

"Steve Jobs' New Machine for the '90s: the NeXT Computer" (BYTE magazine) - A_A
http://simson.net/ref/NeXT/byte_article.htm

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thought_alarm
Fun Facts about the original Cube:

* A single cable connects the Cube to its monitor (with speakers and microphone). A single cable connects the monitor to the keyboard. And a single cable connects the keyboard to the mouse.

* Neither the Cube nor its monitor have any buttons, switches, or controls. The only way to turn the machine on is by pressing the Power key on the keyboard (which is connected to the monitor). It's basically a giant laptop split into 4 parts.

* Likewise, there's no way to turn the monitor off while the system is running. However, the OS will automatically lower its brightness after a period of inactivity.

* Startup takes a long time. Pressing the power key while the system is booting up will interrupt the boot sequence and begin the shutdown sequence.

* The keyboard has no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is engaged by pressing Command+Shift which will light up matching LEDs on both Shift keys. The Control key is where it's meant to be, next to the "A".

* The keyboard has no row of function keys. The Escape key is located next to the "1" key, where the tilde would be. But if you press Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde character, you will still get a tilde character.

* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.

~~~
erikstarck
The caps lock key just has to be the most useless waste of space on a standard
qwerty keyboard. I don't think I have ever used it unless you count the times
when you accidentally PRESS IT. Woops.

~~~
pmjordan
You can easily remap it to another modifier key on OSX in the system
preferences. Other OSes/Windowing systems typically require a modified
keyboard layout, but you might be able to find software to do it easily.

~~~
davvid
I map caps lock to be an extra control key. It does wonders for vim.

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A_A
Consider the innovations at that time (c 1988/89)

"It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and
advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a
built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube
features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming
environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface
that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax,
and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power."

Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The
cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"

Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8
MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)

~~~
spitfire
The funny thing is, I regularly used my NeXTstation turbo right up until 2002.
It still felt fast with 128meg ram+fast hard drive. Coupled with the NeXTlaser
I was able to keep up with modern life. I had Mathematica, pagemaker,
openwrite, email, omniweb, etc.

In fact, even today you could use it as a usable desktop. I still find it
amazing that we've gone from 8meg to 8192meg ram and two orders of magnitude
cpu power but we've done very little with it. We've moved video decoding onto
the main cpu, offloaded graphics to a specialized chip and that's about it.
(Note: Next's shipped with a DSP similar to gpgpu today.)

Now I sort of want to buy a nextstation again and see if I can live a month
just on that.

EDIT: I should note that there's STILL no replacement for Quantrix and Lotus
Improv. They are miles away better than excel/traditional spreadsheets. If
someone cloned quantrix for OSX I'd buy it.

~~~
fractallyte
Huh?? Quantrix is still around, and there's an OSX version available - I know,
because I have it!

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spitfire
It's written in java and it just isn't quite the same as the old next
quantrix. Doesn't play as nice as native nextstep quantrix does.

~~~
fractallyte
Yes, it's certainly a downside. And one would think they'd release a Linux
version too, in that case...

That's why I prefer to use Lotus Improv under WINE ;-)

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mambodog
If this stuff is of interest to you, here's Steve giving a half-hour
demonstration of NeXTSTEP 3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A>

~~~
citizenkeys
damn... you beat me to it. That video never gets old. Steve actually
explaining some technical details and not just being cool.

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mambodog
It also shows he obviously had somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with the
"Stencil" typeface :)

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quux
Lol, that made my morning.. thanks

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jasongullickson
Funny that most of you are holding that code in your hand...

~~~
jbrennan
For those not in the know, he's referring to iOS, which is modified Mac OS X
which is modified NeXTSTEP. It's truly wonderful this OS lives on.

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RexRollman
In 1996, I bought a used TurboSlab from a company called Spherical Solutions,
which was run by a man named Sam Goldberger (IIRC). I loved that machine and
the Nextstep 3.3 install media that came with it even had x86 binaries, so I
was able to install it on the PC I owned at the time (a Micron Millenia with a
200mhz Pentium Pro). I would have upgraded it to Openstep 4 but Next wanted
something like $900.00 for it.

I loved Nextstep and I still prefer it to Mac OS X, even though the latter has
became something far prettier. I really should see if I can run it via
emulation, like I can with BeOS, another favorite OS of mine.

~~~
redacted
It is definitely possible to run Openstep in VMware, I used to do it. Not
everything works, but it is very cool to see all the parts of that OS that
made it into OS X.

edit: here's a helpful blog post by one of the VMware guys:
[http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek-
ou.h...](http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek-ou.html)

~~~
RexRollman
Thanks!

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yardie
This article makes me reminisce about the Color Turboslab I had in uni.
Functionally, it was limited because I didn't have much software I could run
on it but the layout and design was pure genius. I had this, a few
sparcstations, an indigo and an Alpha. All acquired at university auctions.

I eventually had to put them out when I graduated. My car wasn't going to hold
all the stuff I had acquired and something had to give.

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raffi
These are amazing machines. I have a Cube and a Colorstation stashed at my
father's house. I picked them up on the cheap in the early 00's. The desktop
felt completely modern but it was lacking modern applications. CubX remedied
this though. I had a laptop with a broken screen that I put Linux on. I then
ran netscape (who remembers netscape?) and other applications via an exported
X session. Good times.

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jonhendry
Incidentally, I just contacted ColorWare to suggest that they offer "NeXT
Black", the paint used on the Cube, as an option. I found the paint
specification online in an old NeXT document for developers of NeXTBus
expansion cards for the Cube.

([http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&...](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=62ead926ef12dc8217c7c736a256980e))

Yes, 3rd party hardware developers were expected to make sure the card-end
panel face matched the cube's color, rather than being unsightly bare steel.

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aspir
Did anyone else first read "8 Gigabytes of RAM" before doing a double take?

Moore's law is a powerful force indeed

~~~
drats
Indeed. 25 megahertz and 8 megabytes of RAM for $6500 ($11.5k in today's
dollars). And a machine with 2.5 gigahertz and 8 giabytes of RAM can be had
for under $1000 today; as much storage as the NeXT harddrive can be found on a
$10 usb key. 1000 times more powerful, 1/10th of the price in two decades. We
live in an incredible age, people too often forget.

It's these machines which indirectly enable so much as well. People like to
talk about the cloud a lot, but video that gets uploaded to YouTube has to be
edited somewhere. Now while it's true that YouTube has a flash based editor
_now_ , they didn't before they got big. And there is all the other video, HD
quality, out there that needs to be edited on beefy machines: 3D modelling,
games, music et cetera.

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FiddlerClamp
Beautiful machine - like the Mac Cube. I wonder if the experience with NeXT,
though, helped shape Jobs' ideas about pricing, interoperability, and
backwards compatibility when he returned to Apple.

