this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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NextStep - eventually became Mac OS X (that’s why all sorts of system calls start with
NS)BeOS. Playing 4 video streams at the same time in 1995 was mind blowing.
OS/2 was WINE before WINE
SixDegrees was a social network before Friendster
Prodigy was an online service (and ISP later) owned by Sears, which had a significant mail-order business. It could have been Amazon.
I used to work at Sears, and I could never figure out how a company that found its initial success in a catalog business didn’t immediately see the opportunities the internet presented. Now Sears is all but gone, and Bezos gets to go to space with Shatner :(
Eddie fucking Lampert.
They very likely saw, but very likely could not make the transition without causing revolt in its ranks and in its own middle management. Or even its own board directors.
Man, I remember seeing that BeOS demonstration that had a spinning cube with a different video playing on each face, and being absolutely dumbfounded. Thanks for reminding me of that.
Yeah that looked so promising
*NeXTSTEP. And the NS object calls are part of the Objective-C programming language it was built with.
Oops yeah, corrected in my post
Another fun fact you might want to add, is that Apple, when they came to a crossroads after the failure of trying to invent a NexGen operating system in Copeland, had to decide whether to buy BeOS or to buy the entire company NeXT in order to get NeXTSTEP. They decided to acquire NeXT, along with NeXTSTEP and Steve Jobs (the then CEO of NeXT)and to hire him on as interim CEO of Apple, and, eventually the CEO. And that’s how Apple got Steve Jobs back as CEO.  technically, it was a huge gambit that Steve Jobs arranged while he was still the CEO of NeXT and it saved both companies from complete ruin, particularly when he arranged a financing deal with Microsoft year later. 
I think I still have a couple versions of Rhapsody on CD somewhere. It was a really wild mashup of OPENSTEP with MacOS 8 styling. I'm not sure if I have the x86 version, but if so, it might be fun to see if it'll run in a modern virtual machine. I'm also not sure if I kept media for a "Yellow Box" install, when part of Apple's strategy was to have its APIs run on Windows NT to allow for cross-platform apps.
I have a version of it running in a VM somewhere on an archived Drive someplace. It was very interesting to be sure.
What do you mean with this?
Programmers that make MacOS apps see a lot of things with "NS" in the name. For example, if you want to play sound in your code, you can use something called
NSSound. If you want to interact with the clipboard (or "pasteboard" as MacOS calls it), you use something calledNSPasteboard"NS" is short for "NeXTStep". Apple kept the old prefix even though it's called MacOS now.
Thanks for the explanation!