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Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: evaluation

23 Oct 2016 Acquired NeXT (Live show at the GeekWire Summit)

“It’s just software. That was kind of in vogue during that time because that’s when the Mac was in the era of the clones.”

— Ben Gilbert

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Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
23 Oct 2016
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…$10,000, which was the price that all workstations cost at the time. So, nobody buys these things. Yeah. So NeXT decides “okay, we're going to be a software company.” And what they do is, they kind of separate out NeXTSTEP which was the operating system and then they had kind of the mach_kernel underneath which they sort of brought in-house. They separated that out and they said okay, we’re just going to start selling this thing to other computer manufacturers, right? What we know of Apple today is an entirely vertically integrated software and hardware company. They’re moving away from that. It’s just software. That was kind of in vogue during that time because that’s when the Mac was in the era of the clones. I mean, the Mac OS ran on other people’s hardware, which is totally mind-blowing for those of us today who know, “Well, what do you mean? iOS only runs on iPhones.” Yup. But it's super important and because of the power of this operating system and we mentioned earlier, but just to give a sense of like what is the real implication of this power, the World Wide Web is invented on this operating system on a NeXT computer actually. So Tim Berners-Lee at CERN invents the World Wide Web and it's possible because of Object Oriented Programming and networking obviously. And also, other history of this computer, John Carmack at id Software, John’s now the CTO I believe of Oculus, John wrote the video games Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D all on NeXT.…

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