My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.
reply- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.
replyCaroline Rose also has an interview there, and it was also well-worth watching:
replyThanks to both you and the GP commenter for the references. I've queued both of them up to download. CHM's oral histories are priceless, though finding the right ones to listen to can be difficult with the volume.
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replyWeird to state all these details, leading with 'presumably'
replyI don't have the book, and I don't have much faith in writers, esp. when writing about NeXT, e.g., David Pogue writing in his column in _MacWorld_ and noting that Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad (correct) running Windows 95 (incorrect) since he couldn't be bothered to check that the ThinkPad model in question (I believe a 760C) was of course on the NeXTstep Intel compatibility list, and so, was of course running NeXTstep --- Lighthouse Design's Presentation.app was used as the model for Apple's Keynote.app
replyWill concede that David Pogue is a bit of a hack compared to the other biographers. I didn't think his recent book added much except for some stories from the Tim Cook era.
replyWasn't PowerPoint also based on an application initially made for NeXT?
replyI don't think so --- it was originally a Mac application done by a company named Forethought, Inc. in 1987 (per Wikipedia), while the NeXT didn't come out until late in 1998
replyI was on the Virtuoso team at Altsys. Until Freehand was murdered by Adobe, there was still a ton of NeXT flavor in it.
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