
NeXT Computer - nashequilibrium
http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next.htm
======
ajross
> _with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, [...] this was the
> "Ferrari" of desktop systems!_

Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against
MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on
typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform,
and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed.

There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very
flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in
its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and
integration would otherwise have been attractive.

~~~
SeanLuke
> It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price
> range,

Having used a lot of SPARCs and NeXT boxes side by side during that period,
I'm scratching my head as to what features you're referring to, at least among
machines which directly competed with, say, the NeXTstation Color Turbo.
Looking back I'm really amazed at how ahead of its time that machine was.

But the critical item, I think, was the OS. NeXT had NeXTSTEP. Sun had heaven
help us all) SunOS and later Solaris. SGI had IRIX. There was absolutely no
comparison. I think this is why NeXTSTEP still lives on in OS X, and Solaris,
um...

~~~
reeses
They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in
a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers
and low end workstations.

This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel
started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time
the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT
couldn't scale up the way SGI could.

If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different
story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but
they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on
technology or HP and IBM on financials.

~~~
mietek
> In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics
> accelerators were on the market

NeXT was already out of the hardware business for three years when 3dfx
introduced Voodoo in 1996, same year NeXT bought Apple for negative $400M.

~~~
reeses
I was referring to the workstation market, where Sun and SGI were stitching up
that market. GX, LX, and Élan were arriving on the market when NeXT only had
ND.

3dfx was, for obvious economic reasons, not a slice of the solid, high, or
extreme IMPACT graphics that were available on the desktop at the time of its
release. It was more competitive with the options for Ultra, but Sun had
already conceded the high end graphics market to SGI.

------
wtallis
Some things to take note of:

Scroll bars are on the left, and the scroll buttons are at the same end of the
scroll bar.

NeXTSTEP GUI programs adhered to a well-defined concept of an _application_ :
they're stored on-disk as self-contained app bundles that appear in the file
manager as a single file, there's one Dock tile per application, one menu per
application, and zero or more windows per running application. OS X has
somewhat weakened this.

Menus are vertically arranged, and can be re-positioned. Sub-menus can also be
torn off and re-positioned.

Unlike OS X's Dock, when you fire up an application that isn't already in the
Dock, the app icon goes in the bottom-left corner of the screen (which is also
where minimized windows go). The app icons in the Dock are only the ones that
you have selected to stay in the Dock even when the application isn't running.

The window close and minimize buttons are in different corners, and the close
button provides visual indication of a window containing an unsaved document.

The display is grayscale, but the software supports color.

~~~
ben1040
>the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar.

Which was also the case in OS X, up through 10.3.

~~~
_delirium
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being described here, I believe they were
kept up through 10.6. I'm running 10.6.8 currently, and there are two scroll
buttons at the same end of the scroll bars, as in NeXT. But from 10.7 the
scroll buttons were scrapped entirely.

~~~
wtallis
Whether to put the buttons together or at opposite ends has been an option for
as long as I have been using OS X, but I don't recall the history of the
default setting.

The other scrollbar-related behavior is what happens when you click on an
empty part of the scroll bar. On NeXTSTEP, the scroll thumb jumps to where you
clicked. On Windows, it scrolls down one page/screenfull. OS X has defaulted
to the Windows behavior for at least the past several major releases.

~~~
eschaton
What you're referring to as "Windows" behavior is actually Mac behavior.

Smalltalk scroll bars were hidden entirely when the mouse pointer was outside
a scrollable view. When shown they were on the left, they were proportional
and went up/down with a left/right button mouse press. The code for this is
probably still in Squeak somewhere - it's certainly how old versions of
VisualWorks Smalltalk worked.

Lisa made scroll bars always visible, moved them to the right, made the
thumb/elevator non-proportional (users didn't get why it changed size), and
added arrows to the ends - and then added page-scroll buttons too. Lisa also
came up with the resize corner, rather than resize-by-any-edge or resize-by-
explicit-command.

The Mac streamlined this further by getting rid of the page-scroll buttons and
making it what happened when clicking in the bar background. Later the Mac
also came up with zooming a window to a proper size to fit its contents.
(Which isn't the same as maximizing it to fill the screen.)

NeXT moved scroll bars back to the left, put the arrows together at the
bottom, made them proportional again, and made clicking in the the bar
background scroll to a point.

Mac OS X kept the arrows together and proportionality but matched the
positioning of the Lisa and Mac. Scroll-to-point instead of scroll-by-page
remained an option in System Preferences though, and holding the option key
inverts the behavior.

OS X Lion hid the scroll bars once more, at least for users with touch-
scrolling devices like trackpads and the Magic Mouse, and got rid of the
arrows.

------
ebbv
There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there
were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice
in that it was standard and you knew what to expect in every application, but
also could be less than ideal in some applications.

Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of
daily usage.

In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was
competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very
expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if
you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other
reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's
for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons.

A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc.
and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on
X. etc.

~~~
jjtheblunt
Or, in the end, NeXT succeeded in being bought by Apple, morphing into XNU,
Darwin, and thus OSX and iOS, and doing quite well?

~~~
ebbv
Well, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can
really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any
yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom
hands you a trophy.

~~~
cstross
Subsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over
Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The
contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis
Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple
was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All
else is history.

If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered
the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But
with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things
around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on
every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny _silver_ cube that runs
something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic
MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and
a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to _make_ such a statement) I
don't know what is!

~~~
pjmlp
Another interesting "What if" is if they had decided to go BeOS way, Mac OS X
wouldn't be a UNIX system.

Not sure how that would have gone with all the geeks that went for Mac OS X
without an Apple background, just because it is UNIX.

~~~
reeses
BeOS had every geek salivating madly with the BeBox. Two processors, man! And
it could play two mpegs at the same time!

It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.

~~~
zmonkeyz
and the geekport!

~~~
reeses
OMFG, the Geekport!

------
akamaka
John Romero's blog has a nice write-up about how id Software developed Doom on
Next Step back in 1993. Complete with a screenshot of the level editor:
<http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday>

------
erikj
Those who want to experience NeXTSTEP without the hurdle of installing a VM
should try GNUstep. This project aims to faithfully recreate the NeXT's
software environment, with the omission of Mach and its IPC mechanisms.

<http://www.gnustep.org/>

You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package
manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.

~~~
pjmlp
The problem is that their development is almost stalled.

I hardly see any difference since 2004, the last time I used WindowMaker as my
desktop.

As for GNUStep the web site wiki is very confusing, as it is not easy to find
out how close they are for Objective-C language version and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa
libraries.

Again, many of the pages look the same as back in 2004.

~~~
nglevin
WindowMaker split off from the GNUstep project quite some time ago, IIRC. They
don't even use Objective-C, they use their own framework for widgets built on
WM called "WINGs."

There's still activity on the GNUstep front. Just a few things I can think of,

\- Their runtime, libobjc2, has done a great job keeping pace with Clang and
modern Objective-C. It now has a Cmake based build system and doesn't require
any bootstrapping with GNUstep-make.

\- GNUstep-base (the Foundation alternative) is solid, though some parts go
back as far as OS X 10.6 and others OS X 10.4. You'll have to check the
headers to see what's up to date. They do have an extremely capable
implementation of distributed objects, last I heard they were planning to make
it integrate with Apple's distributed objects implementation, but that project
still seems to be pending.

\- GNUstep-gui (AppKit alternative) just added support for 10.6's
NSCollectionView very recently. Most activity there has been in the form of
refinements. As I recall, drag and drop is still on their todo list... they
really could use some manpower there.

\- GNUstep-back (the backend renderer) still uses an API that's largely based
on Display Postscript. They are planning to pitch a GSoC project to replace
the Display Postscript API with one based on GNUstep-Opal (a Core Graphics
alternative), and they already have a largely proof of concept Core Animation
alternative running on it (GNUstep-QuartzCore.)

The project's current vision is to focus on making it easier to port
Objective-C to other platforms, rather than to be a desktop environment. But
like most small, mature open source projects, there's a lack of manpower
keeping them from easily achieving those goals. Would be nice to see more
activity there, in the future.

You can check out all of the projects I've named in the Github mirror at
<https://github.com/gnustep> , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull
requests. The mailing lists at <http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html>
are strongly preferred.

As for the current website, I think Scott Stevenson designed it a decade ago
long before he joined Apple. I like the design, personally, but I do
understand that it's a bit difficult to navigate... and several of the docs
haven't been updated in some time.

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks for the update.

------
Bud
I owned a NeXT Cube (since sold) and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I still
have and which still powers up nicely. Monitor and NeXT laser printer still
work as well. Pretty impressive for 20-year-old hardware. And still a
beautiful, sleek design, if you can get past the 100-pound color monitor.
Owning a NeXT in the early 1990s and the first days of the Web was like having
super powers.

~~~
reeses
I still credit the NeXTlaser's 400dpi, clay-coated paper, and FrameMaker with
half a grade point on every paper I wrote.

~~~
kickingvegas
I'm still mad that FrameMaker was never ported to OS X.

------
bernardlunn
Ah, the memories, the memories. Yes kids I was there and it was beautiful. My
company built systems for financial traders. There was always a battle between
the techs in the banks who wanted something architecturally elegant e.g.
object oriented and the traders who wanted a UX that worked in an incredibly
high pressure environment. In some deals the techies won and in some deals the
traders won and in both cases the bank lost. NeXT was the only thing that was
equally good at both. We ported to NeXT and sold a few. The rest as they say
is history (i.e. NeXT disappeared into the dustbin of history and remerged in
Jobs's brilliant second act. Today in our real time social mobile web we are
all like traders, so that is why we have NeXT 3.o aka the iPhone.

------
dredmorbius
For those who'd like to get a sense of what the NeXT desktop was like, there's
the WindowMaker window manager for X11.

I've actually been using it for a decade and a half (trying others from time
to time as well). It's very light and fast on modern hardware, the codebase is
remarkably stable (development has just re-started after stagnating for 6-7
years), and it's configurable (I've got numerous hotkey shortcuts defined
which I miss terribly when I'm in another environment).

In a world where I'm coming to appreciate calming interfaces, WindowMaker is
very much one such. I've only recently discovered Readability (similar to
InstaPaper or Pocket / Read It Later), and there's a certain similarity of
spirit between the two.

Also, as others have noted, Cocoa for OS X contains a _lot_ of NeXTstep-isms
under the hood.

------
kickingvegas
I have a copy of the original NeXT product information and IDC bulletin which
I scanned a while back for posterity.

Posting here for those interested.

[http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-
hav...](http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-have-your-
iphone.html)

~~~
salgernon
I have been searching for, and failing to find a quote by Steve Jobs - I
remember reading it in the late 80s. It was to the effect "UNIX is going to be
the operating system for the 90's". I'd love to track down the original source
for this...

~~~
glhaynes
I wouldn't be surprised at all if he'd said that; but you might be thinking of
Gates who once said that OS/2 would be the operating system of the '90s. (He
was wrong but he… still did all right in the end.)

~~~
nsxwolf
I'm willing to give his prediction some credit. Windows and OS/2 are pretty
closely related.

~~~
glhaynes
Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can
be.

~~~
wtallis
The Windows that is related to OS/2 is NT, which was very much _not_ the
operating system of the 90's, since it didn't go mainstream until NT5.x:
Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

------
j7
Aside from the beauty of this restore, I thought it was cool to see the UI
influences the NeXT's OS had on Mac OS. I've never seen screenshots until now,
but you can definitely see aspects carried through to its successor.

------
yanowitz
When looking at the terminal screen shot, I can't help but think of the
classic "csh considered harmful"
(<http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot>) (Which is itself a
classic "meme" before "memes" were a misused "meme").

------
DanBC
> All the NeXT components are displayed here, showing a clean and well
> engineered assembly, demonstrating a design asthetic that extended to the
> inside of the NeXT cube computer.

Some machines are really nice inside. IBM (and some Lenovo); some HPUX
machines; etc; have really nice well laid out insides.

It's a shame that this approach is dying, even though most people don't need
it and benefit more from semi-disposable hardware.

~~~
rsync
I'm not a mac fan, nor a mac apologist, but I have to say the current Mac Pro
beats all of them ... that is an extremely well designed desktop computer.
Really a joy to work with.

For runner-up I would say the SGI Octane2, and for a non-desktop machine, the
Sun E4500 was an extremely well designed, well manufactured system. Also a
real joy to work with (although weighs something like 100 lbs fully loaded)

~~~
bitbckt
An Octane2 is still my home workstation. Irix remains a joy to use.

~~~
wazoox
And a great hardware, with the sliding boards and the pressure connectors. Its
only culprit was the missing 5.25'' slot. I still have a dual R12K MXE Octane
too :)

------
bhauer
At first glance, I thought MazeWar looks a lot like MIDI-Maze [1].

And, sure enough on looking it up, MazeWar [2] is cited as inspiration for
MIDI-Maze.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War>

------
melling
Does anyone remember this NeXTStep game? Apple still has it for the Mac.

[http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40012297-Intro-
DontLinkElementID_2)

I did some NeXTStep programming 20 years ago. I converted the Tetris game to
color when they finally shipped the NeXTstation Color. If someone has the
Tetris source, I'd like to look at again and see how close it is to the iOS
stuff I'm doing these days.

~~~
nglevin
Is this the one?

[http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m...](http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m68k_only/Tetris1.3.N.bs.tar.gz)
(tar.gz file)

~~~
melling
Yes! I'm the 'melling' from the README2:

\--------------------------------------

If you are using a monochrome system, you should copy the Tetris blocks from
MonoBlocks to this directory. You can design blocks of your own by using Icon
and saving them as Block1, Block2, Block3 and Block4. Be sure to save you
images as 16x16 files. NOTE: Icon will open(and save) the Block images as
48x48 so you will have to change the image size back to 16x16.

Also, if you would like to design a color icon for Tetris, please NeXTmail me
the TIFF at the following address.

melling@cs.psu.edu

Also, I'm interested in hearing about any features that you would like added.

-Mike

------
dmourati
"Your printer is out of paper"
<http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd>

------
pacaro
If this whets the appetite of anyone in the Seattle area, I have a couple of
pizza boxes (one turbo color) with soundboxes, a mouse, keyboard and monitor
all looking for a new home.

All this is most likely non-functioning, but anyone who wants it is welcome to
it. I can be contacted at gmail.com

------
kailuowang
I have one box like this under my desk, nobody knew what it is.
[https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/A...](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/AAAAAAAADKM/ZuNIV_RAET4/w994-h1325/IMG_20130503_161810.jpg)

------
lazyjones
NeXT was way out of my own price range in the early 90's (I only had an Atari
ST). At our university there were mostly DECstations and Sun workstations,
apparently due to huge discounts (50%+) these vendors gave to academic
institutions and because they were also used as servers (with NCD X-Terminals
as clients).

The amazing design and focus on graphics power may have hurt sales in these
circles because it would have been hard to justify a high price for eyecandy
over raw cpu power and most universities outside the US were probably not
adequately funded at that time (perhaps Jobs overestimated that market?).

------
cwisecarver
I bought my first Mac a TiBook when OSX was still in beta because I knew it
was based on the OS that the world wide web was invented on. I've got the NeXT
Bible at home on a shelf. I've been looking to buy a cube for years and have
only found them for $5k+ on ebay. I know they're rare but does anyone have one
they want to sell for a reasonable amount or know of a place selling them?

~~~
reeses
The NeXT Bible, 1/3 of which was an ls -R from /, right? I recall the
interview with Brad Cox being particularly cringeworthy as well.

------
tardigrade
I had always assumed osx's aqua interface was behind the dock, very cool to
get a chance to see what their predecessor looked like in action.

~~~
frou_dh
There are torrents out there of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep images that you can boot
right into using VirtualBox.

------
mwexler
Lots to love about NeXT. I got a kick out of the display PostScript screen.
Very few other computers or workstations ever took that route.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript> tells a bit more about how
it evolved into PDFish displays in Mac OSX.

------
ludwigvan
Since there are Mathematica screenshots on NeXT computers, here is a trivia:
Mathematica owes its name to Steve Jobs.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia>

------
robterrell
Not to be needlessly pedantic, but MazeWars was originally on Macs circa
...1985? I know we played it in the dorms at Virginia Tech over phone-net
(some homemade!) connectors in 1986-7. Pretty sure I had seen it long before
then.

------
austenallred
All I could think about as I was looking through the pictures and reading was,
"Wow that is a good looking computer." Perhaps it's the designer in me, but it
just has a completely different feel to it.

------
hnriot
I remember going to their store on university avenue (palo alto) which is
think today is the location of an apple store. I used Apollo workstations at
the time, but the NeXT boxes looked really cool.

------
bambax
On this picture:

<http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg>

there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?

~~~
kickingvegas
That's a NeXTstation, a later version in a "pizzabox" form.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation>

------
camperman
Steve Jobs demoing the NeXT in 1990:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA>

------
headbiznatch
Steve Jobs blah blah blah UNIX blah blah blah Apple blah blah UX nerdery blah
blah blah blah blah.

OK - now the important stuff about the Cube:

<https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn>

