Episode: 3093
Title: HPR3093: Response to Linux Inlaws S01E06 (hpr 3079) on NeXT
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3093/hpr3093.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:36:58

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This is HACCO Public Radio Episode 3,093 for Wednesday, 10 June 2020.
Today's show is entitled Response to Linux in-laws season 1, Episode 6,
HPR 3,079. On next,
it is the 10th anniversary show of Claudio Miranda,
and is about seven minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
Response to Linux in-laws season 1, Episode 6,
HPR 3,079. Regarding next, next step,
and what would become Mac OS X.
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Hey everyone, this is Claudio M.
I'm just recording a little episode here
as a response to the Linux in-laws episode that was uploaded
for season 1, Episode 6, which is HPR 3,079.
I heard in that episode that they were discussing
the origins of Mac OS, Mac OS X,
and they had brought up the company called Next,
and Next Step. I wanted to clarify it.
I was going to clarify it as a comment,
but apparently it was too long,
and I think Ken and company have some sort of algorithm going where
if your comment is past a certain number of characters,
it gives you an error in the hopes that you record an episode.
So here I am recording an episode, a response episode, to 3079.
So that was a good episode. I liked it and enjoyed it,
but I just wanted to clarify a couple of things regarding Next.
So I'm going to take basically read off what was going to be my comments,
my comments to that episode.
So a little bit of clarification on Next and how it became Mac OS X.
Next was the computer company that Steve Jobs created
after being ousted from Apple in the late 80s.
The operating system was used by the next brand of computers.
It was called Next Step.
Now Open Step was an API derived from Next Step
that allowed the implementation of the interface and libraries to other systems
hardware-wise and even operating system-wise,
so that they can run that kind of interface along with being able to develop apps
for that environment.
And it was also used by Next itself in what was also called Open Step,
except that Open Step was in all caps.
The way they spelled the operating system,
if you're not familiar with Next the company,
it was a capital N, lowercase E, and then capital X, capital T.
And then, of course, the operating system was next in the same fashion,
but the word Step was all caps.
And of course, the operating system they created using the Open Step,
basically camelcased for the implementation of the APIs and all that,
was Open Step, capital S, but the OS they created,
basically the continuation of Next Step under a new name was all capital
and all one word Open Step.
So, I'm going to provide the links to the Wikipedia entries for each one of these in the show notes.
So, yeah, basically, that's...
Next was the name of the company, and Next Step was the operating system
that they created for their Next hardware, which was the Next Station,
the Next Cube, and a few others.
I can't recall off the top of my head.
Great little machines.
Some of them, the Cube basically was a big machine.
That was the one that I think certain burners Lee used to create the World Wide Web.
So, I'll put that one in the show notes too.
That wasn't part of it, I just threw that in there.
But anyways, so, continuing on,
when Apple purchased Next in the late 90s,
it took what was basically Next Step or Open Step,
and turned it into Mac OS X.
The core of Mac OS X, and even to this day,
with it being called, quote unquote, Mac OS,
is what's called Darwin.
And it's BSD, I want to say BSD-based,
but it's actually a bunch of stuff.
So, there's a lot of other things as a whole Darwin uses.
So, it has, I think, an XNU kernel.
I don't know if that's specifically Mac or not.
Didn't research that part, but I know that that's part of it,
and there's certain BSD-isms about it.
And originally, they used to ship with the GNU tools,
but I think they're moving away from that.
I think they have already moved away from that,
but I can't say for sure.
But I know that's what they're looking to do,
is kind of eliminate all of the GNU tools and applications from it.
So, before Mac OS X was actually released, officially,
there were some developer versions that still maintained
some of the aspects of next step or open step.
Mainly, the SCU Morphic icons from the originating OS,
kind of like what you'd see in Window Maker or anything like that.
The project was called Rhapsody,
and there were a couple of developer releases for that.
I think there were two, but there's an entry there for,
I think in the next step one, or one of those.
And one of the links that I'll be providing, it's there.
So yeah, so they had a few developer releases,
and then after that, they had one called Mac OS X Server 1.0.
And that one was really kind of used to test a couple of things.
They had a server, some server software,
you can run as like a web server and stuff,
but it was very, very early days.
So it was just mainly for testing purposes that I can remember.
And all those previous versions of Mac OS X before the public beta
was released to the public.
They all had the classic Mac OS interface,
like the one that you'd see in Mac OS X 9,
stuff like that.
Now the Aqua interface was introduced with the public beta,
and it's been there since,
with a few variations like the Brush Metal and some of the later versions,
and kind of the more minimal looking interface that they have now.
And if you look, all of this is better explained in the open step,
Wikipedia entry that I'll provide in the show notes.
So funny enough, before even next was around,
Apple actually had a Unix operating system.
It was called AUX, and it's usually written A forward slash UX,
all capital.
And I've used it before, and from personal experience,
just running it, if you just use it and you run it,
it kind of felt like a herbinger of what was to come in the Apple world.
So it's kind of eerie now seeing Mac OS X,
or Mac OS if you want to call it what it is now.
And how that all came to be.
And this was basically 10 years prior to all of that.
So kind of interesting.
So I'll also put a link in the show notes for AUX.
And I hope this was informative.
I hope I didn't ramble too much,
so I have a tendency to do that, as you can tell.
But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this,
and talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
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