Design folks at Microsoft (all six or 10 of us) were so jealous of the gray scales available on NeXT. Sure there was no color, but the first toolbar icons at Microsoft were all gray scale anyway. But we only had black, white, a light gray, and a dark gray to work with. There was some religion around not using color in icons that ChrisP challenged when he ran Word. Not that that you could do much with the remaining 12 colors in the Windows palette anyway! We did our best.
The stacked menu bar on the left of the screen was also attractive to me. It read easier to me being left justified. I did endless mocks and VB prototypes of the ubiquitous "File, Edit, View, ..." in stacked form a la NeXT. I guess the Start menu kind of ended up there.
It’s true that the original 1988 NeXTCube did indeed retail for $10,000. However the sleek 1990 NeXTStation pizza box you refer to in this post started at $4,999. Still expensive, but not crazy and very competitive with Sun workstations.
I love the way you're referrring to your colleagues with their email names (the story with Jeff/JeffH is really funny) but I'm starting to get lost with the list growing. For example, I've inferred that CharlesS was Charles Simonyi but I didn't read who was him before (or I didn't pay attention back when you first referred to him if you did).
Anyway, I'm enyoing this so much. I started my BS in Computer Science in '91 in Spain and I don't remember ever have been aware of what Jobs was doing at NeXT at that time. In the uni the available computers were VT-100 terminals, some really basic PCs with MS-DOS and, I remember well, a solitary Macintosh classic (yep, the 1984 one) that was kind of a testimony of the past and almost nobody used. MS-DOS and Windows dominated everything back then.
A few months later I bought an Amiga 500 and a year later an Amiga 1200 that from my point of view were far superior both in its operating system (that preemptive multitasking was something Amiga users were really proud of) and in gaming, which was something I did a lot at the time. It's great to confront those memories with all the details you're giving: most of us here were really ignorant and naive and didn't have a clue of what was really happening in the computing scene because access to that reality was scarce over here.
To me, the big realization of the AFX "app month" was we needed far better documentation than we had. We were all decently knowledgeable programmers, and most of us knew how to write a GUI app on Windows and OS|2, and a lot us knew the Mac, too. I think we all assumed we could just look at our own code and class definitions and figure out how all these new classes were supposed to work, because ... well ... how hard could it be?
But everything in AFX was different. And without decent documentation, it was hard to know if we were using some brilliant new class incorrectly, or if there was a bug, or if there was a fundamental design flaw that needed to be addressed immediately.
And we were also built on top of a full-feature operating system, and we were constrained by that native programming interface. And the more we diverged from the underlying system, the more overhead we added. So whenever we tried to fix some short-coming of Windows or OS|2 (and one of our goals was to "fix" Windows and OS2), the slower it got.
What a great, enjoyable read. I feel like I’m there with you and the team. Interesting, when Jeff wasn’t seeing progress - did he have pressure from above / micromanage at all? You portray it as a bit of a lost cause, but I’m thinking in reality you guys were making headwinds albeit slowly? Otherwise I’m not sure why the project would have kept on? Keen to hear more!
Also, it feels like Microsoft had a lot of bets going on many that failed or fell flat at this time (plus the superstar products that were bringing in the money). So interested to learn how that idea generation / where to go next came from. No doubt BillG/SteveB and other execs drove a plan in some way.
Also, are you going to talk much about Jeff Raikes?
You skim over your Cornell recruiting trip without a date, but I can offer some color if it was in the 1988/89 time-frame. That’s when my now-wife Tonya (TonyaE at Microsoft later, though people often assumed TonyAE) and I were STOSes (Student Terminal Operations Supervisors) at Cornell, managing the public computing rooms. (And for those who don’t know, which will be everyone, Steven was Tonya’s dorm resident adviser in her freshman year of 1985/86.)
In 1988 or 1989 (can’t remember if it was fall or winter), Cornell got the first public room of NeXT Cubes, and Steve Jobs came to open the room and give a talk later at Bailey Hall. I honestly don’t remember much about the ribbon cutting ceremony, but Tonya says she was utterly awed by Jobs’s personal magnetism. And his polished Italian shoes—this is well before the jeans and turtleneck era, and he cut quite the figure. We didn’t know the term “Reality Distortion Field” at the time, but it was in full force that day.
The NeXTs were in the basement of Upson Hall, which was Cornell’s Computer Science building at the time. (Now it’s Gates Hall. Things change.) The STOS office was right across the hall from the Upson computer room, so although neither Tonya nor I was explicitly in charge of Upson and the student PTOPs (Part-Time Operators) who actually staffed the room, we were the next level of support if they had problems. And wow, did they have problems. The major issue was that the NeXT Cubes were cooled by drawing air from the front of the machine to the back, and the main opening on the front was the optical drive. As a result, all the dust in the environment (and there was a lot—Upson was an old, rather dirty building) went through the drive and caused all sorts of disc errors.
We didn’t love the NeXTs; they were tremendously cool, of course, but there was no real software for them, unlike the Macs. I think they were used purely for programming classes at Cornell. Sometimes we’d torture them by making the digital clock app as tall and thin as we could—remember that they used Display PostScript. Juvenile and probably pointless, but it felt good when they were making our lives miserable by breaking all the time.
I am curious - you waited until you got a pizza box, which came out in September of 1990? I would have thought that NeXT's team would have sent you cube loaners a year before that.
I saw that Edward Jung had one in his office in early 1991, and was amused a year later when my small company took delivery of the same loaner - had Edward's name and address still on the box.
Also, I developed deeply on that environment. You could direct allocation out of an NXZone when instantiating a class, but they did not yet have the refcount system for allocation, let alone GC.
Great to relive all this.
People often ask me how Apple was able to have their OS fit on a phone, but MSFT needed to create a separate mobile OS. "Are they sloppy programmers?" they would ask. I always pointed out that the NT code base was successful, and as such added features for more than a decade and got bigger because of that. Meanwhile, despite my love for it, no one was using or wanted either NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP until the early 00s, rebranded as OS X. So APPL already had a smaller OS ready to deploy on these devices.
I love the story so far! I have found that you were writing this blog/book (interesting format, by the wat) on Twitter just a few days ago, and I am hooked up. I want to know more, hear more stories, more details. Up to now one of my favorite books was Showstopper (the history of DaveC and NT), but this is promising to be even more exciting.
Being born in the '80 I am too young to have lived the first stuff you are writing about first-hand, but I am so fascinated by Microsoft history and products that I can recognize most of the names and stories. My first real encounter with Windows was in 1992, when I got a new shiny PC for christmas, complete with Windows 3.1 and Word (2.0 IIRC). On the one hand I can't wait for you to arrive at Windows 95 and MFC, when I started to really get into programming, but on the other hand I want to continue reading about all the details you can possibly remember and write about!
I am lucky enough to have crossed paths with NeilK a couple of years ago, while working for Ferrari. Neil arrived in Ferrari around year 2000 and built for them version 1 of a vehicle dynamics tool, which I contributed modernizing in the last few years (version 18!). It still has some NK-named classes in it, and at its core is still an MFC application (complete with the occasional AFX function or macro!), even if new modules are now built in .NET and C#. It surely is a testament at the quality and value of his work.
I have only exchanged some emails and technical discussions with NeilK, but my older co-workers have plenty of interesting stories about him. Contrary to the beliefs of many, no one working at Ferrari but the F1 drivers actually own and drive a Ferrari, not even the CEO. The notable exception was NeilK, who used to park his among the rows of little fiats of the other employees.
This is an amazing read, thank you! For those of us who worked in organisations you led later in your career, it's awesome to read about your own early years.
What secret sauce, if any, did Next have that they were able to develop such a sophisticated full stack system in such a short amount of time? I imagine basing it on Mach saved a bunch of time, but that can't possibly be the entire reason?
Design folks at Microsoft (all six or 10 of us) were so jealous of the gray scales available on NeXT. Sure there was no color, but the first toolbar icons at Microsoft were all gray scale anyway. But we only had black, white, a light gray, and a dark gray to work with. There was some religion around not using color in icons that ChrisP challenged when he ran Word. Not that that you could do much with the remaining 12 colors in the Windows palette anyway! We did our best.
The stacked menu bar on the left of the screen was also attractive to me. It read easier to me being left justified. I did endless mocks and VB prototypes of the ubiquitous "File, Edit, View, ..." in stacked form a la NeXT. I guess the Start menu kind of ended up there.
Tandy kept a NeXT running in a UI research lab in Building 17 and I would sneak in there to play with the NeXT. The application I remember being most impressive was Mathematica. Wolfram was committed to NeXT and their early work showed. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/VerticalMarkets/HigherEducation/HigherEducationSW/MathematicaForEducation/files/page595_2.pdf
Coming from a UNIX world working on SGI workstations at Wavefront, a love for svelte UI, and sophisticated industrial design, I was in love with NeXT.
It’s true that the original 1988 NeXTCube did indeed retail for $10,000. However the sleek 1990 NeXTStation pizza box you refer to in this post started at $4,999. Still expensive, but not crazy and very competitive with Sun workstations.
I love the way you're referrring to your colleagues with their email names (the story with Jeff/JeffH is really funny) but I'm starting to get lost with the list growing. For example, I've inferred that CharlesS was Charles Simonyi but I didn't read who was him before (or I didn't pay attention back when you first referred to him if you did).
Anyway, I'm enyoing this so much. I started my BS in Computer Science in '91 in Spain and I don't remember ever have been aware of what Jobs was doing at NeXT at that time. In the uni the available computers were VT-100 terminals, some really basic PCs with MS-DOS and, I remember well, a solitary Macintosh classic (yep, the 1984 one) that was kind of a testimony of the past and almost nobody used. MS-DOS and Windows dominated everything back then.
A few months later I bought an Amiga 500 and a year later an Amiga 1200 that from my point of view were far superior both in its operating system (that preemptive multitasking was something Amiga users were really proud of) and in gaming, which was something I did a lot at the time. It's great to confront those memories with all the details you're giving: most of us here were really ignorant and naive and didn't have a clue of what was really happening in the computing scene because access to that reality was scarce over here.
You can't really call it _raiding_ the minibar. It's right there in your room!
Fixed the garbled sentence. Sorry.
To me, the big realization of the AFX "app month" was we needed far better documentation than we had. We were all decently knowledgeable programmers, and most of us knew how to write a GUI app on Windows and OS|2, and a lot us knew the Mac, too. I think we all assumed we could just look at our own code and class definitions and figure out how all these new classes were supposed to work, because ... well ... how hard could it be?
But everything in AFX was different. And without decent documentation, it was hard to know if we were using some brilliant new class incorrectly, or if there was a bug, or if there was a fundamental design flaw that needed to be addressed immediately.
And we were also built on top of a full-feature operating system, and we were constrained by that native programming interface. And the more we diverged from the underlying system, the more overhead we added. So whenever we tried to fix some short-coming of Windows or OS|2 (and one of our goals was to "fix" Windows and OS2), the slower it got.
What a great, enjoyable read. I feel like I’m there with you and the team. Interesting, when Jeff wasn’t seeing progress - did he have pressure from above / micromanage at all? You portray it as a bit of a lost cause, but I’m thinking in reality you guys were making headwinds albeit slowly? Otherwise I’m not sure why the project would have kept on? Keen to hear more!
Also, it feels like Microsoft had a lot of bets going on many that failed or fell flat at this time (plus the superstar products that were bringing in the money). So interested to learn how that idea generation / where to go next came from. No doubt BillG/SteveB and other execs drove a plan in some way.
Also, are you going to talk much about Jeff Raikes?
Thanks for the great chapter!
You skim over your Cornell recruiting trip without a date, but I can offer some color if it was in the 1988/89 time-frame. That’s when my now-wife Tonya (TonyaE at Microsoft later, though people often assumed TonyAE) and I were STOSes (Student Terminal Operations Supervisors) at Cornell, managing the public computing rooms. (And for those who don’t know, which will be everyone, Steven was Tonya’s dorm resident adviser in her freshman year of 1985/86.)
In 1988 or 1989 (can’t remember if it was fall or winter), Cornell got the first public room of NeXT Cubes, and Steve Jobs came to open the room and give a talk later at Bailey Hall. I honestly don’t remember much about the ribbon cutting ceremony, but Tonya says she was utterly awed by Jobs’s personal magnetism. And his polished Italian shoes—this is well before the jeans and turtleneck era, and he cut quite the figure. We didn’t know the term “Reality Distortion Field” at the time, but it was in full force that day.
The NeXTs were in the basement of Upson Hall, which was Cornell’s Computer Science building at the time. (Now it’s Gates Hall. Things change.) The STOS office was right across the hall from the Upson computer room, so although neither Tonya nor I was explicitly in charge of Upson and the student PTOPs (Part-Time Operators) who actually staffed the room, we were the next level of support if they had problems. And wow, did they have problems. The major issue was that the NeXT Cubes were cooled by drawing air from the front of the machine to the back, and the main opening on the front was the optical drive. As a result, all the dust in the environment (and there was a lot—Upson was an old, rather dirty building) went through the drive and caused all sorts of disc errors.
We didn’t love the NeXTs; they were tremendously cool, of course, but there was no real software for them, unlike the Macs. I think they were used purely for programming classes at Cornell. Sometimes we’d torture them by making the digital clock app as tall and thin as we could—remember that they used Display PostScript. Juvenile and probably pointless, but it felt good when they were making our lives miserable by breaking all the time.
I am curious - you waited until you got a pizza box, which came out in September of 1990? I would have thought that NeXT's team would have sent you cube loaners a year before that.
I saw that Edward Jung had one in his office in early 1991, and was amused a year later when my small company took delivery of the same loaner - had Edward's name and address still on the box.
Also, I developed deeply on that environment. You could direct allocation out of an NXZone when instantiating a class, but they did not yet have the refcount system for allocation, let alone GC.
Great to relive all this.
People often ask me how Apple was able to have their OS fit on a phone, but MSFT needed to create a separate mobile OS. "Are they sloppy programmers?" they would ask. I always pointed out that the NT code base was successful, and as such added features for more than a decade and got bigger because of that. Meanwhile, despite my love for it, no one was using or wanted either NeXTSTEP or OpenSTEP until the early 00s, rebranded as OS X. So APPL already had a smaller OS ready to deploy on these devices.
I love the story so far! I have found that you were writing this blog/book (interesting format, by the wat) on Twitter just a few days ago, and I am hooked up. I want to know more, hear more stories, more details. Up to now one of my favorite books was Showstopper (the history of DaveC and NT), but this is promising to be even more exciting.
Being born in the '80 I am too young to have lived the first stuff you are writing about first-hand, but I am so fascinated by Microsoft history and products that I can recognize most of the names and stories. My first real encounter with Windows was in 1992, when I got a new shiny PC for christmas, complete with Windows 3.1 and Word (2.0 IIRC). On the one hand I can't wait for you to arrive at Windows 95 and MFC, when I started to really get into programming, but on the other hand I want to continue reading about all the details you can possibly remember and write about!
I am lucky enough to have crossed paths with NeilK a couple of years ago, while working for Ferrari. Neil arrived in Ferrari around year 2000 and built for them version 1 of a vehicle dynamics tool, which I contributed modernizing in the last few years (version 18!). It still has some NK-named classes in it, and at its core is still an MFC application (complete with the occasional AFX function or macro!), even if new modules are now built in .NET and C#. It surely is a testament at the quality and value of his work.
I have only exchanged some emails and technical discussions with NeilK, but my older co-workers have plenty of interesting stories about him. Contrary to the beliefs of many, no one working at Ferrari but the F1 drivers actually own and drive a Ferrari, not even the CEO. The notable exception was NeilK, who used to park his among the rows of little fiats of the other employees.
This is an amazing read, thank you! For those of us who worked in organisations you led later in your career, it's awesome to read about your own early years.
What secret sauce, if any, did Next have that they were able to develop such a sophisticated full stack system in such a short amount of time? I imagine basing it on Mach saved a bunch of time, but that can't possibly be the entire reason?
I'm hoping you talk about Sequoia. Will you?