. THE
OBJECT IS THE ADVANTAGE.
1988 Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) rolled out his NeXT system, a
computer in a sleek black magnesium cube. It was graphical, object-oriented
and way cool. But instead of being a real challenge to the Mac, NeXT was aimed
at the education market. It used a very unusual writable optical disk for
storage. And it cost $10,000. It sold slowly.
NeXTstep never gained a big market share inspite of having a
really cool concept. In 1997 Apple bought NeXT so Openstep could become
the new and improved MacOS. Steve Jobbs is the interim CEO of Apple at the
moment (1998). NeXTstep is based on an operating system called Mach
(to which NeXT has added a UNIX interface, so you can use the UNIX command
line if you like), but unlike your average UNIX system, NeXTstep is not hard
to use.
