NeXT Step

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After being asked to leave Apple during the reign of John Sculley, Steve Jobs went on to create the NeXTStep operating system. Ten years later, it was this OS system that saved Apple Corporation and ensured their dominance in the computer market.

Brief History

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Steve Jobs

Though Steve Jobs had made it to the top by 1983, he had little interest in running Apple. Instead, he brought in John Sculley, an executive at Pepsi, to be the CEO of the company. Only a few years later however, a power struggle broke out between the two and “Jobs was out, fired by Sculley in late 1985. … He dumped all his stock – less than a single share – and, a few months later, started a company called NeXT” (Kaplan 105).

Steve’s NeXT Step

Upon being fired, Jobs went on to create the NeXT computer which was released in 1989 in San Francisco. Nicknamed as “the black box,” the computer ran on a operating system named NeXTStep. The NeXTStep was an “object-oriented technology that Apple’s Pink engineers were just starting to develop” (Carlton 409). The system was innovative in its utilization of “reusable ‘chunks’ of software code that could be used to build a more versatile and adaptable operating system. Instead of having to perform major surgery on the operating system each time it needed upgrading, the reusable chunks of code could be swapped out at will” (Carlton 409).

“Plan A instead of Plan B”

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Jobs makes his return at Macworld 1997

About a decade after firing Steve Jobs, Apple began to lose momentum as it became imperative to find a new operating system. As Microsoft was steadily becoming stronger, Apple frantically started searching for alternatives to calm their customers, as well as their software developers. Gilbert Amelio, a CEO at Apple, “promised to unveil a new software strategy on Jan. 7, at the MacWorld trade show in San Francisco” (Burrows). Amelio and his team began to look into Solaris by Sun, Windows NT by Microsoft and considered merging with Be Inc. Apple continued its search for a system in a frenzy, with the five basic requirements being “memory protection, preemptive multitasking, multimedia, ease of use, and ability to access the Internet” (Carlton 411). Ellen Hancock, an important figure at Apple stated, “When we did our numerical scoring, NeXT came out the highest” (Carlton 411). Amelio ended Apple’s struggle through buying the NeXT system and software, saying “I can boil it down to: we picked Plan A instead of Plan B” (Carlton 412). NeXT was bought from Steve Jobs for a final transaction price of $430 million (Carlton 412).

Critical Techniques

“The Cube”

The NeXT computer was distinctive in its shape; standing at one foot in every direction and weighing 12 pounds, it was shortly after nicknamed “the cube.” The shape and system of the cube later proved to be problematic. Of the cube Gates stated, “He put a microprocessor in a box. So what?” (Stross 72). While the cube was easily recognizable because of its shape, it was essentially unnecessary at the material level. In the end however, it is clear that “Jobs’s return was far more than symbolic” (Kaplan 106), and his distinctive black cube helped contain the operating system that was critical in his return to Apple.

A (Semi-) Analog System in a Digital World

“Jobs refused to include a standard floppy drive into the machine” (Carlton 410), and thus consumers were less likely to buy them because it was necessary at the time to swap between floppy disks to keep up with the exponential increase of applications. This resulted in a lack of applications written for NeXT, “resulting in Jobs being able to sell only about fifty thousand of the machines before pulling out of the hardware market in 1993 to concentrate on the NeXTStep software. But by then, NeXT had lost momentum” (Carlton 410). The bad choice in both shape and design led to critical comments from competition, with Bill Gates and Scott McNealy saying such things as “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it” and “it’s the wrong operating system, the wrong processor, and the wrong price” (Stross 72).

Naming Nonsense

Unnecessarily complicated was the process by which the products were categorized and labeled. Though the company name “NeXT” was consistently written with a lowercase “e, ” the products are more confusing and tricky. In a publication titled “The Merger,” Engel breaks them all down:

NeXTstep: the name of theparts without the operating system;

NeXTStep: the name of the entire system (the operating system, various parts, applications, etc.), sometimes even referring to an inclusion of the cube;

NeXTSTEP: the entire software package;

NEXTSTEP: no longer associated with the company NeXT, NEXTSTEP was now sold in conjunction with different hardwares (i.e. NEXTSTEP/NeXT Computers (black), NEXTSTEP/Intel (white), etc.) (Engel). Though the words next and step are conjoined and capitalized in various fashions, they are nonetheless necessary at the semiotic level in order to help differentiate between the different features and systems. And while the similar names make it difficult to distinguish, those who are familiar with NeXT know the ins and outs of these labels as they carry big distinctions. This confusion carries on to the direct remediation of the NeXTStep software, named OpenStep. OpenStep bares the various names of: OpenStep, OPENSTEP, OpenStep for Solaris and OPENSTEP for Windows (Engel).

Object-oriented Technology

The purpose of utilizing object-oriented technology was its malleability. Object-oriented technology was advantageous for “Instead of having to perform major surgery on the operating system each time it needed upgrading, the reusable chunks of code could be swapped out at will” (Carlton 409). This ultimately “would make it far easier, faster, and cheaper to keep the operating system spiffy and new” (Carlton 409), a crucial aspect of encoding and decoding messages.

Before and After What Came NeXT

Before Steve Jobs started NeXT, he and Steve “Woz” Wozniak “turned the Jobs family’s garage into a workshop and set out to build a personal computer” (Munarriz). A year later, they emerged from the garage with the Apple I; “Despite its limitations (the computer had all of 4k of memory) it became one of the first personal computers to be mass-produced” (Munarriz). The Apple II was released shortly after, the target audience being schools and school children instead. Interestingly enough, the design of these two systems bear a particular resemblance to the typewriter. At this time, even the Apple systems were digital, they were still one solid and chunky piece of technology that resembled what came historically before. It was not until the Macintosh that the keyboard separated itself from the screen. But this hardware set up that was characteristic of the Macintosh is what is continuously remediated to this day. At the end of the day, with the return of Jobs to Apple, “The heart of the new Apple was the iMac, a futuristic-looking computer-and-monitor-in-one, as brilliantly marketed and packaged as anything Jobs had done in his youth” (Kaplan 107). Since Jobs’ triumphant return to Apple, the “renaissance” that Apple is undergoing has been entirely successful to even include the recent release of the iPhone. The iPhone further condenses a personal computer into a hand held system that deviates greatly from the historic typewriter or printing press. These remediations are all media that are readily available for anyone with basic computer knowledge to read and write in, though the NeXT computer and Apples I and II require a little more knowledge. In regards to the NeXTStep software, it was remediated in conjunction with Sun to be known as OpenStep, software that could make use of another operating system as its core. The original primarily functions in a similar manner as NeXTStep, with versions for Solaris and Windows NT as well.