Originally posted by arden
Ironically, NeXT has become vaporware itself. Yes, yes, I know, much of MOX is built on NeXTech, but NeXT itself is vaporware.
Maybe you could define
vaporware for us.
In Dec. 1996 when Apple bought NeXT they had just released OPENSTEP 4.1 and WebObjects 3.0. Apple continued to offer OPENSTEP as an Enterprise solution and provided both an update (to version 4.2) and later Y2K patches to both OPENSTEP 4.2 and NEXTSTEP 3.3. Within a year of buying NeXT Apple had released WebObjects 3.5, and with the release of Mac OS X Server 1.0 (version 5.3 of what was originally the NeXT operating system) and WebObjects 4.0, Apple discontinued the selling of old NeXT products (even though licenses for those products can still be bought from Apple today). They didn't remove their NeXT product section of their web site (formerly at
www.apple.com/enterprise/) until mid 2001 and the NeXT software support documents (known as NeXTanswers) are now part of Apple's knowledge base archive.
Apple has not released any of the NeXT software to the public in anything but a licensed form. In fact the current licenses restrict users from major development. Apple still sees older versions of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and WebObjects as directly competing with Mac OS X and the current version of WebObjects.
OPENSTEP is only now starting to show enough age that people are thinking of replacing it (mainly because of it's 8 GB disk limit). For many people WebObjects 3.x and 4.x are not only just as good today as when they were new, the fact that Apple dropped support for Objective C in favor of a totally Java solution means that many users of version 3.x and 4.x who didn't write apps in Java have no quick upgrade path to WebObjects 5.x.
I currently know quite a few people who are still using both NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP on a daily basis and I have thought about returning to OPENSTEP for the ability to use some apps that didn't make it to Mac OS X. I contributed a section to the last issue of the online NeXTeZine and have provided information for a section in the upcoming release (on installing OPENSTEP on IBM ThinkPads).
Vaporware is usually promised software that either doesn't exist or doesn't deliver. NeXT software not only existed and delivered, it is still delivering today.