Monday, January 31, 2005

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP 3.0

...in the early 90's. Check out this video full of goodies:

  • Steve Jobs is dressed in a shirt and tie instead of his regular blue jeans and black turtleneck, but he still has his characteristic hand gestures and catch phrases (e.g., "boom, there we are", "gorgeous", "beautiful", "powerful".)

  • He's pitching to enterprise customers instead of consumers.

  • Lotus Improv, WordPerfect, and OpenDoc make cameos

  • Connects to a Sun workstation, A Mac and a Windows box

  • Steve builds a couple apps, even connecting to a Sybase database showing off NeXT's database kit, one of the first (if not the first) object relational mapping tools.

  • Uses Display Postscript instead of Mac OS X's PDF rendering technology

  • Mail looks a lot like today's mail.app

  • Next's dock is remarkably similar to Mac OS X's dock

  • This is all on a 68040! Steve mentions a port to intel 486. Amazing.

  • Drag and Drop is everywhere. This is one of the things I love about the Mac.

  • He shows frame for page layout and the demo is strikingly similar to Phil Schiller's demo of Apple's new word processing application Pages.


It's simply amazing to me how advanced NeXT was compared to what I was using back then. It really shows Mac OS X's heritage. Heck there are things in that demo that I don't think are even in OS X. Jeez I was doing DOS based Clipper applications and PowerBuilder 1.0 in Windows 3.0 in 1991 and NeXT was completely object oriented. Wow.

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