• BeefPiano@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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 :(

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      *NeXTSTEP. And the NS object calls are part of the Objective-C programming language it was built with.

        • gregorum@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          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. 

          • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • gregorum@lemm.ee
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              10 months ago

              I have a version of it running in a VM somewhere on an archived Drive someplace. It was very interesting to be sure.

    • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      that’s why all sorts of system calls start with NS

      What do you mean with this?

      • dan@upvote.au
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        10 months ago

        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 called NSPasteboard

        “NS” is short for “NeXTStep”. Apple kept the old prefix even though it’s called MacOS now.