard to understand why people drooled over the early OS X
UI.

~~~
hayksaakian
does this have something to do with rendering on CRTs? How they draw
horizontal lines?

~~~
sho_hn
No, nothing.

------
acqq
And the same year, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had "world's first-ever web site and
web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-
Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-
Lee#/media/File:Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-
Lee#/media/File:First_Web_Server.jpg)

~~~
Razengan
Let's not forget the development of Doom on NeXT, which ironically went on to
make PC/DOS cool in gaming:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programmin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programming)

~~~
acqq
It wasn't ironic, at these "earlier" times it was common to use significantly
stronger computers to develop for the "smaller targets": in 1975 Altair Basic,
the first product of (then called) Micro-Soft, which had to run on the 8080
computer with only 4 kilobytes of memory was developed on the PDP-10 computer
owned by Harvard University:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC)

Paul Allen wrote an emulator for the microprocessor which run on PDP-10. He
was able to extend his previous version of emulator for that.

At the time Microsoft developed MS-DOS (actually modifying the program they
have bought), around 1981, they owned their own DECSYSTEM-2060:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

~~~
csl
Also, the original Lucasfilm Commodore 64 games, such as Maniac Mansion, were
cross-compiled on UNIX workstations, transferred over the network and uploaded
to running C64s — way back in 1987! (Source: The Thimbleweed Park podcasts
[0], which I highly recommend.)

[0]: [https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com](https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com)

~~~
acqq
Three years earlier, the development for the 1984 game "Match Point" for ZX
Spectrum (the graphics in the video is original, the sound is fake by the
youtube video producer):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRO_nY-d94w&t=22s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRO_nY-d94w&t=22s)

was done by then-just-software company named Psion on their VAX computer:

[https://archive.org/stream/sinclair-user-
magazine-036/Sincla...](https://archive.org/stream/sinclair-user-
magazine-036/SinclairUser_036_Mar_1985_djvu.txt)

------
slashblake
For one of my summer jobs in college, this is around 2005, I had to port an
old NeXTSTEP phone system to Mac OS X. I was amazed at how easy this was,
considering it was just taking Carbon to Cocoa, and amazed at how ahead of its
time NeXTStep's APIs were. Project Builder (XCode) and Interface Builder were
created on these machines. Then bought by Steve@Apple.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Carbon was the name for the cleaned up, sanitized version of the old Classic
Macintosh APIs that was compatible with OS X[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_\(API\))

Steve founded NeXT after getting fired from Apple, as is reflected in part by
the name of the company. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 for $429mm, which is how
Steve Jobs came back to Apple:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_merger)

[1] Well, what was _then_ called OS X.

~~~
duncan_bayne
I've heard that purchase described as "Jobs buying Apple for $-429mm" :)

I still remember reading reviews of the NeXT OS as a child, wishing I had the
hardware to run it (from memory I was still running a PC at the time - an
original IBM PC, which was considered a dinosaur even then).

------
therealmarv
Am I the only one who had the same development feelings but only on Windows
with Borland Delphi?

You could do the same video with Delphi vs. Visual C++ playing in the 90s.

~~~
snaky
That's why Microsoft stole all of the key people from Delphi team.

~~~
msh
How can they steal them? They were not slaves.

~~~
snaky
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000)

~~~
msh
I don't have a account so I can't read the whole article but I can't see how
someone could claim that the people was the property of Borland.

------
lopatin
I always feel like the Sun programmer, writing web apps today.

~~~
asenna
Have you tried some of the newer _magically-handles-everything_ frameworks
like Meteor? Yes, it may not suit every project and I too use the more
traditional tools for a lot of my work.

But when I do use Meteor for a project, I feel exactly like the NeXT developer
in this video.

------
deanCommie
I wonder if the Sun programmer knew he would be portrayed as a patsy..

~~~
ebbv
I mean he knew it was a video for NeXT, so I don't know what else he would
have expected.

Though I would say I don't think he was portrayed badly in this video, the
point was not that he was a problem, the point was that NeXT's application
development environment is better.

~~~
primis
What I found interesting, up until the Tiff issue, they were basically on par.
The Sun programmer said his code would basically work with anything except
tiff. The NeXT people probably knew this was a limitation of a specific
library he was using and threw it in to make it less fair.

------
mistersquid
@12:19: [https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg?t=739](https://youtu.be/UGhfB-
NICzg?t=739)

> At this point, we threw the programmers an unexpected but not unrealistic
> curve.

> Like a typical user, we asked them to add a feature not in the original
> spec. In this case, a button would recall all the trouble logs for a
> particular customer.

> Using NeXT Step, the NeXT programmer completed the task in about 20 minutes.

> [NeXT progammer discussing some details]

> The sun programmer also estimated a time of 20 minutes, but it took about 45
> before he was ready to test his version.

This was about 20 hours in, which means that since they started on Wed, 30
October 1991 and assuming maximum 8-hour days, they have missed Halloween and
would be at least halfway into Friday. The video states that the programmers
finished on Sat, 2 November.

The video goes on to state that the NeXT system enabled the NeXT programmer to
add a number of features such as system fonts and button icons "for free",
which goes to show that the video's intended audience are managers and
executives of software development teams who would of course want faster
development, ad hoc requests, and cost-free features.

I personally would have been tempted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ once they announced a
planned "unexpected" feature request because rather than train users and
customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design
decisions that would be made as a result, the video encourages customers to
believe their out-of-spec requests will be more quickly accommodated if only
their programmers were using object-oriented NeXT Step.

25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-
hour feature requests when using object-oriented code.

EDIT: link to specified timecode; formatting; additional detail about date
code was written.

~~~
mwcampbell
> they have missed Halloween

I don't understand this part. You said you're assuming 8-hour work days.
AFAIK, it's not at all common to take Halloween off from work. So what's the
point of mentioning that day?

~~~
mistersquid
Just that there are so few secular holidays in the US work context and
Halloween is one of those non-holidays (like Cinco de Mayo in California)
where people in the US will make an extra effort to spend time with friends
and family.

------
agumonkey
"Sun" was trimmed out of the title.

Still an enjoyable video.

~~~
infodroid
It was originally posted with the title:

 _NeXT vs Sun head-to-head programming competition (1991) [video]_

------
akhilcacharya
But ultimately most application developers wouldn't be using $15K workstations
anyway.

~~~
trimbo
Exactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had
completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer
service representatives) and the competition within that market (Sun).

Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that
Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there.

Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off..
but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was
consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.

~~~
pjmlp
I wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
Isn't that ASP.net?

~~~
pjmlp
Kind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript
mess.

~~~
pcwalton
Does Visual Basic pre-.NET/WinForms even support layout _at all_?

Edit: Doesn't look like it. [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/kb/182070](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070)

~~~
pjmlp
GUI RAD tooling is much more than just layout, and at least it can center text
and quite a few other things that require CSS tricks.

Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else?

Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a
HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Apparently each browser still implements just part of it.

Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.

------
youdontknowtho
That was really fun to watch. I love old tech videos...thanks!

~~~
Narishma
Here's one of a demo of Lucid's Emacs-based C++ IDE from around the same time:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk)

~~~
youdontknowtho
Nice. Thanks for that. Enjoyed it very much.

------
mwcampbell
Does anyone know what kind of database the NeXT version of the application
probably used? Plain text files? .plist files? A relational database?
Something else?

~~~
ams6110
IIRC the NeXT workstations came with a contemporary version of Sybase
(ancestor to SQL Server).

------
kristopolous
Man that control to put on the multiple buttons and give them spacing was
really something. Kinda useless but really quite impressive.

