Dick Pountain - 01/12/94 13:21 - ISSUE 4 IDEALOG
A few columns ago I expressed impatience at the slow
progress toward a truly object-oriented operating
environment for the PC. Even while writing that piece I
was dimly aware that proper object-oriented environment
already exists which I'd never tried - it's called
NextStep and it began life on Steve Job's NeXT machine.
The black cube itself may be defunct, but the NextStep
operating system has migrated to Intel and HP's PA-RISC
platforms, and it so happened that my friendly
neighbourhood PC manufacturer Elonex is selling a
ready-to-run NextStation, which they kindly loaned me for
a couple of weeks.
Elonex's NextStation is basically the firm's
top-of-the-range 90 MHz Pentium PCI-bus machine (the
PC590), upgraded with 32 Mbytes of RAM, a 540 Mbyte IDE
hard-drive, a NEC Multispin 3x CD-ROM drive and a Diamond
Stealth 64 video card with 4 Mbytes of video RAM and
Elonex's 17" Advanced Colour Monitor. In other words about
as much muscle as you can cram into a PC today, with a
£7000 pound price tag to match. It runs version 3.2 of
NextStep, with a display driver that supports 1152 x 864
pixel resolution at 32-bit depth; each pixel gets 24 bits
of colour information (for 16 million total colours) and 8
bits of alpha, or transparency, information (used to
specify what can be seen through what). NeXT veterans tell
me that the Elonex's video performance is equal to, and
its computation performance substantially exceeds that of
the last genuine NeXT boxes, which were based around a 25
Mhz 68040.
Somewhere deep inside I may have been hoping that I'd hate
NextStep, so excusing me for ignoring it for so long. No
such luck. I was certain that, being ultimately
Unix-based, the NextStation would be a pig to set-up.
Actually I just plugged it in, flipped the power switch
and it ran. It took twice as long to boot as my Windows
machine, but that was still comfortably under two minutes.
All it took to sell me on NextStep was one look at the
desktop, where each icon is a miniature work or art. Does
being seduced by mere appearance make me a shallow person?
So call me Mr Shallow. I'd begun to show symptoms a long
time ago. During the year or so when I was running both
DOS and Windows software, I began to despise the clunky
appearance of those DOS applications I still used, even
where they were clearly superior in function to anything
Windows offered. NextStep's full colour desktop looks as
far ahead of Windows as Windows did of DOS - a Sotheby's
catalogue compared to Loot. Windows was born into a
deprived neighbourhood (IBM's CGA and VGA adaptors) and it
still basically believes that the world contains just 16
garish solid colours, plus a few hundred varieties of
tartan (officially called dithered colors). If Windows 95
fixes this - as I'm told it might - so that I can use
soothing pastel backgrounds, that will be reason enough to
upgrade.
NextStep feels as good as it looks. I've always disliked
pull-down menus and NextStep's 'tear-off' submenus are
more to my taste. The smoothly scrolling windows with
scroll bars on the left (I belong to the
chirally-challenged minority) also suit me very well. The
underlying object-orientation makes NextStep a very
consistent environment. You use the same spell-checker,
the same dictionary (Webster's comes bundled with the
system, as does an excellent quotation dictionary and the
complete works of Shakespeare; there's posh), the same
colour picker and the same mail box whatever application
you're in. Embedding text in pictures and vice versa is
quite transparent, with no clunky Object Packager
required, and you can spell-check text in a drawing just
as you would in a document. If you add a new software tool
- for example an OCR reader - then NextStep is smart
enough to detect it at boot-time and place it
automatically into each application's Services submenu.
(If you know about Unix shell scripts then you can make
your own scripts appear in Services too.)
Perhaps my greatest fear about NextStep related to this
matter of the underlying Unix system. I've used several
Unix workstations running Motif-based user interfaces, and
in every case found that the smart GUI was so paper-thin
that whenever I needed to do anything more demanding than
list a directory I'd wind up back in a terminal window
grep-ing and tar-ing and muttering oaths. (Why is it that
the conjunction of 'Unix' and 'GUI' always makes me think
of teaching first-aid to serial killers?) NextStep isn't
like that; its GUI is deep enough that you don't need to
see a Unix terminal unless you really want to. Even the
most hardened Next developers are happy to use the
excellent graphical Project Builder and the legendary
Interface Builder, which allow you to control the compiler
just as effectively as a half-mile string of command line
switches. In fact NextStep has to be the most powerful
programming environment yet invented; it's no coincidence
that both Doom and the World Wide Web were originally
written by Nexties.
So would I ever defect to NextStep? If I wanted to make a
living writing 'mission critical' software for banks and
stockbrokers, then yes, like a shot. But I actually make
my living writing about mainstream PC computing so,
regrettably, no. The NextStation is both too expensive and
too complex for my present needs, but more important it
lacks that critical mass of inventive third party software
developers that keeps the Windows world, for all my
gripes, so very interesting.
PS. How come IBM once spent $20 million on buying a port
of NextStep, but now finds itself struggling to reinvent
an OS for its PowerPC machines?
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