I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.

It still blows my mind that this is the same company.

▲

pwatsonwailes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.

They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.

▲

wat10000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The joke is that NeXT acquired Apple and got paid to do it.

There’s a lot of truth to it. A huge amount of the software stack is inherited from NeXT. Steve Jobs was inherited from NeXT. Modern Apple is vastly more successful than NeXT ever was, but there’s a lot of continuity there as well.

▲

nostrademons 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's right there in the developer APIs. All of those NS_ prefixes in the MacOS and iOS SDKs stand for NeXTSTEP.

▲

marsten 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.

▲

bombcar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Microsoft had done something similar (twice!) but Apple polished the living daylights out of it.

▲

wat10000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Apple did it before as well. A/UX ran System 7 in a UNIX process. That was a really niche system, though.

	▲	bombcar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That and XENIX are really interesting “what might have beens”.