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.

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The MacBlogosphere is getting heavy with nostalgia as the occasion of Apple’s 30th birthday approaches on 1 April.

Wired.com seems to have the best content for the occasion, including a series of Apple Heroes and Villains , Steve Job’s best quotes ever , Wired’s best articles on Apple and a set of screenshots on the evolution of the GUI.

Guy Kawasaki’s video interview on Steve Jobs and Apple’s future at C|Net is interesting too.

When confronted by all this gushing talk of excellence and innovation, I turn my mind back to Apple Mail’s early years as NeXTMail.

Perhaps recent switchers like me, who haven’t travelled with Apple through the Valley of Death and back, don’t deserve to have an opinion. Even so, it seems to me that while Mail.app has come a long way, it has lost some good things too.

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The mail client we know and love has a long history. It was written from scratch for NeXTSTEP, the operating system created by NeXT Inc, a company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 and which was bought up by Apple in 1996.

Known as NeXTMail or simply Mail.app, it was a powerful and fully-featured program, more powerful than its descendant Mail 2.0 in some ways, although less powerful in others.

The importance of NeXTMail for OS X’s Mail.app is clear at once from a screenshot of NeXTMail’s interface:

Read on to take a look at Apple Mail in its early years, see what it could do, and hear what some people remember about using it.

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