BY SIMSON L. GARFINKEL
Special to the Mercury News
The Next step for Apple Computer Inc. was the right one. By choosing to work with Next Software Inc. rather than Be Inc., the company has chosen the right operating system for its future.
Unlike the Be operating system, which had also been under consideration by Apple as a replacement for the ailing Macintosh operating system, there is a cornucopia of software applications and books already written for Nextstep, the Next operating system.
One reason for this plethora of software is that Next's system is dramatically easier to write an application program for than for Windows, or the Mac operating system, or practically any other operating system in use today.
Fundamentally, Nextstep is a union of two underlying technologies, which are united like the layers of fudge-bottom pie. Apple needs to adopt both layers in order to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
The top layer of the Nextstep pie is the Openstep user interface system, which are the icons and pictures people see when they first sign on. It is Openstep that gives Nextstep applications their characteristic look and feel. Openstep is based on an object-oriented application development environment called the AppKit.
At the bottom of the Nextstep pie is the Mach operating system. Like Microsoft's Windows NT operating system for corporate users, Mach has memory protection, which keeps one program from crashing another or the entire operating system, and support for ''multi-processing,'' which should ultimately let Nextstep run twice as fast on computers that have two central processing units instead of one.
Before Next abandoned the desktop operating system business, Nextstep was the most compatible operating system in the history of the computer industry. Nextstep ran out-of-the-box on four hardware platforms: Next's own proprietary workstations, Sun's SPARC workstations, Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC workstations and industry-standard Intel-based PCs. Beyond its own proprietary floppy disk format, Nextstep can also read, write and format floppy disks for Macs and PCs.
But could Apple modify Nextstep to make it also run the huge library of Macintosh applications? The good news is that Apple doesn't have to: Nextstep can already run MacOS applications, thanks to another product called Executor, developed by a New Mexico-based company, ARDI.
Written completely without the help of Apple (perhaps even despite Apple, according to the company's president), Executor only emulates Apple's Macintosh System 6 operating system. But working with Apple, it would be an easy matter to take Executor, bring it up to the level of Apple's system 7.5, and add it inside some future Apple/Nextstep software offering.
Using this future operating system would probably be a lot like using a Macintosh today. You would sit down at the computer, turn it on, and within 30 seconds you would be able to start running programs. (Alas, the BeOS operating system boots in less than five seconds.)
You would be able to double-click on old-style Macintosh applications and have each one run in its own window. Or you could double-click on a new Openstep application and have it run. In the best of all words, you could even double-click on Windows applications and have them run as well.
Nextstep is an incredibly easy operating system to move into other computer systems. The bad news is that there isn't one Power Macintosh computer to convert to: There are nearly a dozen of them. According to engineers that I've spoken with in and outside of Apple, there are fundamental differences between each generation of Macintosh machine.
While this heterogeneity has allowed Apple to experiment with its hardware, it's also contributed to Apple's high costs of software development. Microsoft doesn't have this problem because the world of PC hardware is largely based on a single standard.
More bad news is that Apple has now tried and failed to bring out a new Macintosh operating system at least three times. There are literally hundreds of people inside Apple who worked on these projects. These people could harbor resentment at any outsider who comes in with a new corporate vision.
Fortunately Steve Jobs is not just any outsider -- he's the ultimate Apple insider.
He's got the vision, charisma and drive to bring Apple back from the abyss. When the history of Apple Computer is written, Steve Jobs's entire experience at Next may be seen as a 12-year-long skunkworks project.
Simson L. Garfinkel is a former programmer who worked with Next Software Inc. on a consulting basis and has published a book about the subject.