I remember back when I was a freshman or sophomore in college (1990 or 1991) seeing a NeXT rep giving a demo of the NeXT computer on campus. This was a tiny rural college of all places. I was so impressed I was ready to buy one, until I saw the price tag. This was back in the day when few students owned a computer and most just used the school's computer lab (which I'd imagine don't even exist today).
Every 21st century college I've seen has a computer lab. While students tend to have their own computers, these are available in case of a personal HW or SW issue. These machines may also have SW for certain classes that isn't easily available to a student. Plus, with PCs costing so little these days it doesn't cost too much to have a room with some desks and PCs present.
I was working at Apple, in Higher Education Sales, when NeXT launched. NeXT was busy poaching Apple HE Sales Reps so on a moment's notice we were flown to NYC and wined and dined for a couple days. It was basically a big party to remind people why the worked, at Apple, and Scully even showed to give us a pep talk. He needn't bother as most of our customers found the NeXT 'cube' to be too expensive and under-powered to run the object-oriented NeXTStep OS. Many of these machines ended up running various internet applications (www was even 'invented' on NeXT) or as they say 'expensive doorstops'. NeXT had a big booth, at Educom, in 1989 and Steve was giving demo's dressed in an expensive Italian suit. Good times...
I was at Apple in Higher Education Sales at the same time working as a systems engineer (first job out of college). I even went to the same Educom in 1989 and met Steve Jobs at the Ford Museum party. Those were good times.
It's amazing how the current state of Apple wouldn't have happened if Steve Jobs hadn't been forced out. If that hadn't happened, NeXT and its software almost certainly wouldn't have happened. And while Apple nearly died in the intervening years, Jobs learned how to be a better leader as well as developing the software that was the direct ancestor to OS X, iOS, tvOS and now iPadOS.
'nothing remains of this once promising company'. Yeah except NeXTStep evolved into MacOS. Apple was also my first job out of college and I absolutely LOVED working there except fo the last 6 months. NeXT did find some success in Financial Services, mainly due to their innovative, object-oriented development environment. Steve took a lot of Apple Higher Education people, with him to NeXT, the vast majority of which he burned out pretty quickly. The cube was cool and innovative, but it was a 'tweener'. Somewhere in-between a Mac/PC and an engineering workstation (Sun/Apollo). Old thread ;-)
wondering what would happened if BeOS was selected instead of NeXT? (how much Jobs' charm and name play in the role of finalize the deal?). Be Box and BeOS were more feasible at the time IMHO (of course, no Jobs)... Well, BeOS ghost live on in Droid somewhat, NeXT in iOS... it is a small world indeed.
I remember seeing NeXTStation with full color display at CSUN bookstore back in 1993 and I was marveled at how beautiful it looked compared to Windows or Macintosh Classic. It was just so different. The UX was very different so it wasn't intuitively obvious. The performance was significantly slower than Windows or Macintosh.
I wish I bought that computer but it was definitely out of my range.
In 1995 I went to work for a large ad agency that shockingly use NeXT computers. I was a photo-retoucher and prepress guy and while they had ordered me a Mac, there was a delay getting it and so for a couple of months I had to use NeXT. The operating system was obviously very advanced and many of the features were directly ported into Mac OS X. The columns view of the Mac Finder is the most obvious one, along with the dock. The email program was the best thing about the system.
Unfortunately, there was very little else that you could do on those computers. I remember distinctly that there was an out-of-date version of Adobe Illustrator on my system, and I think Photoshop but I can’t be sure about that. Within a year all of the NeXT systems were phased out in favor of Macs and PCs.
NeXT did find some success in Financial Services, mainly due to their innovative, object-oriented development environment.
This is exactly why AT&T had a bunch of NeXT computers. The developers were able to crank out tools much more rapidly because of Interface Builder and the integrated development environment.
Apple's today, the 1 trillions $ company, would be nothing without NeXT's technology. All its success has been possible thanks to NeXT's revolutionary Object Oriented OS. Steve knew it 200%.
Few people realise today how advanced this machine was compared to what was on the market. It looked literally from another planet: Microsoft users were still mostly on DOS or Windows 3.1, without networking or on primitive tokenring network (haha), whileNeXT Computers were bringing a UNIX multi user, multi tasking OS with Display Postscript, Object Oriented Libraries, Rapid app development thanks to Interface Builder, which is at the core of Apple's strong app ecosystem today.
What a beautiful system it was. It literally changed the course of my life.
True, the problem with NeXT was two fold 1) The price, 2) The Workstation label, which helped it lose developers especially game developers. I know games are not the purpose of any education or business computer, but they play a very important subconscious role. The article missed out on the popular Signa Station software that was, and still is, the top imposition software in the market. At the time Signa Station ran only on NeXT.
This still doesn't take away the fact that Next Computer itself was a colossal failure. By all accounts, so was Pixar. Pixar was literally 6 months away from bankruptcy after Jobs bankrolled it for a decade. He spent almost his entire Apple stock money trying to keep it afloat. The fact of the matter is, no other startup would have been given that much runway. If not for the stubbornness of Jobs, Pixar would have faded into history of just another Silicon Valley failure.
This still doesn't take away the fact that Next Computer itself was a colossal failure. By all accounts, so was Pixar. Pixar was literally 6 months away from bankruptcy after Jobs bankrolled it for a decade. He spent almost his entire Apple stock money trying to keep it afloat. The fact of the matter is, no other startup would have been given that much runway. If not for the stubbornness of Jobs, Pixar would have faded into history of just another Silicon Valley failure.
When Jobs left Apple in the 1980s he sold all but a single share of stock. He was not a billionaire. It was his purchase of Pixar and its eventual IPO that only arose from the many successful films that allowed Jobs to become a billionaire.
This still doesn't take away the fact that Next Computer itself was a colossal failure. By all accounts, so was Pixar. Pixar was literally 6 months away from bankruptcy after Jobs bankrolled it for a decade. He spent almost his entire Apple stock money trying to keep it afloat. The fact of the matter is, no other startup would have been given that much runway. If not for the stubbornness of Jobs, Pixar would have faded into history of just another Silicon Valley failure.
Wasn't Pixar originally supposed to be a hardware/software company supplying CGI tools and they stumbled into making movies?
A DSP workstation built on a NextCube in Ircam in france; i was there, by the way (working on Max/MSP and Animal).
Maurizio
That’s pretty cool!
Apple’s Mac Pro design has analogous board layout principles to the NeXT machines. Namely, a backplane I/O board with computing boards attached. The Mac Pro basically had this type of design for a very long time, even the 2013 cylinder form factor, where the CPU wasn’t mounted to a motherboard as is so often seen in PCs. The CPU and RAM were on a separate board by way of a custom multi-pin slot or connector. What people saw as the motherboard in a Mac Pro (with PCI slots et al) was basically backplane board.
The 2019 Mac Pro is the first Mac Pro in what, 12 years?, to have the CPU right on the backplane, and thus making it more like a PC motherboard. They have a nice wrinkle with the MPX modules though. If they wanted too, there’s enough volume and power there to make a MPX module with 2 CPU sockets, RAM and SSD, and run it like a blade server or a cluster. 2 MPX modules more 5 sockets total in the Mac Pro, with a possibility of a >100 cores in the Mac Pro box. The sockets would have PCIe x16 or higher bandwidth between them. But you’d have to be nuts to run something like that on a desk.
I was working at Apple, in Higher Education Sales, when NeXT launched. NeXT was busy poaching Apple HE Sales Reps so on a moment's notice we were flown to NYC and wined and dined for a couple days. It was basically a big party to remind people why the worked, at Apple, and Scully even showed to give us a pep talk. He needn't bother as most of our customers found the NeXT 'cube' to be too expensive and under-powered to run the object-oriented NeXTStep OS. Many of these machines ended up running various internet applications (www was even 'invented' on NeXT) or as they say 'expensive doorstops'. NeXT had a big booth, at Educom, in 1989 and Steve was giving demo's dressed in an expensive Italian suit. Good times...
Not very well informed then, the OS ran super smooth and the screen was super crisp (certainly for the workstation standards of the time namely Motif). Very stupid not using it, for computer sciences the perfect tool to learn and use powerful new software. That is using DSP software with the beautiful application Ensemble, Display Postscript, programming in postscript, programming OO visually with Interface Builder (this is why Brenners Lee could rapidly prototype the first web browser) creating 3D computer animations with RenderMan (yes it was part of NeXTStep once), exploring the Mach microkernel, writing Display Postscript drivers (for a matrix printer for example), learning ksh and other Unix environments (eventually bash) and using super great science programs like Mathematica which was freely included (I have never seen a better implementation than the ‘notebook’ one on the NeXT).
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It's amazing how the current state of Apple wouldn't have happened if Steve Jobs hadn't been forced out. If that hadn't happened, NeXT and its software almost certainly wouldn't have happened. And while Apple nearly died in the intervening years, Jobs learned how to be a better leader as well as developing the software that was the direct ancestor to OS X, iOS, tvOS and now iPadOS.
I wish I bought that computer but it was definitely out of my range.
Unfortunately, there was very little else that you could do on those computers. I remember distinctly that there was an out-of-date version of Adobe Illustrator on my system, and I think Photoshop but I can’t be sure about that. Within a year all of the NeXT systems were phased out in favor of Macs and PCs.
The article missed out on the popular Signa Station software that was, and still is, the top imposition software in the market. At the time Signa Station ran only on NeXT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPW
A DSP workstation built on a NextCube in Ircam in france; i was there, by the way (working on Max/MSP and Animal).
Maurizio
Apple’s Mac Pro design has analogous board layout principles to the NeXT machines. Namely, a backplane I/O board with computing boards attached. The Mac Pro basically had this type of design for a very long time, even the 2013 cylinder form factor, where the CPU wasn’t mounted to a motherboard as is so often seen in PCs. The CPU and RAM were on a separate board by way of a custom multi-pin slot or connector. What people saw as the motherboard in a Mac Pro (with PCI slots et al) was basically backplane board.
The 2019 Mac Pro is the first Mac Pro in what, 12 years?, to have the CPU right on the backplane, and thus making it more like a PC motherboard. They have a nice wrinkle with the MPX modules though. If they wanted too, there’s enough volume and power there to make a MPX module with 2 CPU sockets, RAM and SSD, and run it like a blade server or a cluster. 2 MPX modules more 5 sockets total in the Mac Pro, with a possibility of a >100 cores in the Mac Pro box. The sockets would have PCIe x16 or higher bandwidth between them. But you’d have to be nuts to run something like that on a desk.
Very stupid not using it, for computer sciences the perfect tool to learn and use powerful new software.
That is using DSP software with the beautiful application Ensemble, Display Postscript, programming in postscript, programming OO visually with Interface Builder (this is why Brenners Lee could rapidly prototype the first web browser) creating 3D computer animations with RenderMan (yes it was part of NeXTStep once), exploring the Mach microkernel, writing Display Postscript drivers (for a matrix printer for example), learning ksh and other Unix environments (eventually bash) and using super great science programs like Mathematica which was freely included (I have never seen a better implementation than the ‘notebook’ one on the NeXT).