NeXT vs Sun
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- Опубликовано: 21 ноя 2011
- 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.
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Don't you just love it when startups portray themselves as young and hip while the established competition is stodgy and old? Things never change.
It was the same even when Seymour Cray began working on his super computers in the 50s
I think they chose an older guy to imply Sun had an advantage because they gave the task to a programmer with more experience. In reality I'm not sure how much water that holds considering when that guy started his programming career, computers were so different that he would have been doing work totally different from this newfangled drag-and-drop GUI building and interfacing with network devices and whatnot. It's very possible if they grabbed a young, ambitious Sun programmer from the time it would have been a closer race. But that wouldn't have made for a very good NeXT promo!
@@Ashanmaril True, but in some ways the task was hand picked to give to the edge to NeXT anyway, like displaying the manual pages in TIFF format - natively supported by NeXT and not by Sun. Still, with NeXT far less code did have to be written. This paid big dividends way down the track with OS X, and eventually, iPhone.
In 1998, we purchased a number of Sun 450 servers for a web-to-3270 billing interface project. It was still running when I retired 16 years later in 2014. Same 4GB hard drives, same 512MB RAM, same 150,000+ lines of C & Perl, still handling several thousand users/mo. No repairs. Sun's were expensive, but they were reliable.
A Friend of mine in school said he ran into a Cray CS6400 running as a mail server! So, the company had never touched it in about 15-20 years and it took them awhile to even remember where it was... the reason their email went down wasn't a hardware or software failure they simply ran out of disk space... as far as I know it is still serving mail today, after he cleared enough disk space for it to get back to business. Funny thing is the CS6400 has a second computer as it's service console... and is essentially a Sun Sparc powered supercomputer... rather hilarious that it was being used to serve mail actually. It is the direct predecessor to Sun's E10k line I believe.
Russell Grokett I agree totally. I have been supporting Sun ( now Oracle Sun) systems for over 20 years. They are bullet proof.
@@Wingnut353 Looks like they have nobody doing energy cost controlling. They were stable but man did they eat power. And not remembering where it was? How can this be. Just follow the noise. You can hear this 3 floors above.
UNLIKE the next machines? doubt that
@@antigen4 Depends on the Next machine you're talking about. Those early models with the MO drives seem to have high failure rates
it's incredibly weird to see a video from 1991 mentioning all this stuff that is still in xcode
I got my first cube in 2000 or so, and was amazed at the similarities between OpenStep and the Mac OS X Developer Preview - with the pretty aqua of course. Interface Builder was functionally the same! (Wait was IB provided with the DP MacOS X?)
Yep. In a way your watch is a tiny NeXT computer :)
what you think this stuff was just developed overnight? you probably think that women don’t shit either do you? 🤨
There are parts of unix that we still use that date back to the 70s. If it ain't broke...
Then VB came out, so anyone with a $1000 PC could rapid prototype and hire from the large BASIC developer pool.
But wasn't VB extremely limited when it first arrived?
I got completely distracted by the fact that the NeXT guy was hunting and pecking and not touch typing.
Yeah me too.
I know this is totally fake. Not because I have any idea about NeXT or Sun Machines, but because there is no way to develop bug-free non-trivial software in the first try, no matter how nice your programming language is.
Right! Lol.
I like how spicy that Next salesman is. "You can build your software with those other guys, sure, but you would be stupid."
That’s Avie T, he was the CTO and also worked at Apple during the OS X transition.
@@veccio exactly he wasn't a salesman he was THE engineering force behind all of this. His code/work made it possible.
See whether Jim Carrey or Dr. Phil more efficiently produces the most boring business application ever.
This is where the Mac vs PC ads came from.
EVERYONE knows that software development works better with harp music
import harp
fake, digital harp music you mean? i guess it was done with the music kit
I remember seeing NeXT systems for sale in the UCLA bookstore but it was too expensive for most students. This Ad was about the time that NeXT started pivoting to Wall Street and other corporate clients.
Fast-forward to 2021: have someone from 2005 build a website vs someone from 2021. The latter one will spend 3-4 hours picking a JS framework and configuring the build system. :)
I love archive footage like this
The Sun dude should've used Tcl/Tk or something. I'm pretty sure implementing a run of the mill data-driven business app in 16 pages of C was obsolete even in '91.
Agreed, he could have made it easier for himself.
They essentially gave the the Sun guy really shitty tools on purpose to make next look even better. I mean it's an advertisement after all.
it wouldn't have been a fair performance comparison then because the NextStep app would have been running in natively compiled objective c code...
@@JohnDoe-sp3dc those tools were state of the art in 1991.
The first version of Tk didn't come out until '91. C was very much the standard in 1990 and long after.
Hardware and development costs are offset by having the CSR staff make 12 cents an hour in Bangalore.
The way you connect signals and slots in Qt designer is very much inspired from interface builder. I never used Apple/NeXT software to develop GUIs, but I find the Qt tools quite handy.
Except that the C++ object is so restricted that it was never a good choice. GTK/GObject is so much more flexible, just like Objective-C. OOP in GUI development makes only sense when you have this (Win32 handle, Smalltalk Objects, Objective-C, GTK, Lisp ....).
Gotta love the FM Synthesis music as a background. Thanks to NeXT- I do development work that sometimes replicates InterfaceBuilder :)
I love how entertaining, true, and shady this is. It's premium Steve Jobs.
I've always loved the styling of the NeXT computers. Even the Paul Rand designed NeXT logo is super cool. If Sun and Apple had merged their best technologies, the result probably would have been the ultimate computer, combining RISC processors and industrial-strength multiprocessing OS with multithreaded compiler w/ libraries and OpenGL 3D hardware paired with best graphical interface and object oriented programming tool chain. SGI was the only other company that had industrial design comparable to NeXT.
NeXT is cool and all, but am I the only who is thinking Sun's looks better as DE? Sometimes to me less is better, but I think that's are opinion... for example I like DE such as Gnome or Unity.
This was really high-end in 1991. Thats why the world adopted PC clones. They were much cheaper.
I remember surfing the internets on a NeXT computer back in the days.
Did you get there riding a dinosaur.. 🦖 ..😂
Of course it's biased. It's an ad afterall. But AppKit and Interface Builder are stellar pieces of software, as can be seen by how they're basically still in effect today with macOS. Both Sun and App...-NeXT har good products going for them
i also wonder if maybe that particular task was chosen because it suits the nextdev tools better than did sun's?
@@antigen4 No. They picked a practical real world piece of software and Sun failed. Next is a truly productive app development environment. Look how many iOS applications have been created shortly after the introduction of the iPhone. My only issue with the video is that both machines were obscenely expensive to deploy on a CSV's desk.
Yes but they went too far like picking up TIFF format when it's the ONLY format Sun couldnt deal with it
@@alerey4363 TIFF is a fairly common format. It would have been biased if they chose a obscure proprietary one. Regardless, on every other case the Sun's development facilities were clearly outdone.
@@bobweiram6321 well if Sun was chosing the picture format it would have picked up BMP which (by far) was the most common format image format there was in windows 3.1, 95 and NT (which had the 90% global market) and Next would have been with a blank screen; there was absolutely no need to show this in order to showcase the benefits of the Objective-C approach (rapid GUI closely tied to event-driven code, database integration, common functionality across apps with minimal code, etc) ; also as the other guy posted, from the get go the ad depicted the Next developer as a yuppie and the Sun guy as a briefcase bald senior, etc.
I would have focused on this: showing how very little documentation books (in a pre-internet era) were needed to develop software in Next vs tons of manuals in Sun's and things like that.
Epic fight!
There is an interesting Steve Jobs interview in GQ magazine from around 1993. They talk a lot about Object Oriented Programing. Jobs was really evangelizing it back then. Check it out. He was right though. The three things he saw at PARC (GUI, OOP, and PCs connected and sharing over LAN/WANs) are a big part of his legacy. You have to give him credit for busting his ass bringing them to market. It all would have happened eventually, but not as quickly and certainly not in quite the same way.
+Steve Steele i remember him saying that he almost regretted not staying longer at PARC. he said that he was there for a few minutes and saw the GUI, he was so fascinated he left straight away, if he'd stayed another 20 minutes he would have seen object oriented programming and ethernet... though he was saying this probably 20-25 years AFTER it happened.
This whole video has ASMR triggers
the Sun guy seemed so friendly lol
Yes, but you may purchase a "Core" membership, which comes with extra features.
TIFF? Why not PostScript where you can do a fulltext search on?
You can't create an artificial hurdle without using a file format that is incompatible with one of the two OS being used.
Sun OS didn't have PostScript support?
No, TIFF support. The guy says as much "if it had been just about any other format.."
Ah, misread your comment. Understand now.
The problem was printing/faxing scanned manual pages. TIFF is a publishing standard format widely supported by scanners and printers.
I maintain that NeXTStep had one of the nicest UI's and some of the best built-in tools for it's time and realistically for a long time after that. I always wanted a NeXT machine myself but they were way out of my price range.
i got SOOO lucky and had a roommate who had a FULL ON next cube system with laser printer etc etc in 1988. he was a next developer. what's even better is that he was NEVER home!! so i was using that thing all the time!
The NeXT machines were basically the last machines, which came out of the blue and you really could see a huge jump, maybe 5-10 years ahead of the competition. After that it was more like small evolutional steps in desktop computing but not those leaps anymore.
@@werpu12 yeah I'd go along with that. They were a complete revelation to me at the time as a university undergrad.
I prefer much of the original NeXT UI to when they had later reshape it to pretend to be Mac OS later on. Sticking the menus at the top of the screen, for example. Luckily the power is still there underneath, unlike classic Mac OS. I find the NeXT UI interesting as well with the X in the upper right - at the time MS Windows had minimise / maximise arrows upper right and a dash symbol upper left, you could double click the dash for close or single click and select close. The X to close the window in the upper right was lifted directly out of NexTSTEP for Windows 95.
I wonder what happens if you call 1-800-TRY-NeXT these days?
-jcr
it's some survey number now lol
Hate how they had to zoom into the poor guy's bald spot when it was time to beat up on Sum.
20 hours! You have 10 hours to write that application!! After that time to go on UI for a year or two.
Visual Basic came out in 1991, and on much cheaper computers managed to allow this sort of rapid application building ability. It might not have had the low level abilities of Objective C, but that didn't seem to matter.
+judgewest2000 it's not just the "low level abilities". Visual Basic was a toy language. It wasn't even object oriented. It was designed for whacking together prebuilt components with some glue code. Nobody would write serious large applications with it. So if your little data driven frontend app grew and acquired a serious layer of business logic or needed advanced graphics or performance-sensitive algorithms and what not, you'd need to rewrite it in C/C++ -- or at least factor out components and rewrite those. And that sucks. ObjC and AppKit also provided this ability to glue components together, but at the same time they provided a real OOP language and environment, the same one the whole systems itself was written in. So you'd stay in the same language and use the same toolkits and APIs for everything.
+multi io don't think you get my point. obj c could handle large scale applications yadayada. so what? who cares www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qdkj7?
the vast majority of applications in 1991 were not enterprise, thousands of concurrent-user applications, running on $10,000+ boxes.
BUT - the example they show here is of a fairly run-of-the-mill application that could be knocked up in vb in even less time with all the same abilities on windows 3.0 at a fraction of the cost
Well visual basic was actually pretty useful back then, but that was back then of course. My dad written a UI with visual basic that was used for cashiers at dry cleaners. It is limited, but it's useful for things that don't require such complicated tasks. Obviously in my opinion I think it shouldn't be used anymore and rather use other languages like Java or C++.
I don't think anyone is arguing that VB should still be used today
For rapid development most real world applications there were clarion, foxpro, etc.
Yes, deving in Sun was tedious but not that much.
And yes; NextStep was a step ahead because the tools
The cost of delivering this application is in development time, I mean saving 30% dev time? It is why these companies failed on the desktop - the cost of application delivery was not in whether or not the developer had some funky new tools on his $15k workstation.
There was a saying at the time, "Who's down with OOP?"
I feel it for the poor Sun guy, dealing with fields in 'C', too painful
The narrator sounds like Robert Stack Unsolved Mysteries
2:55 Was it John Carmack? You know Doom, Quake
look at those nerds
Or you could have done this in HyperCard in 15 minutes
only a year or so later, could have made the application in powerbuilder within time of the video
I'd like to see Sun's version of this 'unbiased' presentation. I don't doubt that IB w/Objective-C along with the NeXT AppKit was the better development environment but to call this an 'objective' (no pun) viewpoint- I don't think so. I'm surprised they didn't have the Sun guy wearing a pocket protector.
Wow, the origin of Visual Basic.
Fascinating. I'd still prefer the Sun. But fascinating.
Nice
While this is clearly an ad, it's worth mentioning that NeXT and SUN had rather different use scenarios/user cases in real life, and this comparison, biased or not (I suspect not) is pointless at its core. Database-related processing tasks were always the strongest card with the SUN, no matter how hard NeXT tried to outcompete them.
So they joined them!
BeOS anybody :p ?
BeOS was great like OS/2.
Yep! Except BeOS didn't even exist when this video was made... and not for another 3 years until after this video!
Yeap. NeXTSTEP in 1988, BeOS in 1991.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
It's also worth to mention PC/GEOS launched in 1990.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)
and GEOS (8-bit operating system) from 1986:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
NeXT was awesome (I’m writing this on a variant of it right now with iOS), but I fell head over heels for BeOS. Just imagine that the fact BeOS isn’t a big player on the scene in modern times is all due to Apple’s decision to acquire NeXT rather than Be.
I still have OS/2 Warp on floppies.... somewhere.
If Haiku could port Firefox or other DRM capable browser I would use it .
Anyone use OpenIndiana ? SmartOS? I was wondering if either could stream services like Netflix ..
Both companies defunct.
13:10 Oh come on...just losing your train of thought can add 20 minutes. The older programmer was a lot more candid about problems. Junior devs are a lot more likely to say "everything's great, everything's fine," so I'm not impressed by the editing here that makes the older guy seem more flustered.
Top os
'All without writing a single line of code', pleeeease, that's a lie. I worked with those NeXT workstations and yes they were spectacular, but 0 code, that's sales talking.
For those particular functions. Adding icons to the buttons, and talking about built in functions already present in the built in email client that weren't part of this app at all. (eg recording voice messages)
Th GUI on Next was better, but everything else was better on the SUN, especially CPU scaling and file system, NeXT is primitive in comparison in those areas.
Also the 68030 was sloooooooow.
The NeXT here acutally had a 68040 and the Sun had a 40Mhz Cypress Sparc v7 in integer workloads the Sun is about 2x as fast... in floating point they are probably similar.
I was NOT impressed with the 68040 either. Glad it had an integrated math coprocessor though. The NeXT was a nice "personal computer" but in a cluster or multi-user settings ...
@@lancelotxavier9084 Well there is a reason why the 68040 pushed Motorola out of business. This arrogant management was insane to realize their failure (no 68050 yeah fuck you). And Sun was only good in selling overpriced hardware in a crazy expanding environment.
Next interface seems better than microsoft visual studio and QT LOL
You could work in everything but TIFF as it turns out.
If it's good enough for Carmack.....
Yep, and Tim Berners Lee. You have to have respect for a niche platform (as NeXT was at the time) which was used to create the World Web Web, HTML, Web Server, Web Browser etc, and DOOM. Super influential to say the least.
I just watched my first nerd-off.
oop in 90s...wow
There is one basic flaw, coding is 7% of the software development and QA is 40-60% depending on how mission critical the software is.
And for the ad : Sun workstation guy looks like a Wall-street guy a.k.a Michael Douglas (representing the boring and bureaucracy a.k.a enterprise ) and the Next guy is hip and cool kid on the block using new and cool things. The same concept is used in Mac vs PC ads.
And I'm pretty sure that the same concept is used with the new technologies for more than 30 years after this ad.
And 80% of software developers fall for this trick for 30 years
GUI Gallery
toastytech.com/guis/index.html
I know NeXT was superior, I mean I own a Mac, but Sun's DE was a-we-so-me!
Nobody could foresee that in the Next 15 to 20 years software would get 20 times harder to run while doing basically the exact same things. 😅
all in beautifull Black&White(TM) only ;)
It's running in color.
When you realize that the video was made by NeXT and the results are obviously gonna favor the NeXT machine, lol
I'm amused by this very earnest presentation of the NeXT as a business computer. Nothing more than spin. At the time we all knew who the NeXT was really for: computer geeks!
Yep. Like Tim Burners Lee, who made the World Wide Web with it. Or iD software, who made Doom for the PC with it. Computer geeks. Who appreciated rapid application development.
a two best system are same built on top of Unix
0:58 discount Andy Samberg
Yes like jobs are going to pay for a "competition" and the result could be that it was faster developing on sun's :P
bold with suspenders and ties old school type-and-debug guy against brave young sweater-and-jeans point-and-click guy. We all know that future belongs to young guys
NeXT = the grayest operating system ever
It said in the beginning something about NeXT Color but i can't see any difference to the non color version except 1 or 2 barely colored icons in the right panel or taskbar
+skil3z in the past monochrome displays were preferred because they could have a much higher resolution (having pixels with red, green and blue phosphors is more space intensive than having one phosphor), consider that the NeXT display had a resolution of something like 1120x832 which was HUGE at the time. almost all GUI based systems started with mono displays like with the Xerox systems 40 years ago. then when colour started being sold in GUI's it was done gradually to make the content more important and IIRC for processing requirements too. the mac had the same kind of style. mac os 6 and 7 helped standardize colour on the mac but unless you were working with colour content you'd almost never notice.
maboroshi1986 In the video they have a color monitor for the NeXT, but it's still almost gray (not including a few icons). That's what i was pointing out
*****
as i said, when colour was introduced it tended to be fairly subtle in the actual UI. there's a demo of NeXTSTEP version 4 that was pretty colourful in comparison.
+𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗹𝟯𝘇 Ya - they're using NeXTstep 2.1 - which was pretty monochomatic. NeXTstep 3.0 which came out a month or 2 later was far more colorful.
LOL so biased!
a race between a ferrari and a ham sandwich, why ?
These are "application users"..like Microsoft Office ..LOL hehehe :-)
As a computer science student i find out building Next OS , according to this video , is easy as a piece of cake 🤣 - but in reality, I almost did non GUI at school and face with ugly error message and long long terminal cmd to finish the final look
Jacob
There is no `oh come on.' Sun Microsystems ported their entire platform tools and applications for Solaris to have Openstep for Solaris sit on top of Solaris in a cross-licensing agreement with us at NeXT because over the next several years it became painfully clear NeXT tools were superior.
Since we merged with Apple the MVC world of NeXT OOA/OOD has been implemented and extended throughout the industry. Cocoa makes it possible for iOS applications to be rapidly developed. Fortune 500 loves it
You were one of NeXT's employees?
Ihi
00=nut spo-key-en 2erms..!!
"Industry standard TIFF format..."
How'd that work out?
Pretty well as it's still used to this day in millions of fax machines.
@@rztrzt And scanners / document management platforms.
@@TheyRiseBand correct
Look it up on wikipedia. Still a very valid image format, especially for lossless compression of documents.
This would take around 10 minutes in a modern web framework lol.
And require the client to run a 512MB webbrowser and a 2GB server process.
The most unscientific experiment ever....
a pity that apple has always needed a Unix underlying OS on their systems.. :)
its not programmig its a desing like apple learning programming language much more easy
'Twas twen tea ye ares a go two dais, Saas gen tPP eps par talked the world two say...
Boy, oh boy, the neXt boys were so desperate.
It's no secret that SunOS/Solaris was terrible for rapid development compared to NeXTSTEP. Seriously. Come back when you get interface builder.
They both still failed. Somehow in all excitement they forgot the faxing feature in the software.
+rootbeer666 Print and fax are the same thing on the NeXT - the fax button was in the print dialog box. In fact, the NeXT built-in postscript engine would regard the fax machine as a remote 200dpi printer. I still remember sending clients proofs of technical illustrations and having them call me asking me "how the hell I did that" (send an illustration that looked nearly as good as their laser printer from their fax machine which only had a 90-100 dpi scanner built in).
+mgabrysSF I didn't know that. That's really cool.
I don't think I saw them show the fax selection or a button for it in the demo here. :D
It was on the print dialog box, but you'd have to know when it appeared (all 2 seconds of it) and where to look on the box (bottom middle).
Any programmer with a lick of sense will tell you that this is clearly biased. The application was clearly created to exploit interface builder's strengths and Dev guide's weaknesses. And, seriously, it's like comparing apples to oranges. Using a full blown application building software suite against something not designed to build full blown applications? What a joke! I mean come on. I've only got a year's worth of programming education. Object oriented programming versus functional programming. I can tell you OOP is a more powerful paradigm than functional. Apples to oranges, very very biased.
But both computers are sexy little beasts, I want them both. XD
Roswell Night humble, bro.
Roswell Night The point of the demonstration is that the Sun didn't have the NeXT tools, so you should buy the NeXT. It's an advertisement. So no shit it's biased.
***** no shit anyone should buy a NeXT. They're fucking awesome inside and out. The only thing I'd step overe a NeXT machine for would be an AT&T 3B2-series machine, but that's only because it was built down to the microarchitecture to run unix
+Roswell Night Meanwhile, you can send the Suns to me. I'll make sure they have a good home.
CptJistuce suns are just the most adorable little UNIX boxes. Would love to have an older SPARCstation pizza box :D
I hate when this kid types really slow on a mechanical keyboard
so exciting!!!!!! NOT ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California." Edsger Dijkstra
From a man who realized he isn't team capable and has to do only cowboy programming? Taking advises from people like him (or Donald Knuth) is like listening to a joy of sex talk from the pope.
@@llothar68 My AI development system replaces your team of jeetcoders. Your comment aged poorly. The highest performance machines will ALWAYS be finicky and temperamental, that's why they require TALENT to operate properly. Seethe and cope.
This fucking blows goats raw. Is it any coincidence that at this same time, MacIntosh was LIGHT YEARS ahead of this NeXT crap? Apple was in its Golden Age when Steve Slobs wasn't around to fuck it up. Not only did the Macs of the time have vastly superior OS, they were......gasp.......actually programmer friendly and you could do useful stuff simply, and build up the complexity at your discretion. There were tons of great developer tools for it -- everything from Borland stuff to CodeWarrior. With this NeXT or sun crap, you are stuck jumping through the shitty designers hoops just to do the first step. On to the second step, which is double the number of hoops to jump through. Third step is double that number of hoops, but everything contradicts the rules in the previous step, and so on. Object oriented (or any) crapware "frame works" are nothing but post-modernist (anti-structure and anti-logic) hindrances to getting actual work done. That's the tragedy of modern crapware "development" -- it's nothing but hipster sophism intended as an anti-tool in order to sell the next anti-tool as a "solution".
For all of the commenters claiming that this is biased, it really isn't.
You did have to write a lot more code in Java, particularly Java 1 which relied overwhelmingly on object inheritances and function overriding. NeXT by comparison is largely delegate driven.
Interface Builder was far more than a UI designer; it could generate and maintain source code for the instances and connections established in the Designer. You could do a lot of RAD prototyping in IB alone, complete with working connections.
A simple application like this WOULD be faster to create in NeXT.
If anything the contest skipped over some of the NeXT's applications big advantages, such as the fact that it was compiled, native code and would run faster than the Java version that required a virtual machine.
Of course they also skipped over the downsides too, such as the fact that the integration between PB and IB was never that great and it would often fail. Also NeXT systems were slow and expensive whereas the Java app could run on virtually anything.
This is from 1991, Java for released in 1995
FONTS STYLEN in business ARE NOT IMPORTANT!
Wait till your eyesight is bad. There is a reason why there are different size and font styles all around our world, and why modern computers are not just command line interfaces at a set size.
They don't look like good typers. Good software developers are typist, these guys are not like many wanna be software developers these days.