<story><title>How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube</title><url>http://pupeno.com/2015/12/21/how-i-found-one-of-the-earliest-browsers-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>NeXTSTEP only became &amp;quot;cross platform&amp;quot; (meaning: ran on x86 hardware) as a desperate alternative to their failing proprietary hardware business. Seeng as how at that point the OS itself was NeXT&amp;#x27;s business, it&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes.&lt;p&gt;Even today the only real cross-platform product Apple makes is iTunes, and that only exists so they can sell iPods (and now iPhones) to windows users. Facetime, ApplePay, iBooks... all would be better as cross platform apps, but Apple isn&amp;#x27;t interested because it doesn&amp;#x27;t help them sell more macs&amp;#x2F;iphones.</text></item><item><author>ams6110</author><text>NEXTSTEP was cross platform, so not really such a far fetched idea.</text></item><item><author>twoodfin</author><text>I can imagine an alternate universe where Jobs has a &amp;quot;Xerox&amp;quot; moment and immediately pivots NeXT&amp;#x27;s software efforts to developing a cross-platform graphical browser.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;cross-platform&amp;quot; part is the most optimistic, to be sure. But if Jobs believed that NeXT&amp;#x27;s real value was the software (as OS X, and especially iOS, bear out), then you can imagine a strategy that used a web browser as a Trojan Horse for a platform that could overthrow the currently dominant Windows monopoly. That was basically Netscape&amp;#x27;s strategy a few years later, after all.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Could you say more about how you think that would have happened? I was a NeXT developer at the time, and I&amp;#x27;m having trouble imagining it.&lt;p&gt;At the time, NextStep was a struggling niche OS. Jobs didn&amp;#x27;t get any real power until he returned to the helm of Apple in &amp;#x27;97, and NextStep technology didn&amp;#x27;t hit the mainstream until 2001 with the release of the consumer version of OS X.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Netscape&amp;#x27;s first product was released in late &amp;#x27;94, and it was popular enough that they IPO&amp;#x27;d in 1995.</text></item><item><author>tbrock</author><text>Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane.&lt;p&gt;I constantly think about how them meeting that day may have moved the mainstream adoption of the web up by 5 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joezydeco</author><text>And that decision almost never happened:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;While it seems a given that the iPod was to be made compatible with Windows, Jobs was very resistant to the idea. At one point he said that Windows users would get to use the iPod &amp;quot;over my dead body&amp;quot;. After continued convincing, Jobs gave up:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Screw it,&amp;quot; he said at one meeting where they showed him the analysis. &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrumors.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;steve-jobs-biography-what-might-have-been&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrumors.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;steve-jobs-biography-wha...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Think about what iPod sales would have been if iTunes never made it to the PC platform.  Would there have been enough profit to fund the development of the iPhone?  Would we be where we are today?</text></comment>
<story><title>How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube</title><url>http://pupeno.com/2015/12/21/how-i-found-one-of-the-earliest-browsers-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>NeXTSTEP only became &amp;quot;cross platform&amp;quot; (meaning: ran on x86 hardware) as a desperate alternative to their failing proprietary hardware business. Seeng as how at that point the OS itself was NeXT&amp;#x27;s business, it&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes.&lt;p&gt;Even today the only real cross-platform product Apple makes is iTunes, and that only exists so they can sell iPods (and now iPhones) to windows users. Facetime, ApplePay, iBooks... all would be better as cross platform apps, but Apple isn&amp;#x27;t interested because it doesn&amp;#x27;t help them sell more macs&amp;#x2F;iphones.</text></item><item><author>ams6110</author><text>NEXTSTEP was cross platform, so not really such a far fetched idea.</text></item><item><author>twoodfin</author><text>I can imagine an alternate universe where Jobs has a &amp;quot;Xerox&amp;quot; moment and immediately pivots NeXT&amp;#x27;s software efforts to developing a cross-platform graphical browser.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;cross-platform&amp;quot; part is the most optimistic, to be sure. But if Jobs believed that NeXT&amp;#x27;s real value was the software (as OS X, and especially iOS, bear out), then you can imagine a strategy that used a web browser as a Trojan Horse for a platform that could overthrow the currently dominant Windows monopoly. That was basically Netscape&amp;#x27;s strategy a few years later, after all.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Could you say more about how you think that would have happened? I was a NeXT developer at the time, and I&amp;#x27;m having trouble imagining it.&lt;p&gt;At the time, NextStep was a struggling niche OS. Jobs didn&amp;#x27;t get any real power until he returned to the helm of Apple in &amp;#x27;97, and NextStep technology didn&amp;#x27;t hit the mainstream until 2001 with the release of the consumer version of OS X.&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Netscape&amp;#x27;s first product was released in late &amp;#x27;94, and it was popular enough that they IPO&amp;#x27;d in 1995.</text></item><item><author>tbrock</author><text>Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane.&lt;p&gt;I constantly think about how them meeting that day may have moved the mainstream adoption of the web up by 5 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>&amp;gt; it&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps hard to imagine, but they actually did it. OPENSTEP Enterprise allowed you to use the NeXT development tools to build apps for 32-bit Windows platforms. That came toward the end of the NeXT saga, so you could argue it was a move of last resort. But it clearly wasn&amp;#x27;t out of the question.</text></comment>