Ever since I was in high school in the early 2000s, I've been fascinated with Apple's history and, by extension, spinoff companies like NeXT, Be, Claris, Taligent, and General Magic. While my enthusiasm for Apple has waned since Steve Jobs' passing, I'm still quite impressed with Apple's history and its founders Woz and Jobs, and how Apple was able to employ so many talented people who have contributed much to computing, including (but definitely not limited to) Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Susan Kare, Bill Atkinson, Jean-Louis Gassée, and many more. Apple from its founding through Steve Jobs' second period at Apple was a passionate champion of personal computing.
Back to the article, which has an issue date of July 1985, I'm wondering if Larry Tesler worked on the Big Mac project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_(computer)), the planned successor to the original Macintosh that not only had beefier hardware, but also ran Unix but had a Macintosh interface and can run Macintosh software. Of course, the Big Mac wasn't to be; Steve Jobs left Apple in September 1985 when he lost a power struggle against John Sculley and formed NeXT, which in many ways resembles a Big Mac, but instead of having a Macintosh interface and running Macintosh software, it has a different interface, and while it has Unix underpinnings via 4.2BSD and the Mach microkernel, its user interface software is implemented in Objective-C, which was heavily influenced by Smalltalk. Apple would later create A/UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX), which seems to meet the objectives of the Big Mac's operating system plans. Of course, as we all know, Apple would end up buying NeXT in December 1996, and since 2001 the Mac's operating system uses a Macintosh interface with Unix underpinnings via NeXT's technologies.
It makes me wonder, though. Suppose Steve Jobs didn't leave Apple in 1985 and the Big Mac continued. I wonder if it would've been similar to A/UX, or if it would've been closer to NeXT except with a Macintosh interface all along (I assume the reason NeXTstep has a different interface is to avoid copying the Macintosh interface for legal and business reasons).
1985 was a really interesting time though. The Mac was hugely popular after one year. I remember going to Kinko's at 11:00 PM to work on a document and there was a bank of Macs with people furiously working on something for class. The PC was mostly for the recently introduced WordPerfect at law firms and trucking companies with a dot matrix printer. It was exactly at this time (April 1985) that Jobs was essentially fired from Apple. Jobs sold all of his Apple stock except one share. Apple would remain a single product company (Macintosh) until the iPhone was introduced in 2007, 22 years. Today the Mac is the "endpoint for the C-suite" in many large businesses, although corporate adoption on the level of the PC is mostly non-existent.
Not much so in Europe, the first time I got to see Mac Classic in person was in 1994, and I was already messing with computers since 1986.
At the university we had Mac LC range, at two specific places, one DTP room and the secretaries on the computing department, everyone else was either using Windows for Workgroups or UNIX (DG/UX), which during my years there, eventually transitioned to dual booting Windows 9X/Red-Hat on client machines, and Solaris/Red-Hat on the UNIX servers.
The Mac users either kept the same devices, or eventually transitioned to Windows.
We had some NeXTSTEP stations, and due to uncertain times, the critical software was ported, my thesis for example was a port from a visualization framework using particle systems, originally developed on NeXTSTEP, so that others could do further research on it, but using C++ on Windows instead of Objective-C on NeXTSTEP.
This shows how much sentiment was there at the time that either company would survive.
Steve Jobs was never an UNIX fan, you can easily observe this in the design of NeXTSTEP where everything that actually matters on the OS has zero UNIX influence, his famous remarks about UNIX, or the recordings at NeXT as UNIX support being a means to an end to fight in the workstation market.
ok that is interesting but it seems colored by the modern point of view, with Mach and *nix and all that.. At that time, the trajectory of "corporate industrial messaging OS with roles and security features" was very far away from the Apple Macintosh. The Apple Macintosh computer popularized and marketed software that was running for the user of that computer, first. Education is one word and creatives is another word, but those two words represent unexplored and very compelling topics for graphical user interface software. That is not at all what was going on with those network computers with security. So much core software has shipped and integrated since then, available via network installs or on web pages, it might be challenging to think about the product definitions in the 1980s as they were at the time.
> Up to that time, whenever people had problems, the advocates of difficult systems would just declare philosophically that, well, these things are just hard to learn, but because they’re so powerful, people will just have to learn them.
Unfortunely, many still keep pushing this school of thought.
Back to the article, which has an issue date of July 1985, I'm wondering if Larry Tesler worked on the Big Mac project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_(computer)), the planned successor to the original Macintosh that not only had beefier hardware, but also ran Unix but had a Macintosh interface and can run Macintosh software. Of course, the Big Mac wasn't to be; Steve Jobs left Apple in September 1985 when he lost a power struggle against John Sculley and formed NeXT, which in many ways resembles a Big Mac, but instead of having a Macintosh interface and running Macintosh software, it has a different interface, and while it has Unix underpinnings via 4.2BSD and the Mach microkernel, its user interface software is implemented in Objective-C, which was heavily influenced by Smalltalk. Apple would later create A/UX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX), which seems to meet the objectives of the Big Mac's operating system plans. Of course, as we all know, Apple would end up buying NeXT in December 1996, and since 2001 the Mac's operating system uses a Macintosh interface with Unix underpinnings via NeXT's technologies.
It makes me wonder, though. Suppose Steve Jobs didn't leave Apple in 1985 and the Big Mac continued. I wonder if it would've been similar to A/UX, or if it would've been closer to NeXT except with a Macintosh interface all along (I assume the reason NeXTstep has a different interface is to avoid copying the Macintosh interface for legal and business reasons).
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