{"id":564,"date":"2011-10-08T14:58:26","date_gmt":"2011-10-08T19:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/?p=564"},"modified":"2026-08-23T17:03:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T22:03:00","slug":"next-give-steve-a-little-credit-for-the-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notes.technologists.com\/notes\/2011\/10\/08\/next-give-steve-a-little-credit-for-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"NeXT, give Steve a little credit for the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"

The news reports and tributes following Steve Jobs’ passing this week have been dramatic, both in quantity and in degree of regard and respect. Today in the Wall Street Journal’s\u00a0Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet<\/a>\u00a0there is an extreme example, with allusion to Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson, and comparison with Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

My memory of Steve is tainted by my feeble attempts in telephone negotiations with him in 1992. NeXT<\/a> was developing\u00a0NeXTSTEP 486 for the\u00a0Dell 450 DE\/2 DGX, and both companies wanted a more formal relationship. Steve wanted large sales volume commitments, $2.5M worth if memory serves, and I knew that we at Dell didn’t want to make any volume commitment. In trying to keep the conversation going, I was making excuses, and Steve accurately but unkindly challenged my excuses. There are other positive personal memories, of Steve demoing\u00a0NeXTSTEP 486 on stage on a DGX, and of face to face meetings regarding some large sales opportunities, but memories of him mocking my words still linger. [Update February 16, 2015\u00a0– See\u00a0https:\/\/ma.tt\/2015\/02\/jonathan-ive-profile\/<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Since his death, I’ve seen hardly any positive discussion of NeXT, yet what Steve did with that company was so important, with regard to Apple products, but also with the beginnings of the World Wide Web. (The only significant post-mortem NeXT-oriented report I’ve seen is Jonathan Schwartz’\u00a0Realigning the Stars<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It is perhaps exaggeration, but not wild exaggeration to say that Mac OS X is NeXTSTEP adapted to have the Mac OS 9 look and feel. iOS<\/a>\u00a0internals, in turn, are derived from OS X. At least from a software perspective, all of the prominent Apple products, current Macs, the iPhone and the iPad, trace back to Steve and his team at NeXT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is no secret\u00a0that the first Web server was built by Tim Berners-Lee\u00a0on a NeXT machine at CERN. And that the first Web browser was also built on that machine. [See\u00a020 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published<\/a>,\u00a0Welcome to info.cern.ch<\/a>, and\u00a0World Wide Web<\/a>.]<\/td>\n\"NeXTcube<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n

What if there had been no NeXT, no NeXTcube and no NeXTSTEP? Would there have been a World Wide Web? It is easy to say that Berners-Lee might have used a SPARCstation<\/a> and SunOS instead, and the Web would still have thrived. But in 1991, there were Gopher<\/a>, USENET<\/a>,\u00a0and other alternatives to the Web. [Update August 2, 2017 – see Long Live Gopher: The Techies Keeping the Text-Driven Internet Alive<\/a>.] Who knows what would have happened? Without Steve Jobs, the Web as we know it might have never come to be. So give him some credit for the Web while you’re thinking of him, an exceptional person who gave us so much.<\/p>\n

Update October 5, 2013: Walt Mossberg tweeted link to this obituary:\u00a0https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/obituaries\/technology-obituaries\/8810037\/Steve-Jobs-obituary.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Update October 12, 2015: It is interesting to read all the details in\u00a0Without Dennis Ritchie, there would be no Steve Jobs<\/a>, but I suspect Dennis would have cringed at the title. I only met Dennis once, walked up to him after he’d given a talk at a conference, but he seemed so self-effacing then and at other times. The title is both biologically inaccurate (obviously) but also technically — Jobs’ early products at Apple didn’t use C or have obvious UNIX influences,\u00a0e.g.<\/em>, Mac OS initially was very Pascal oriented — see A Technical History of Apple\u2019s Operating Systems<\/a>. Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On<\/a> seems more apropos<\/em>, but not so detailed.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Update May 17, 2019: Looking around some more, I also found this: January 22, 1992, Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP 3.0 on Dell 450DGX (“JAWS”)<\/p>\n