tuaw.com — According to Romero, the original development environment for both Doom and Quake was NeXTSTEP; in fact, the first four years of id Software's efforts were on NeXT. He fondly remembers the days of simultaneously building for three different architectures, and side-by-side map editing across the LAN with cofounder John Carmack.
Dec 26, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 26, 2006
In any case, since (almost) nobody ever bought a NeXT computer, it doesn't matter much does it?
goblinkillerDec 26, 2006
Why is a Mac cool? OS X is based on the NeXT operating system and NeXT was started by Steve Jobs who had been "kicked" from Apple. Later Apple understood they needed Jobs and they bought NeXT and NeXT took over Apple and replaced the old Mac OS with the new OS X. If you want to know what made a NeXT cool - look at Apple. The technology NeXT had was so nice that Apple bought to have it replace Apples own.
scottstevensonDec 26, 2006
"Can someone explain to me the appeal for NeXT?"It must have had some value because practically everyone developer took something from what they did. Microsoft took a number of elements for Windows 95. I think it probably had some impact on Visual Basic, as well. Sun took the ideas in OpenStep to make Java. A number of developers took inspiration from EOF. There are probably others.
koregaonparkDec 26, 2006
Here's an interesting piece of information. Halo was first written for the Mac.<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_gaming#Original_Mac_games">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_gaming#Original_Mac_games</a>
ishmalDec 26, 2006
But the good ideas from them don't die, as the newer ones grok the good stuff.
deadbabyDec 26, 2006
The appeal of NeXT was being able to use a fully modern computer system 15 years ago. If you look at the basic design of NeXT -- the GUI, the API design, development tools, etc, they're all very much in fashion today among modern operating systems. I'm not going to say that people stole from NeXT because they didn't invent most of these ideas -- they simply saw what was coming and embraced it long before anyone else. Here we are in the year 2007 and OSX (based on NeXT) is still cutting edge while others play catchup.
jellygraphDec 27, 2006
There might not even have been Linux or Windows Vista.Without some vanguard of hope and freedom like Steve Jobs, Linus Torvards probably would never have bothered; Microsoft would have had no competition and thus we would still be stuck with Windows 98 SE 6 (special edition 6)....On the other hand, Microsoft would have probably perfected their security and, since the internet wouldn't have existed without NeXt, there would be no worms and such.
jrbrewinDec 27, 2006
"This is a demo of release 3 which came out in 1992. As you can see from the video it was many years ahead of anything Microsoft had available"and apple, and ibm.