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View all posts by: Kris Hookerman | View all posts in category: Macintosh History

I spent the day looking over Apple's new development tool called Cocoa. It is a true Object-C environment and runs only on OS X. According to Wikipedia:

Cocoa is Apple Computer's native object-oriented application programming environment for the Mac OS X operating system. Cocoa applications are typically developed using the development tools provided by Apple, specifically Xcode (formerly Project Builder) and Interface Builder, using the Objective-C language. For end-users, Cocoa applications are considered to be those written using the Cocoa programming environment. Such applications usually have a distinctive feel, since the Cocoa programming environment automates many aspects of an application to comply with Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

Mac OS X is a derivation of OPENSTEP, which Apple inherited after the complete acquisition of Steve Jobs' NeXT Software, Inc. on February 4, 1997. Steve Jobs had left Apple in 1985 after being ousted by then CEO John Sculley and started NeXT in 1987. In effect, Jobs set up a company that he hoped one day would supplant Apple. NeXT did not succeed as a computer manufacturer, but found limited success as a software company. To fully understand Jobs' strange relationship with Apple during his years in the wilderness, it is necessary to go back to the beginning and examine his role in Apple's creation.

Steve "Woz" Wozniak, Jobs' lifelong friend, was an engineering genius. Woz, who was working as an engineer in Hewlett Packard's calculator division in the early 1970s, took advantage of the company's policy of allowing engineers to use company equipment and stock parts (chips, boards, etc.) to experiment with developing new ideas. Woz took chips and breadboards from the company's stock and used the company's oscilloscopes and other equipment to build a computer around his own recently acquired MOStek 6502 chip. Woz had built himself a powerful home computer while he worked at his dream job for a great company. He was happy and had no other plans for his incredible device.

When Jobs saw his friend's device, he immediately went out trying to sell it at computer shows. Jobs secured a deal with Byte Shop, a small computer store in Mountain View, California, to sell 50 Apple computer kits for $500. Jobs sold his van, Woz sold his prized HP calculator and the rest is history. Without Jobs, the genius of Woz would never have come to the world and I suspect our modern home computers would not have developed in the same way without Apple's contribution to the industry.

Going forward about seven years, Jobs, still the darling of Apple Computer Inc, took over the Macintosh program at Apple in 1982. He had been struck by the potential power of the Xerox PARC Alto GUI that Apple was given access to in 1979. The Xerox Alto was an incredible computer with a three-button mouse and a usable GUI, but Xerox, which had been sitting on the technology since 1973, could not figure out a way mass market it for public consumption.

Jobs worked his people hard and the team turned out a great first offering, Macintosh. It sold in 1984 for $2,495 and had an incredible fully integrated GUI. A year later, Jobs got into an internal fight with Apple's CEO, John Sculley. Jobs resigned in 1985 and took many of his Macintosh crew with him. Apparently, the crew depicted in the TNT hit, "The Pirates of Silicon Valley," liked Jobs more than the movie would lead you to believe.

Jobs and his crew started NeXT Computer, Inc. and began work on a Unix-based OS called NeXTSTEP. Apple sued and they lost. As luck would have it, H. Ross Perot was in the market for a technology startup investment. He had founded EDS years earlier. Jobs convinced him to invest $20 million in the startup and away they went. An interesting sidebar, during these years, Jobs founded Pixar at a time when computers lacked the ability to develop believable movie quality animation because computers were just too slow. Now, Pixar is the powerhouse of the industry producing computer animation for movies like Toy Story.

Jobs saw the future of software beyond a useable GUI.

"In my 20 years in this industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as object oriented programming. You can literally build software 5 to 10 times faster, and that software is much easier to maintain and much more powerful."

Steve Jobs, speaking about NeXTSTEP

Object orientation is the software equivalent of the Industrial Revolution. In the same way that modern factories assemble products out of prefabricated components rather than manufacture every product from scratch, object orientation allows programmers to build complex software by reusing software components called objects. Specifically, objects lead to several measurable advantages: greater reliability, easier maintainability, and greater productivity through reuse. Unfortunately, NeXT never hit its mark. The NeXT computers cost as much as $10,000 each and were never able to take advantage of economies of scale.

"You can have a good product with a lot of good philosophical thinking behind it - a lot of pureness - and still not sell. The NeXT is a good machine that just didn't have the luck to make it successful."

Steve Wozniak, on the failure of NeXT

It is interesting to note that Bill Gates said "Develop for it? I'll piss on it," in response to InfoWorld's Peggy Watt asking if Microsoft would develop applications for the NeXT Computer. He shortly changed his tune concerning object oriented software because as we now know, Windows NT, an object oriented OS, appeared on the scene in 1995. Windows NT, was a DOS-warped OS, not a pure Unix-based system, and it suffered because of it all the way up to WindowsXP. Window NT was not a pure object oriented OS because Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) was a tangled amalgamation of both the good and the bad of Microsoft efforts from Windows 1.0 to WindowsXP. NeXTSTEP was a pure Unix object-C OS built from the ground up with objects in mind.

Back at Apple in the post-Jobs era, Classic MacOS was progressing in short leaps and bounds for 15 years. Unfortunately, Apple was having trouble changing the OS to make it truly modern. It suffered form poor memory management and due to the increasing complexity of modern peripherals, Extension conflicts. To make things worse, Apple began to lose much of its hard won market share to the cheaper and less sophisticated PC clones running Windows. In between a rock and a hard place, Apple desperately tried to modernize its OS. They were riding their incredible creation into the dust and could not come up with a way out.

Once again, in comes Jobs. He convinced Apple to buy NeXT and incorporate NeXTSTEP (now called OPENSTEP) as the next major iteration of MacOS. From 1996 to today, Jobs has consolidated his position at Apple and now effectively runs it. A few years after introducing Mac OS X, Apple began to phase out support for dual-boot machines. Classic MacOS would still run productively on the millions of older PowerPC Macs beloved by many but, effectively, after the introduction of OS X, it was history. The future for the industry (both PC and Apple), once again revolves around the imagination and talent of Jobs and Apple. Almost every major advance in the home computer industry since 1975 has revolved around this winning combination.

The new paradigm is Unix object oriented programming. With Mac OS X, Apple once again has the most advanced OS on the market. You can think of Apple and NeXT as a family squabble. They are truly brothers. The brothers disagreed and parted ways for a few years. Apple carried on with its advanced user-friendly hardware, NeXT developed the powerful next-generation Unix object oriented operating system. All have kissed and made up. The world is now in for an incredible ride of new technologies and mouth-watering computers. Hold on tight!