They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware. I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.

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zitterbewegung 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features by running a command that edits a XML file that really is just a large dictionary to remove or modify features

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jorisw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something

The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded.

But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.

Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books

	▲	rbanffy 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.

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ghaff 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, and although most users don't care (directly), having essentially a BSD command line available on Mac OS is pretty useful for a lot of us.

	▲	ktallett 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A command line of any form is the biggest positive of Rhapsody and eventually Mac OS X

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Projectiboga 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you realize Steve's other successful business used NeXT and then OpenStep? That little venture, Pixar, is where the cash to save Apple came from.

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ktallett 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips.

Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.

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cbm-vic-20 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.