Flashback: “This thing called the Dock” – Steve Jobs demos NeXT, bashes the Mac, says his favorite font is “Stencil”? WTF?
Ok, this little piece of Apple history is over 30 minutes long, but I encourage anyone who considers themselves an Apple geek to watch it. It is a demo by Steve Jobs of “NeXTSTEP Release 3” given in 1992, and it provides a slew of interesting tidbits about the newly married Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, OS X, and 1992 in general.
If you don’t have 30 minutes to spare, some key highlights that stuck out in my mind are:
– 1st up, you just know Steve wishes he were doing this demo on a stage at Moscone.
– A little early Mac/PC bashing, networking and graphics are inferior
– It is really kind of shocking to see how much of today’s OS X looks and acts exactly as 1992’s NeXT system. Makes you wonder what Apple’s programmers have actually been doing these past 8 years… some NeXT carryovers
• this “thing” called the dock
• mail (particularly the delete button/ drag and drop)
• font palette
• services menu
• dictionary/thesaurus
• home directory/icon
• network globe icon
• shelf
• search
• The FRAME application = Pages Today
• color picker = color object
• There are probably more I have missed
– 4:15 Steve shows us a pic of his young son Reed
– 10:20 or so Steve throws in a “Boom!” (And “Boom” I’m back there”
– 14:30 In talking about NeXT’s networking, it seems while Steve worked closely with Novell, they did not want to work with Apple. “So we did the work, working with Novell to get their NetWear fully integrated with NexStep and we wrote our own Appleshare to get it fully integrated…again, into NeXTSTEP
– 17:30 A Little Mac Bashing “This is a live demonstration, the text is really coming off a PC, this EPS file is really coming off a Mac, which is why it takes a second, because the Mac is a little slow to give it up.”
– 24:40 Steve”s favorite font is “Stencil”
– 31:00 Steve makes fun of DOS (Classic Steve)
– 33:10 Pixar’s renderman 3D render engine is used throughout NeXTSTEP (Steve bought Pixar back in 1986)
– Steve decides to use the Disney Character Donald Duck as part of the graphics demo, and puts him in a Ferrari (early Steve/Disney Love)
