5 ms·
The NeXT physical design - well except the terrible mouse abd keyboard - was absolutely glorious. Just wonderful. Nextstep was also glorious. I supported a lab
by foobiekr 5y ago
The NeXT physical design - well except the terrible mouse abd keyboard - was absolutely glorious. Just wonderful.
Nextstep was also glorious. I supported a lab full of cubes and slabs.
But under the covers, the hardware other than the terrible magnetic optical drive was boring. There was only minimal hardware distinctiveness. The built in Motorola DSP was nice..ish, but the real revolution before and after NeXT was graphics. The non-NextDimension-equipped cubes were utterly pedestrian compared to things like the Amiga (before) and the SGI machines. Not long after the slabs shipped Apple shipped a Mac ii with a TI DSP on a card for accelerated 3D.
I’m a huge next fan but it was all the experience - excruciatingly terrible for the MO cubes to glorious for the color turbo slabs - which defined NeXT.
- jhbadger 5y agoWell, even the pedestrian NextCube had a "megapixel" display -- 1024x1024 graphics. Even in monochrome, that was pretty impressive for the day. The icons actually looked like what they represented, not abstractions.
- spamizbad 5y agoMaybe at the Cube's (albeit still very expensive) price-point. But by 1990 SGI had VGX(T) graphics on the market, which could do 24bit color at 1280x1024. It could also clock to early HGTV signals for overlays.
- foobiekr 5y agoIt's a nit, but I think the megapixel display was 1120x832.
- lizknope 5y agoYou are correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display The original MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (just shy of a true Megapixel at 931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz
- rasz 5y agoThanks to open nature PCs had better capabilities for many years before Next even came out, and cheaper too. October 1986 https://books.google.com/books?id=mzwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA41&ots=rHeRHwiF4l&dq=verticom+ega+review&pg=PA41&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=true https://books.google.com/books?id=mzwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA41&ots=... Multiple 1024x768@16 cards in $2-3K range, and an absolute steal - $3K Number Nine 1280 1280x1024@256. In 1988 you could buy 1664x1200 PC card + 19 inch monitor $2400 combo https://books.google.com/books?id=Cj8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA53&dq=Sigma+Designs+laserview+plus&as_brr=1&cd=1&hl=cs#v=onepage&q=Sigma%20Designs%20laserview%20plus&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Cj8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA53&dq=Si... or ~$1K 15 inch 1mpix version.