
NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened - stefanu
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo-that-never-happened/
======
KirinDave
My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have
tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if
people would be interested in it.

It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom
robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house
manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just
beautiful, too.

~~~
mahrain
There's an old video on Youtube called 'The Machine to build the Machines'
which goes in-depth on their automated assembly line for mainboards. Could be
a nice intro.

~~~
wjbr
'The Machine to build the Machines'
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT6aphdX0rI)

------
mrbill
UnixWorld asked on it's April 1993 cover: "Does Steve Jobs have a future in
software?"

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210)

One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd
wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out
in '89 or '90.

I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but
never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and
sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA
flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox.

NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then
replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a
SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats.

I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work
and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of
NeXTstep.

[1] [https://www.mrbill.net/next/](https://www.mrbill.net/next/)

~~~
MrTonyD
One time when I worked at NeXT I accidentally kicked my cube with my tennis
shoe - it was under my desk. Sparks flew. I told the fellow sitting in the
next office what had happened - and he wanted to see it too. We both laughed
as we watched sparks flying. Before long there was a crowd around my desk -
maybe six people - incredulous that it was so easy to create fireworks. Well,
what we didn't know was that Steve was sitting about 3 feet away - behind an
office divider. His head peeked around the divider - and he silently watched
the sparks flying. We all stopped laughing and returned to our work.

Next morning everyone in the company had a paper memo on their desks (the only
one I ever remember - we all used email.) It said that cubes were to be
properly displayed on top of desks only. No mention of the real reason for the
new policy.

~~~
milcron
IIRC the cases were made out of magnesium. There are videos of lighting them
aflame on youtube.

~~~
gcb0
I recall the journalist wanting a pic for the cover of NeXT is dead edition.
and even in a industrial oven he had a hard time igniting the magnesium. I
think he never did. probably a magnesium _alloy_

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Oh, it burned:
[http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html](http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html)

~~~
krylon
But still, he had to do a lot more than kick it.

------
elvinyung
If you've read the _Steve Jobs_ biography (or biopic), you might recall Guy
Kawasaki's accidentally-prescient spoof Apple press release[1] from 1994 about
a (at the time) hypothetical Apple-NeXT acquisition. Choice quote:

> As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to
> Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of
> the four personal computer standards (Apple II, Macintosh, and Windows).

1: [https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-
ab...](https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-about-
steves-r)

~~~
delinka
"...and Windows)."

Was that supposed to be part of the humor of the article?

~~~
rdsnsca
[http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-
box/](http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/)

"Red Box, the planned PC Environment for Rhapsody on Intel hardware, never saw
the light of day, although today’s Intel-based Macs have virtualization
solutions from other vendors which allow them to run Windows or Linux
alongside Mac OS X."

------
itomato
I can imagine a distorted future reality where the natural progression of
WebObjects was based on early successes with NeXT's OOP stuff with AT&T and
Chrysler.

While iTunes, the App Store and the whole "Digital Life" stem from a Web-based
Minivan Configurator, looking back at WebObjects as a product to enable that
for others seems so contrary to what Apple is today.

That Old World of Software Product SKUs has been turned on its head to great
effect, and I think it really is better this way.

------
calcsam
OSX is one of Steve Jobs' least-discussed successes.

The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but
without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption
of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.

~~~
m_mueller
Also, without NextStep Steve Jobs wouldn't have had a way into Apple again -
Apple would look completely different today if it still existed at all.

------
troygoode
I'm surprised this article didn't reference the old joke that NeXT actually
bought Apple – for negative ~$400M.

------
Isamu
NeXT: most successful failure ever.

------
beautifulfreak
NeXTWorld Magazine in the early 90s was my favorite publication. Every issue
showcased apps with elegant and surprising capabilities, like the first
spreadsheet with pivotable rows and columns. John Carmack wrote Doom on NeXT,
and claimed that NeXTStep made development ten times faster. Other developers
agreed. People were excited about programming on NeXT, and not because of any
reality distortion field. Reading NeXTWorld felt like seeing into the future!
(Here's an archive, rather incomplete:
[https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/](https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/)
The pdf scans convey more of the joi de vivre surrounding NeXT than the plain
text files.)

------
cpeterso
Interesting parallel that both Jobs and Jean-Louis Gassée started hardware
computers after Apple and that each retreated to operating systems, which they
tried to sell to Apple.

~~~
itomato
The "whole widget" philosophy only works when you can _sell_ the whole widget.

------
lngnmn
Like Symbolics, it was way ahead of its time.

~~~
ci5er
Aren't Lisp machines always ahead of their time?

What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the
minicomputer?

~~~
milcron
Yep... Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized)
category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. IBM PCs
were cheaper and got the job done. To an extent.

The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.

~~~
ci5er
I only played with one on a VMEBus on a Sun, so I wasn't aware of their stand-
alone form factor (i.e. I was guessing)

> The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.

Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been
noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking
about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in
Austin Texas (and Doug Lenat's Cyc) took some hits from that one...

~~~
milcron
(I wasn't alive then, so I'm only informed by what I've read.)

A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom
and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp
code faster than the dedicated hardware!

But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing
code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went
belly-up, unable to sell their hardware. The standardization of Common Lisp in
1984 did help somewhat.

The Japanese Fifth Generation project was oriented around logic-programming,
was it not? I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog
rather than Lisp.

~~~
ci5er
> I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than
> Lisp.

It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier
the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of
the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but
"support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower
tiers.

I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs,
before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th
Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and
the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and
Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of
frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.

------
m_eiman
They were aquihired before they got to the IPO.

------
mmanfrin
Dot dot com?

~~~
lstamour
That kept driving me nuts. It's as if the author didn't know that at the time
it was written as the "dot-com" boom. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-
com_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble)

------
zeveb
The article in general is pretty good, but this is off:

> The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to
> Microsoft’s Windows 95.

I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse
than Windows 95.

~~~
wilsynet
> I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse
> than Windows 95.

Systems 7, 8 and 9 had better font handling, prettier icons, a more
comprehensive GUI experience (eg. drag and drop worked everywhere), and a
richer desktop publishing ecosystem.

But with respect to multitasking, 32-bit application support, protected mode,
and networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Windows 95
was way, way, way better than Mac OS.

Apple had a 11 year head start with the Mac. With Windows 95, Microsoft had
finally caught up, and then some.

The only people who thought Win 95 = Mac 84 were Apple fanboys.

~~~
kls
Agreed, watching a Photoshop filter lock up an entire machine was painful in
those days. Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get.

I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after
the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step
backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's
deficiencies all the more apparent.

I was not a big fan of Win95 but it would be a far stretch to argue that
System 7/8/9 where anywhere near it in terms of actual use without regular
crashing, which plagued MacOS at the time. Everyone was familiar with the bomb
icon back then.

~~~
tambourine_man
>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get

Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was
monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTStep_to_Mac_OS_X)

Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch:
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png)

~~~
kls
We always called the black and white spinner the beach ball and the colored
one from OSX the pinwheel. May be a terminology thing, but I was talking about
the old black and white spinner in MacOS. If one did any kind of video, image
or 3d editing, it was not far behind and pretty much locked the computer up
until whatever processing was done.

