Apple and NeXT announce merger (1996)

http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=582

by mattl • 9 years ago

159 155 9 years ago

I vividly remember being in an airport when this announcement hit the news, waiting to catch a plane to go home for the holidays. And thinking "huh, bad move, they should have bought Be instead."

What can I say, nobody's perfect :-D

mikeash2• 9 years ago

I’d love to get a peek at the alternate universe where they bought Be instead and see how it worked out. Obviously NeXT worked out really well for them and Be would have a tough time matching that success, but who can say for sure?

grzm• 9 years ago

It would have been interesting. One of the driving factors for me with Apple's acquisition of NeXT has been the underlying Unix support. I've been using Mac OS since System 5, primarily in desktop publishing. Having that Unix subsystem opened up a whole new range of opportunities for the Mac in ways that I think would have been hard for BeOS to compete with. I agree a peek would be interesting, particularly the multi-tasking, but I think more for curiosity's sake than anything else.

itomato5• 9 years ago

Jean-Louis Gassée is on the record saying Apple made the right choice.

Gil Amelio thought the 20th Anniversary Macintosh was really awesome and clones were a good idea.

With (seriously cash strapped) Apple doubling down on Multimedia on rebranded BeOS as a licensed OS for Clones, they would have gone head-to-head with the entirety of the PC market that already had a taste of BeOS.

BeOS was quick and fun, but barely had a TCP/IP stack. See BONE.

Apple probably would have switched to Intel earlier.

protomyth3• 9 years ago

I get the feeling Jean-Louis Gassée would have probably pushed out the existing management the same way Steve Jobs did, but I just don't think he would have been successful at reviving the company.

I had both BeOS and NeXTSTEP and pretty much left BeOS to sit while NeXTSTEP was my daily driver (along with a Windows NT machine because IBM was problematic with OS/2).

yuhong5• 9 years ago

I am more interested in the post-NeXT acquisition Apple with Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock as CEO. Thinking about it, the path without Steve Jobs of "CHRP" and maybe eventually open-sourcing OS X completely would probably work better in a world where PC manufacturing was not outsourced to China.

gwbas1c2• 9 years ago

Why they chose Next over Be is an interesting lesson itself.

I still can't remember the technical merits of the Be operating system. Someone tried to get me to use it back in 1999, but there were no applications worth using.

walrus016• 9 years ago

Why they chose NeXT over Be...

Because the Unix nerds told them that if they wanted a rock solid workstation OS to replace legacy-MacOS (which was getting very long in the tooth at that time), it would be a good idea to have something BSD/NextSTEP based rather than whatever BeOS was.

If you look at OSX v10.0 it's pretty obvious that it's NeXTSTEP with a MacOS-looking GUI slapped on top of it. They've been incrementally upgrading and developing it since then.

BeOS was very interesting, but one thing it was not was anything close to a BSD/Unix platform.

jhugg• 9 years ago

Be was designed to be lightweight and parallel. It was optimized for many threads and the API pushed you to embrace threading. It also had pretty decent scheduling for media stuff. Not quite real-time OS, but closer. It was screaming fast and responsive.

The catch is that it was much less mature. It was single user and had very little real security. It had basic Posix support, but NeXT has much more rich BSD-ishness.

jghn• 9 years ago

By 1999 it was too late. They'd already transitioned to x86 and that was their death knell. At the time most hardware would provide drivers only for Windows which meant that other OSs needed to create their own.

This sorta-kinda worked for things like Linux where the masses would crowdsource them, but for a commercial OS like BeOS they had to spend a ton of time working on this instead of the actual OS.

My recollection at the time was as soon as they entered into this phase the forward progress on BeOS itself ground to a halt, and within a few years the mainstream OSs had started to at least pay lip service to its key features. Any momentum they had was completely lost.

Jtsummers• 9 years ago

Fantastic preemptive multithreading, especially for the time. The file system (BFS) was basically a database, with metadata capabilities that allowed applications to store their data in files and open up their data format (after a fashion) to any other application.

Want an MP3 player? Don't need to open the files and get their ID3 tag info, it's in the file system. You can query it with "filetype:mp3 artist:bach" or whatever and you'd get a list, updated when other songs files were added or changed, of all mp3s meeting your requirement. Same for any other document. Contacts can be stored the same way, rather than hidden away inside an arbitrary file format you can store them with each bit of info as metadata (query on the phone number and find everyone associated with it), email, anything. The real benefit of this filesystem-as-database approach was that it breaks the data silo situation you find in many (most?) other OSes.

Downsides were the dearth of applications, being single-user, and for a time being PPC only. Opening it to x86 opened it up to many more users, but then the OS became the product (instead of the BeBoxes they also sold) which was much lower price and profit. It was a POSIX-compatible OS (good), but not really a Unix in the way users of Unix would expect. This did make porting of applications a bit easier, though.

They were also crippled by Microsoft's actions with Compaq (HP?), where MS threatened to change the favorable licensing costs for MS Windows if they sold BeOS on their computers.

deadmetheny• 9 years ago

BeOS had multithreading back when that was fairly new for consumer hardware. It was great for media purposes but the OS itself wasn't particularly well-developed at that point and Be wouldn't drop its overblown asking price, so Apple went with NeXT, and the rest is history.

BeOS is a really neat little OS. I like it a lot, I often wonder how different things would be if they had taken that direction.

phs25012• 9 years ago

Be's use of C++ (at the kernel/library API/ABI level) would have doomed it in the long term IMHO. There have been several incompatible C++ ABI bumps since then, all of which would have broken compatibility. See the current Be clones which still have to use an ancient version of GCC to not break compatibility with existing software.

NeXT's ABI interfaces (C and ObjC) were and are much more stable.

(I'm not saying don't use C++, just don't use C++ and expect a stable binary API. You need to wrap it in a C API instead unfortunately. There's too much magic in C++ to have a stable ABI and still be able to evolve the language.)

rahoulb• 9 years ago

Lots of good answers here. All I will add is that Mac OSX was dog slow for years, from Rhapsody through till 10.2 (which I still thought was slow but was at least usable). BeOS running on awful hardware felt lightning fast and responsive in comparison. Of course, Apple without His Steveness would be an entirely different proposition

AceJohnny22• 9 years ago

To this day, people still joke that this was a reverse-acquisition of Apple by NeXT, as Apple entirely switched their software to NeXT's.

For the unaware, this is why the macOS/iOS APIs are prefixed with NS (NSObject, NSString...), for NeXTSTEP.

I believe iTunes is still based on WebObjects.

pavlov5• 9 years ago

Actually NS is short for "NeXT & Sun". The prefix was adopted for OpenStep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

The pre-OpenStep version of the APIs used a NX prefix. You can still see some lingering NX* classes/functions in macOS stack traces.

saagarjha• 9 years ago

Huh, interesting. I came across NXHashMap in the Objective-C runtime documentation and was wondering what the "NX" stood for.

jmull• 9 years ago

I can’t find a source for NS meaning NeXT and Sun either in the article you linked or elsewhere (sorry if I missed it). I get there was a name change associated with OPENSTEP, where the prefix changed from NX- to NS- and makes some sense because otherwise wouldn’t the prefix change for OPENSTEP have been something like OS- or OP-? I’m just wondering about the source for this. It would be interesting to hear from someone privy to reasoning behind choice of prefix.

SeanLuke• 9 years ago

I believe the NS prefix dated from NeXTSTEP 3.0 (1992), well before Sun was ever involved with NeXT.

So far as I know, NS stands for NextStep.

hsm3• 9 years ago

I was leading the AppKit group at NeXT at the time, and "NS" definitely came before the Sun relationship, referring to NextStep (or NeXTSTEP, the spelling changed every release). I distinctly remember our team expecting we'd have to suck it up and change the prefix to something more neutral when the Sun deal was made, and then being surprised that they didn't seem to care when the spec was discussed. Maybe the alternate interpretation of "NeXT and Sun" satisfied them, but I don't remember that expression ever being commonly used, and it was not the original basis for NS.

mattl8• 9 years ago

Yeah, the iTunes store is still WebObjects.

Project Wonder is community supported additions + fixes to WebObjects. https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder

Meanwhile, I found this hat on eBay yesterday: https://i.imgur.com/CuInqYo.png

qubex12• 9 years ago

Really?! I knew it had been used originally, but I assumed it had been rebuilt with something new back when Apple deprecated WebObjects in 2009... I'm amazed they're still using it.

threeseed• 9 years ago

I also believe Apple Online Store still uses parts of WebObjects.

Not the full blown EOF, WOF that iTunes uses however.

gsnedders• 9 years ago

Do we know if the iTunes store is an Apple maintained fork of WebObjects or if it is using Wonder?

(Also, hi Matt!)

fzn• 9 years ago

I tought iTunes was based on SoundJam MP.

mikeash2• 9 years ago

iTunes the app is, and iTunes the store is built on WebObjects.

blutfink• 9 years ago

The cost of a WebObjects deployment license was about $50,000 then.

adrianmonk• 9 years ago

Well, I think that was a huge part of the point of the acquisition.

Apple knew for a long time it needed to replace classic Mac OS, which didn't have modern OS features. It started the Pink project internally to make a next-generation operating system, and eventually in the early to mid 90s, that got spun out into Taligent, the joint venture between Apple and IBM (and later others).

Then Taligent didn't pan out for a variety of reasons. Specifically why is another question, but here it's sufficient to say that Apple decided it certainly wasn't the direction they wanted to go. Taligent ended up being handed off to IBM and repurposed as a rapid app development tool that sat on top of other operating systems (AIX, I guess, mainly) instead of a standalone operating system.

As I recall, Apple may have tried to internally do its own second attempt at a next-generation operating system, essentially a competing project to Taligent, but that didn't work out either.

So that left Apple in the mid-90s but still stuck on an operating system that was rooted in the 1980s and really, really showing its age. And a lot of it was Motorola 68k only (it was never meant to be portable), but Apple had already started to make the shift to PowerPC CPUs. So there was another reason it was time to start fresh.

After at least one if not two failed attempts to come up with their own next-gen OS, here was this company founded by a former Apple luminary, with an operating system sitting there ready to go. NeXTSTEP was already portable enough to run on both 68k and x86 at that time, and once you've got two platforms, you can have pretty high confidence that a third (PowerPC) would be feasible. And I don't think NeXT had great long-term prospects with a standalone platform on its own.

kalleboo3• 9 years ago

They were also very close to buying Be instead, but didn't due to Jean-Louis Gassée pushing for too high a price http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

hota_mazi5• 9 years ago

And that plan worked so well that Apple went almost bankrupt one year later and had to be rescued by a fund infusion from Microsoft.

mpweiher3• 9 years ago

NeXTSTEP was already portable enough to run on both 68k and x86 at that time
and once you've got two platforms,

Agreed with your sentiment, but, er: five. Four released publicly: m68k, x86, HP PA, SPARC. And then there was the Motorola 88000 for the NeXT brick. The SPARC OpenStep/Mach port was in addition to OpenStep Solaris and then there was the Windows stuff. Not sure what else they had running internally.

That was some seriously portable software. And for developers, adding architectures was a checkbox in ProjectBuilder (once you had taken care of being endian-neutral).

UPDATE: just checked the Wikipedia entry on the NeXT brick (aka NeXT RISC Workstation), and it says they were redesigning it based on PowerPC, so the number was probably six and they already had a PowerPC NextStep port when acquired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation )

david-cako• 9 years ago

Yeah, and a ton of their developer oriented web portals are as well. Documentation, certificates, App Store distribution, etc.

zmonkeyz• 9 years ago

Copland is coming, you just gotta believe.

itomato5• 9 years ago

I still find a lot of joy from messing around in system releases from this time period.

Watching the evolution of NeXTSTEP/Openstep, Yellow Box, Rhapsody and Mac OS X has been just about as rewarding as I had hoped.

The benefit of UNIX overlaid with a friendly, usable UI is as promising now as it was then.

I just wish I had been able to invest more when AAPL was at @ $18.00.

rubicon33• 9 years ago

This sadly seems all too common... Once people finally have money to invest, buy a home, etc... The prices are suddenly much higher.

wmf• 9 years ago

There are good investments out there today but we just don't know what they are yet.

mikestew2• 9 years ago

Yeah, same thing I said over twenty years ago. Yet here I am with an assload of money in the brokerage account, and a house that has tripled in value since we bought it. AAPL at $18 was still a crap shoot, you don’t hear anyone going on about how well their pets.com stock worked out. But AAPL at $30? At $100 pre-split? There was still plenty of money to be made on AAPL above $18, and after AAPL had established that they were not going anywhere. I had some AAPL @ $17, IIRC, but most of my money made on AAPL was long after that price point. And that’s just an example, buying opportunities are everywhere, the trick is separating the AAPLs from the PETS. (sorry, I tried to find a dot.boom company that sold oranges online so as to have an appropriate comparison, but failed.)

Housing? If you’re complaining about SV, I have no help for you, that place is nuts. Everywhere else, generally, isn’t any worse than when we bought our first house 25 years ago. But once you’re in and can make the payment, the numbers just get bigger as time goes on, as your house price is going to be relative to those around you.

qubex12• 9 years ago

I bought at about $20... and sold at about $100... heh... in hindsight, that’s even more painful.

ssharp• 9 years ago

That doesn't sound so dramatic unless you're talking about pre-split prices :)

AAPL split in 2 in 2005 and had a big 7:1 split in 2014. Pre-2005 unadjusted prices are 14x!

I do remember the days of $10-20 AAPL in 2003/4 when I first started using Macs. Personally, I got out during the 2008 3Q crash and missed out on the huge recovery, somewhere in the 9x range on those shares from when I sold to what they're worth today :(

pfarnsworth3• 9 years ago

Don't worry about it. You would have sold is at $100 and then regretted not holding it longer. It's a game you can't win.

You could say the same thing about not buying BTC at $1 and selling at $20,000.

itomato5• 9 years ago

Yeah, I complain about that a fair amount as well.

juicy-fruit• 9 years ago

Probably the single greatest acquisition in history. Definitely the most profitable with an ROI >$1 trillion.

JAFTEM• 9 years ago

I'm too young to know, so I'm guessing, but was this move also to get Jobs back? I think not long after he became CEO.

walrus016• 9 years ago

The move was more to acquire a rock solid Unix/BSD based operating system with serious multitasking functionality, for the purpose of building professional workstations... If you look at the G4 power macs and G4 powerbook laptops from the 2000 to 2006 era the result is evident. Legacy MacOS on PowerPC was a dead end.

At that time in 1996 they knew that Microsoft was going to take the NT kernel and build it into something very stable and more consumer friendly. NT 3.5 and NT4.0 never saw widespread consumer adoption, only in corporate environments. But the later release of Windows 2000 was significantly more stable and capable than legacy MacOS.

erikj• 9 years ago

Apple even considered licensing the NT kernel before the acquisition: http://lowendmac.com/2013/the-rise-and-fall-of-apples-gil-am...

twoodfin2• 9 years ago

Even Windows 95/98 had a significantly stronger multitasking architecture than classic Mac OS.

EGreg• 9 years ago

I remember BeOS was being developed to replace tor MacOS and they had the BeBox, pre-emptive multitasking and even multiprocessor support. Jean-Louis Gassee never got the opportunity.

EDIT: Actually he HAD the opportunity and because he passed it up we have Mac OS X today!!

From Wikipedia:

In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system. BeOS had many of the features Apple sought, and around Christmas time they offered to buy Be for $120 million, later raising their bid to $200 million. However, despite estimates of Be's total worth at approximately $80 million,[citation needed] Gassée held out for $275 million, and Apple balked. In a surprise move, Apple went on to purchase NeXT, the company their former co-founder Steve Jobs had earlier left Apple to found, for $429 million, with the high price justified by Apple getting Jobs and his NeXT engineers in tow. NeXTSTEP was used as the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X.

jaysonelliot2• 9 years ago

Very much so. There were two primary candidates in the running, NeXT and Be Inc., run by Jean-Louis Gassée, previously the president of Apple Europe.

Some very strong arguments have been made for why BeOS would have been a better choice for Apple at the time, but the truth is that Be was always a second choice for Apple if NeXT could not be acquired.

Apple got a great two for one deal by acquiring both a solid UNIX-based foundation for their future and Steve Jobs, but Jobs was really the crown jewel. Apple was in a terrible position at the time, and most industry watchers didn't expect them to survive.

WIRED ran their famous "101 Ways to Save Apple" cover story around that time, and Michael Dell made his infamous quote that Apple should "shut down and give the money back to the shareholders."

It really was a bleak time, and a technology solution was only part of what Apple needed. Steve Jobs' return was what the acquisition was ultimately about.

reaperducer• 9 years ago

1990something: >Michael Dell made his infamous quote that Apple should "shut down and give the money back to the shareholders."

2017: Who's Michael Dell?

Steve Jobs is better known dead than Michael Dell is alive.

adolfojp• 9 years ago

Back in the day there was a clear distinction between personal computers and dedicated workstations. Personal computers were cheap, underpowered and used wimpy operating systems and workstations were expensive, powerful and used powerful operating systems. At some point personal computers became powerful enough to run workstation operating systems so Microsoft started working on Windows NT after hiring workstation guys like Dave Cutler. Dave Cutler had worked on VMS which was one of the few non Unix-based workstation operating systems of the day. Apple purchased NeXT to acquire its workstation team and tech and as a bonus they got Steve Jobs who founded that company after leaving Apple. Every Windows OS of today descends from NT and every version of Mac OS X descends from NeXTSTEP. Dedicated workstation companies like Sun and SGI couldn't compete with much cheaper workstation PCs and nowadays just about every modern personal computer on the planet uses a workstation OS.

racl1012• 9 years ago

It's basically Napoleon coming back to defeat Duke Wellington except he mops the floor with him.

protomyth3• 9 years ago

I still miss the UI for NeXTSTEP. The joy of tear-off menus floating near my windows is missed. I still have the discs and the full set of books in storage along with the complete run of NeXTWorld magazine[1]. I also miss the librarian. A lot of NeXTSTEP didn't make the transition.

Watch Steve Jobs videos from 1996 and you get some interesting insights.

1) now available online https://archive.org/search.php?query=nextworld

jquast• 9 years ago

WindowMaker for Linux has tear-off menus.

yuhong5• 9 years ago

AFAIK I think tear-off menus was considered for System 7, but was removed before release. I think Rhapsody had it too. It is probably more useful for touch tablets now, but Windows never supported it as far as I know.

danaliv• 9 years ago

Still have my NeXTstation Turbo. God, they were nice. (The "Turbo" means it has a 33MHz m68k instead of the standard 25MHz, in case you were wondering why all of us olds are constantly complaining about crummy performance these days.)

chx• 9 years ago

Watch Jobs in his prime a year later describing his philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

I am very far from an Apple fanboy but gosh, this guy totally gets it.

mrbill• 9 years ago

I remember getting the "ACTUAL SIZE" brochure in '89 for the Cube.. Owned a number of slabs (black and white and color) over the years, used one as my primary work machine for about a year.. but never acquired a Cube until 2014. Even got the cable that let me use a modern flatpanel LCD with it instead of an ancient CRT - http://www.mrbill.net/next/

grajaganDev• 9 years ago

I was a NeXT employee during the acquisition. As I was a WebObjects consultant working in the field I found out via email. Probably the most mind-blowing email I have ever opened.

I left Apple 6 months later to join WebLogic.

pfarnsworth3• 9 years ago

It's the single best business decision ever made in the history of business. It brought it back from death to the most successful company in the history of the world. I still remember at the Brass Ring job fairs how the Apple booth was completely empty and no one wanted to work for Apple in fall of 1996.

earenndil2• 9 years ago

I wouldn't say the most successful company. IIRC the east india company, inflation-adjusted, was worth significantly more.

philwelch• 9 years ago

Maybe even the Hudson's Bay Company at one point, too. But then, those were the days when companies literally ruled entire countries.

pfarnsworth3• 9 years ago

You can choose to measure successful company that way, but I surely won't. Apple is worth almost $1 trillion.

dbbk2• 9 years ago

In retrospect yes it was, but at the time that wasn't obviously true.

racl1012• 9 years ago

It is so mind blowing that so much innovation that not only saved a floundering company, but set the foundation for several computing revolutions, came from such a small company.

mehrdada• 9 years ago

Must watch recollection of the history of Mach and NeXT and Apple by Avie Tevanian. Long but great.

1/2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE (early days)

2/2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtpIFrOGTHk (around Apple acquisition and beyond)

beamatronic• 9 years ago

Can I bring up the vintage NeXT interface?

itomato5• 9 years ago

You can emulate the 68K NeXT computer line, including Dimension and Printer with the "Previous" emulator.

Oddly coincidental is the recent ability to build on Haiku OS: https://sourceforge.net/p/previous/code/HEAD/tree/

qubex12• 9 years ago

I didn’t know this existed, thanks for binging it up.

anton_gogolev• 9 years ago

The legalese is astonishing:

...in consideration of the foregoing and the mutual covenants and agreements herein contained, and intending to be legally bound hereby, Parent, Merger Sub and the Company hereby agree as follows...

hossbeast• 9 years ago

What is special about that sentence?

Apple and NeXT announce merger (1996)

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