Steve Jobs shows off NeXTSTEP, NeXTMail
Someone has unearthed a video on YouTube 
of Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXTSTEP way back in 1992.
The video is long (35 minutes) but begins with Steve talking up how NeXTSTEP has “much, much better productivity apps” than other operating systems.
That includes NeXTMail, the precursor of Apple Mail, which Steve puts through its paces after demonstrating the revolutionary NeXTSTEP Dock:
After watching how far ahead of the pack NeXTMail was, you can read more about Mail in NeXTSTEP (Apple Mail: The Early Years) and about the origin of bundles, which live on in today’s Mail.app as plugins.
[Via Global Nerdy ]
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October 16th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Between Mail.app, bundles, digital webster, Dock, quad-fat binaries, and display postscript, Mac OS X is like a “slightly tarted up Nextstepâ€. ;)
October 16th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
hehehe…. Nice one. :)
It’s amazing how many of Mac OS X’s key features were actually ported over from the previous OS.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:28 am
@Tim, The entire cocoa frameworks were NeXT derived (that’s why they begin with NS…), so yeah, they had it first. Of course, there are some things NeXT had that OSX still lacks, like NXHosting (think steroid enhanced VNC, but MUCH faster). As a matter of fact, I still don’t quite understand why NXHosting isn’t incorporated into Apple Remote Desktop
October 17th, 2006 at 3:38 am
“It’s amazing how many of Mac OS X’s key features were actually ported over from the previous OS.”
Not really, considering Apple paid $400 million for it. What is amazing is how many features from NeXTSTEP and Mac OS is ported into Windows and Microsoft paid nothing for it.
:)
October 17th, 2006 at 3:40 am
Oh, I have to correct myself, MS did ‘invest’ $150 million into Apple back in ‘99. As I recall, they profited from that when the Apple shares went up two years later.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
In 1992, Mail.app had already been around for 4 years. When I first saw it at the 1988 NeXT introduction, I was very impressed. Of course, by 1992, Mail.app had already been extensible (via bundles) for a couple of years, and a plethora of extensions were available (many bundled together in packages like EnhanceMail). Unfortunately, Mac OS X Mail.app is far less extensible than its NeXT forbearer.