NeXT vs Sun

Started programming in 1982. Object oriented programming was a huge advance - especially in developer productivity. A side effect was the dramatic improvement in developer tools: gui builders, IDEs, etc all improved dramatically. Probably the watershed moment for OO was this NeXT video that showed the difference: [VIDEO]

There's a fun bit of marketing [0] NeXT did when AppKit was the new thing, comparing building a reasonably non-trivial application with it to a Sun workstation using C. Obviously biased, but still an interesting look into the development environment that among other things brought us the Web and DOOM. 0. [VIDEO]

So very much this. I think programming languages are also long overdue for some controlled trials. They can't be blinded: any experimental subject bright enough to learn to program is probably going to know what language they are programming in. But trials comparing the effectiveness of different languages. How long they take to attain a specified level of proficiency, how long to learn enough to produce working code, and importantly, readability: for instance, how long it takes to find intentionally-planted bugs in existing, unfamiliar code. NeXT did this, way back in the 1980s, and Sun lost badly: [VIDEO] There is a writeup of some of it here: [LINK] But speaking as a non-video-liker, this 17min one is worth it.

BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: [LINK] NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history. BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS as well as WinFS. The BeFS main developer wrote a book about it, as it is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: [LINK] , [LINK] Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: [LINK] . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: [LINK] , [LINK] Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: [LINK] Another interesting video is: [VIDEO] ( In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later. )

Another good example is the NeXT vs Sun duel, regarding the RAD tooling of NeXTStep vs the traditional UNIX development (1991). [VIDEO]

You mean like this in 1991? [VIDEO] I would have rather used the GUI tooling of a NeXT, which eschews the UNIX traditions even though it builds partially on top of them, than the Solaris way of programming GUIs, if given the option. Just because I could only access green phosphor terminals, doesn't mean I wasn't aware of other, more expensive, options.

> which is further evidence of the amazing foresight Apple had in basing macOS on an open-source core (BSD): NeXT did it, not Apple. And the goal of the time was just to help bring UNIX software into NeXTSTEP as they were competing against the likes of Solaris for market share. [VIDEO] The whole NeXT architecture has very little UNIX on it. [LINK] [LINK]

If you enjoy reading documents, BITSAVERS.ORG is a treasure mine full of lost knowledge. [LINK] Here you will find Xerox PARC, DEC, Burroughs, Apple, Sun, Borland,... old research documents, papers, manuals. In the context of static compilation, for example in MS-DOS, take Turbo Pascal 6.0 programmer's guide. [LINK] For some 8 bit love you can check ZX Spectrum and Atari archives. [LINK] [LINK] Next step is to get an emulator for any of those old OS/computers and try to follow along one of those books. Also there are some videos on YouTube showing those systems. "The Smalltalk-80 Programming System" [LINK] "NeXT vs Sun" [VIDEO] "Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3" [LINK] "Amiga Programming" [LINK] "Amiga Hardware Programming" [LINK] The Mother of All Demos" [LINK] Just a very tiny sample of videos