NeXT, OpenStep and the return of Steve Jobs to Apple
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Since 1984, we've had tremendous advances in the Mac OS,
QTML advance, of course, Internet and Java,
And the most capable OS, still, will continue to advance.
But you know, there are limitations that, frankly,
are bound by the original architecture.
You know, when the first Mac came out in 1984,
it only had 128k OS.
And you ran everything on floppies.
So you'd have the 128k OS, your applications,
your documents, all on a single floppy.
So now if you can imagine the Macintosh being analogous
to a small Cessna, a small airplane,
as you built it out and things became more complex,
you added more stuff to it.
So you added more passengers and cargo.
And then you kept doing that.
And then you realize that the engines really weren't strong enough, so we switch from the 68K prop engine to the PowerPC jet engine.
And frankly, I think you get the picture.
That's no way to design an airplane.
At least not how Bert Rutan works.
I would like to mention while we're on this aeronautical theme
that I did visit down there with Bert
and got to look at some of these tremendous things.
And the kinds of things that apply to the boomerang
apply to the Macintosh.
For example, stability, performance, predictability,
and inevitably, given the foundation
that we've been building on, there are limitations.
And so it's now time to look at
what changes we need to do.
You've got to remember that a lot has changed since 1984.
Microprocessors are about 200 times as powerful.
Applications demands are dramatically different.
The rise of the internet, the rise of multimedia,
client-server computing, and frankly, the declining cost of memory prices have changed completely the landscape since 1984.
Obviously, you can't build everything on top of that old foundation, as I illustrated in the Cessna exam.
In fact, it's pretty amazing we've done as much as we do.
So what do you need to do?
What you need to do is recognize that the mission has changed,
and you've got to go to a new aircraft foundation or go get a Boeing 7-7 or equivalent.
And that is what the modern OS architecture is all about.
What are the big issues?
Stability, performance, productability.
Now, in some ways, the modern OS has some old heritage in it.
But frankly, the technology wasn't ready to take full advantage of architectural things we knew about a decade ago until today.
and if there was anything I think characterizes
what the impact of great new technology has been,
now we can do some of the things we just dreamed about before.
Today's hardware is okay,
except you can't necessarily deliver modern benefits
to all of the applications,
and that's an important element.
So it doesn't look like a Mac,
It looks like starting over, and that's not an option.
We've had to, we want to, I said,
we wanted to preserve your investment,
and so the solution for today's Mac
and the modern environment on the same OS core,
you want to put the Mac OS System 7
and the modern OS on the same system core,
and therefore get the best of both worlds.
System 7, in this kind of environment, we've codenamed Blue Box.
And you'll hear that expression, and you see it in the picture here.
The yellow box is the modern part of the OS, the modern API.
But it's also, recognizing the Internet, we need Java in here.
So let's put in some Java, and let's make sure the machine meets the minimum requirements.
preserve your investment, provide stability, performance, and predictability.
of the modern OS.
So this is the model of what we're going to build.
And then the question was,
and we made this decision about six months ago.
In this picture, we knew was the right picture
going forward six months ago.
The question was, what do you put in the yellow box?
You know what the Java is.
You know what the Mac OS has got to be.
What do we put in the yellow box?
What were the options?
Roll your own?
License?
Acquire?
thought of a minimum checklist would be things like preemptive multitasking, protected memory,
SMP. But we wanted to go beyond the minimum. We wanted to get some excitement factors into
our platform because, frankly, we wanted to make sure that the developers out there are
very excited about developing their next generation of application on our platform and maybe allowing
them to do things they couldn't do in any other way. So what we did is we came up with
60 criteria, 60 criteria that we felt we wanted to benchmark our options against.
And after, I think, a very, very professional evaluation,
the next technology came out as the clear winner by 50% or so
in terms of all the things that we felt were important.
What are the gains?
Well, you're going to get an OS that's ahead of its time,
and it's a good fit and complementary to our technology.
It improves administration,
gives you great international capability,
gives advanced multimedia,
a great internet enterprise story,
and rapid application development.
And of course, along with the application,
we also got this guy named Steve Jobs.
I would like at this time to invite Steve out.
I would like to invite Steve out and have him show you a little bit about what
he's been doing for the last decade. Steve?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Let's chat for a few minutes about what we're trying to do here.
Okay.
Slides.
This is our mission.
What we want to try to do is to provide relevant, compelling solutions
that customers can only get from Apple.
Right?
That's what we want to do, because if we can't figure out how to do that,
then I think there's a lot of other options for people to buy their computers from,
and we might not sell enough computers.
So this is what we want to do.
Now, how do we go about doing that?
Well, Apple brings a lot to this party, right?
As a platform vendor, it brings quite a few things,