13 ms·

NeXT Computers

224 points by behnamoh 4y ago

nologic01 4y ago
They literally dont make them like that anymore. Imagine what a computing device / workstation of equivalent function and aesthetics should look like today if progress was monotonic.
im_down_w_otp 4y ago
My NeXTstation Turbo is probably my favorite vintage machine to tinker around on. The workspace UI and the dev tools are just excellent for the era.
- detourdog 4y ago
  In the early 2000s my sysadmin boss still used his college days NeXT Slab as his desktop computer.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    i bought a bunch of NeXTstations and a cube at a university auction in 2001 and had been using them for a few years after that.
    - detourdog 4y ago
      This place ended up with a semi load from some college lab decommissioning it was ridiculous.
      - Damogran6 4y ago
        I'd love one, but the market prices are higher than my level of comfort, and my attention span is pretty well taken care of using virtualization (same goes for OS/2, BeOS, and AmigaOS)
      - em-bee 4y ago
        yeah, what actually happend to get mine was that the university had a blind auction for a bunch of computer equipment. one "item" was a pallet full of NeXT hardware. a friend from the local linux user group and me put in a moderate bid and won. my friend picked a few machines from the pile, and i sold a few of them to others and for myself kept a slab or two, a cube (with a NeXTdimension card) and appropriate monitors. it was quite a nice catch for a decent price.
fourseventy 4y ago
Does this website run on a next box?
- dsr_ 4y ago
  No, HN runs on a variant of an emulated LISP Machine.
  - eddieh 4y ago
    I think he was talking about https://www.nextcomputers.org https://www.nextcomputers.org, not HN.
  - ngcc_hk 4y ago
    Any details of what this is?
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      It's a semi-joke about LISP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
messe 4y ago
Title should read: "NeXT Computers"
- behnamoh 4y ago
  HN's annoying algorithm messes with titles. I edited it now.
sproketboy 4y ago
[dead]
wkat4242 4y ago
Nice! I never 'had' much with NeXT but l love retro projects. For me the real retro thing is HP-UX 10 with VUE (not CDE!) as I used that in college.
ajross 4y ago
Unpopular opinion, NeXT hardware was kinda junk. It was a 68030 machine released into direct competition SPARC and MIPS chips that were 3x faster. It had a 2bpp framebuffer (and UI) that would have been really clever and attractive in competition with monochrome workstations of 1986, but frankly when it shipped it looked kinda awful next to the 1MB SVGA cards arriving on the market. At the OS level, Mach was outrageously primitive for a commercial unix (no shared libraries!). And the one genuinely unique and innovative feature (the big MO drive) turned out to be a technological dead end. The NeXTStep layer was really the only selling point. And in hindsight that was enough. But the hardware itself? Only barely worth remembering.
- Damogran6 4y ago
  I was in College at the time, comparing it to the Dec and VaxStations next to it, it held it's own. 'the one genuinely unique feature'? So Display postscript and WYSIWYG _everywhere_ wasn't a big deal? The developer environment and DSP capabilities were pretty special....the Magnesium was a cool flex and one cable going to the monitor keyboard and mouse...the MO drive was slow, but cool. Edit to add: And Mathematica. it was CRAZY cool.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    > I was in College at the time, comparing it to the Dec and VaxStations next to it, it held it's own It's interesting to me that this criticism has stayed around so many years in different forms: the iPhone has underpowered RAM compared to Androids, etc etc. Yet consistently people pick on the overall experience not particular components.
- detourdog 4y ago
  I had another boss at the same company that filled a NeXT cube to capacity with motherboards. For the sake of a good story I will say he had them all running under the same Mach kernel. He described the simple thing he did to get it running, but I have forgotten. Technology was moving really fast in those days.
  - 4y ago
linguae 4y ago
One of the things that amazes me about NeXTstep is the fact that it brought together many technologies developed by Xerox PARC. Unlike the original Mac, where the dominant PARC influence was its GUI, NeXTstep had other PARC-inspired technologies, such as Ethernet networking, Display PostScript (while PostScript is an Adobe product, the creators of PostScript were ex-PARC researchers who worked on a similar page description language called InterPress), and dynamic, late-binding object oriented programming, albeit in the form of Objective-C rather than Smalltalk. These technologies created a solid foundation that is still relevant today; macOS more or less is still influenced by NeXT despite gradual changes. Of course, there’s also the Unix foundation of NeXTstep, which importance cannot be understated, especially during the rise of the Unix workstation in the 1980s and the 1990s. This gave NeXTstep (and later Mac OS X) a user base who could take advantage of PARC-inspired environments while at the same time being able to take advantage of the vast Unix ecosystem. Yes, the Xerox PARC and Unix philosophies are different and sometimes contradictory. However, it’s impressive how NeXT was able to bridge these worlds; the execution was great, and once again macOS serves as a living legacy. As an aside, personally I’m curious about an alternative timeline where NeXT decided to go all-in on Smalltalk, building a “Smalltalk OS” with no Unix foundation, similar in philosophy to the Lisp machines of the era. There was certainly research going on in the 1980s to improve the speed of Smalltalk; part of this was continued with the development of Self by David Ungar and other researchers. NeXT probably still would’ve had the same market challenges, and the lack of a Unix foundation may have further hurt adoption. But from a purely technical standpoint a polished Smalltalk desktop would be amazing to see and use.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It was a bit wild to see old demo videos of Project Builder, Interface Builder, and Cocoa Bindings under NeXTSTEP functioning more or less exactly like they would when I first encountered them in OS X around a decade later. It changed how I thought about the state of computing in the late 80s/early 90s, which had previously been shaped by my first computer use on System 7.5 in 1996.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
helf 4y ago
[dead]
pieterr 4y ago
Why was Doom developed on a NeXT? https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answer/John-Carmack https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answe...
- spacedcowboy 4y ago
  Because if you could develop on a NeXT, you would develop on a NeXT :)
kozak 4y ago
Every modern macOS computer is a continuation of the NeXT lineage.
- shagie 4y ago
  Documentation for the NSObject objective C class : http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/Foundation/Classes/NSObject.htmld/index.html http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/... Many of the classes in http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/Foundation/Classes/ http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/... would likely still be familiar.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    The userspace C++ framework for drivers replacing IO Kit, is called DriverKit, which happens to be an homage to the Objective-C framework for writing drivers in NeXTSTEP.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I had to use Macs in college. They crashed just as bad as the PCs. I worked with a Mac programmer. He explained in bits and bobs all of the things he had to take care of to make a program look like it was doing four things at the same time. Oof. My Mac friends kept trying to get me to switch. I said I'd switch when it got a real OS. Enter OS X. On first boot my first thought was, "This is a NeXT with the dock rotated 90º clockwise" I was less wrong about that than I expected.
  - sixothree 4y ago
    I remember the 90's as the era of instability in desktop computing.
    - xp84 4y ago
      It really was (though I can't speak for the people working on NeXT boxes and Sun Workstations, etc). It wasn't really a matter of if a given computer would become unstable and crash every day, but how many times and how much you would lose. Somehow I still developed a liking for computers, but even with the incredible increase in complexity which works against it, a $30 prepaid Android burner phone today is more stable and reliable (though it isn't more fast and responsive) than any Mac or PC introduced in the 90s.
mandeepj 4y ago
Strange to find out the site is blocked in India - Access denied Error code 1020 You do not have access to www.nextcomputers.org. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7c4453141bec5c50 Country: IN Data center: fra03 IP: 122.173.25.62 Timestamp: 2023-05-08 20:06:40 UTC
- bragr 4y ago
  Doesn't seem all that strange considering all the authoritarian speech laws being passed there. I'd be inclined to block India too rather than deal with any potential issues.
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  My friend runs a devshop in California. He was so tired of spam forms, spam emails, and spam calls, that he setup a redirect for India to a page states the business has been closed. Spam reduced by atleast 50%.
gavmor 4y ago
I am especially glad for the NeXTWORLD magazine archive[0], which provides an insight into the tone and priorities of computer people "back then"--not too long ago, but the culture has shifted. Flipping to a random article, I came across mention of "BackSpace, a shareware program developed by NeXT employee Samuel Streeper," and dropped that into a quick web search, bringing up a demonstration of the BackSpace screensaver program[1]. Delightful! 0. https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/ https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/ 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpyRYdzmtoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpyRYdzmtoo
- xp84 4y ago
  Looking at old NeXT stuff as a current Mac user is funny, because here and there you spot something that has clearly been brought over nearly intact from 30 years ago. Like the color picker in that video! And I'm sure the ⌘T font pane, still used here and there, has the same origin.
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Yes, it does, though it's kind of nice that it added a nifty feature where if collapsed to the minimum vertical height it become a line of drop-down menus to pick typeface and attributes and size.
    - xp84 4y ago
      Hey, thanks! I wonder how many years/decades that little feature's been there without me ever knowing it!
      - WillAdams 4y ago
        It's been there since the early days of Mac OS X --- during one UI flamewar on usenet on either comp.sys.next.advocacy or comp.sys.mac.advocacy I suggested it as a way to address the perception of "wasted" space and it showed up (probably coincidentally) in the next iteration.
homarp 4y ago
see also Previous, a NeXT Emulator - HN discussed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35227600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35227600 and the main development happens here https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.0 https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.0
otterpro 4y ago
I remember seeing NeXT for the first time in person, in my college computer store, back in the late 80's. When it first caught my eyes, I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't believe it was actually a computer, seeing the black cubical case and very futuristic looking monitor in time when most of us were running either DOS on IBM/clone or running early Macs. Linux wasn't even in existence back then, I had an Amiga, and the only advanced workstation that I've seen until then were Sun workstation running X11, if I remember. I was in shock for few days afterward , when we were accustomed to boring beige box PC, and even my Amiga, which I was so fond of, almost felt obsolete and dated. (Of course, I'm still a big fan of Amiga, but I don't think I've ever felt like that about a computer like I did with NeXT).
- detourdog 4y ago
  Frog Design had traveling exhibit called Frog Art. The gallery on my college campus ran the show. There was a NeXT cube on display and turned on. There was only a login screen. One could try to login and when the credentials were rejected. The login window jogged left to right and erased the entries like an etch-a-sketch. That completely knocked my socks off. That pretty much inspired me with the notion that going forward we would only understand technology through analogy.
nemo 4y ago
For a while back 20ish years ago I worked at Apple with a team that had been NeXT developer support team for WebObjects and related things. They did OpenSTEP/black hardware support when I got there, and I still have some nice NeXT ephemera. I had a personal Turbo Color NextStation (called "the slab" by NeXT users) running NextSTEP 3.3 and OpenSTEP 4.2 + Y2K patches that I ran on Apple's corporate LAN in the late '90s and early 2000s. It had a static IP and hostname and was bound to the corporate NetInfo domain and it was really nice to work with and really was a window into what would be Mac OS X. At one point I was running Rhapsody on a PowerMac G3 which still supported remote displays with -NXHost, running the app on slab with the UI on that thing. Mail.app bound to NetInfo was useful, the browsers were still being updated, and while setup took a lot of hand compiles, it was a really fun setup for a while. Eventually they migrated from NetInfo to Open Directory, then dropped NetInfo support. The -NXHost remote windowing was based on Display PostSript, which was dropped with Mac OS X, and the slab got to be more limited, esp. with SSL/TLS evolving, and eventually it went into storage. These days it's not useful on the modern web and I wanted to give it to a good home so about a year ago I traded it for help from a friend who's good with hardware for repairing/recapping an SE/30 I've had longer than the slab. Happy to see the slab and the SE/30 running again, they were both greats of their era.
- detourdog 4y ago
  I worked in a WebObjects shop that was combination of Sun, windows, NeXT, and eventually Mac OS Server 1. That shop was the best run shop I ever saw. The Sun was server running NIS, SMB, NFS. The NeXT and Mac OS Server machines NetInfo could be bound to NIS and shares were distributed using NFS or SMB. We also had NetAtalk configured for Mac OS 9 and lower. I have been trying to emulate that shop ever since.
dekhn 4y ago
I remember reading about the NeXT when I was a kid (late 80s). At the time I think I had an apple and was about to upgrade to a DOS PC with a 286. The article I read said the computer would cost around $10K and have an optical disk, bitmapped display, a number of other exotic features, and was designed for science, math, and technology work. Since my budget was $2K I really wondered how people could afford such machines. Years later, I worked with folks who had great NIH funding and they had an array of machines- including late (just before Apple acquired NeXT) HP workstations with the last version of NeXTStep. The team kept trying to get me excited about display postscript, the desktop environment, Mach, the APIs, and more. I told them no matter how cool it seemed, I wasn't going to become dependent on an OS that required absurdly expensive machines. They later moved to Mac OS X, while I stuck with PCs running Linux and PCs running Windows. I appreciate what NeXT tried to do, but I just could never get behind the whole stack.
- mrpippy 4y ago
  That's ironic, since NeXTSTEP 3.1 and later did run on Intel x86 machines (although with a much smaller universe of supported hardware than Linux/Windows).
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    It ran on those machines, but the license cost was still something like $800 a seat if I recall. At a time when Linux was up and coming and starting to be quite usable for all sorts of things. NeXT blew it on licensing costs for WebObjects, as well. They were early to the game on a very powerful application server, with a powerful ORM, etc. But it was hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy it. I went to a seminar/training on it in early 97ish I think? And it was priced completely out of reach for what startups etc at the time could afford. So almost nobody used it. Just a few big companies (I believe Dell's website ran on it for a time.)
    - WillAdams 4y ago
      Yes, and Dell running on WebObjects was such an embarrassment that Microsoft strong-armed them into switching to MS products (which at first were totally broken).
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
NeXT is example 1 of anytime I wonder "have we made ANY progress in desktop". Linux and Windows desktop experience is at best equivalent to x86 NeXTStep desktop environments (except the OS did have memory leaks). Especially considering that we are talking at the time a 66 - 100 MHz 486 or the first gen pentiums (again maybe 100-133Mhz), small and short hard drives, maybe 64-128 MB of ram. Example 2 is BeOS, although I never used BeOS on its era of hardware to personally comment. However, Jobs tried to make BeOS the basis of OSX, and NeXT was his backup plan. So BeOS must have been pretty compelling.
- mattl 4y ago
  Amelio, not Jobs
- sbuk 4y ago
  Jobs had nothing to do with Be. He founded NeXT. Gil Amelio was the Apple CEO when they were working on acquiring BE Inc., which was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée—another former Apple executive. Ironically perhaps, it was reportedly Gassée alerting Apples board to Jobs’ manoeuvring to oust Sculley that saw Jobs fired from Apple.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  Nah? Today's laptop lasts all day without a charger, lets you watch and edit 4K video, allows you to order food and have it delivered in 20 minutes or shop for pretty much anything you need online, provides access to detailed VR worlds and advanced AI chatbots. There is a lot of work under the hood that makes it possible. Plus there are lots of new computing devices like cell phones, smart watches, voice assistants and smart TVs with entirely new UI paradigms. As for original plugged in desktop with a flat monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's relatively easy to experiment with a new window manager under Linux. So if nothing radically different caught on, maybe current design is already optimum for certain tasks like typing in lots of text. After all a text editor window is already similar to a typewriter made in 1868, not everything needs to change all the time. Microsoft learned this lesson the hard way with Windows 8.
bcantrill 4y ago
For anyone interested in NeXT, I very strongly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"[0]. The book -- written when NeXT was barely breathing and Jobs had been left for dead -- is extraordinary, and I think much more revealing of Jobs than Isaacon's biography of him. (Having read Stross, it is galling how little ink Isaacson dedicates to NeXT, as it's impossible to imagine that Jobs' experience at NeXT didn't shape him upon return to Apple!) If you're curious, we also discussed NeXT on Oxide and Friends, very much informed by Stross's book.[1] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-objective-c-and-contrasting-histories-2021-07-05 https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-object...
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  I’ll never forget Siracusa's review of the book in his hypercritical podcast. His opening line paraphrased Steve’s interview regarding Sculley: “what can I say, he hired the wrong guy. (Isaacon)”
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Or David Pogue for his nasty comment about SJ using a ThinkPad to run Windows 95 (it of course ran NeXT/OPENSTEP).
  - bcantrill 4y ago
    Thank you for turning me onto this! I found and listened to the episode[0], and the review was outstanding: I really didn't like the book, and it was frankly a relief to hear Siracusa just absolutely light the book up. Thank you for pointing to it! [0] https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/42 https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/42
    - tambourine_man 4y ago
      You’re welcome :) one of the finest moments in podcasting.
- 4y ago
tourgen 4y ago
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destructuredObj 4y ago
NeXT's demo really shows just how ahead of the time NeXTSTEP was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
jcadam 4y ago
Had a professor in college circa 2000, that had a NEXTstation in his office that he still used everyday. Around this same time, the college purged the UNIX lab of proprietary UNIX boxen (mostly Suns, IIRC, though they kept a few SGIs around in the 3D graphics lab) and replaced them all with Dells running Red Hat :(
js2 4y ago
Will it burn? https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
I have fond memories of seeing Steve Jobs giving a live demo of NeXTstep at the San Jose convention center. It was a bravado performance. I had a Cube with the laser printer and later a slab. Such an elegant machine for the time.

224 points by behnamoh 4y ago

They literally dont make them like that anymore. Imagine what a computing device / workstation of equivalent function and aesthetics should look like today if progress was monotonic.

im_down_w_otp 4y ago

My NeXTstation Turbo is probably my favorite vintage machine to tinker around on. The workspace UI and the dev tools are just excellent for the era.

detourdog 4y ago
In the early 2000s my sysadmin boss still used his college days NeXT Slab as his desktop computer.
- em-bee 4y ago
  i bought a bunch of NeXTstations and a cube at a university auction in 2001 and had been using them for a few years after that.
  - detourdog 4y ago
    This place ended up with a semi load from some college lab decommissioning it was ridiculous.
    - Damogran6 4y ago
      I'd love one, but the market prices are higher than my level of comfort, and my attention span is pretty well taken care of using virtualization (same goes for OS/2, BeOS, and AmigaOS)
    - em-bee 4y ago
      yeah, what actually happend to get mine was that the university had a blind auction for a bunch of computer equipment. one "item" was a pallet full of NeXT hardware. a friend from the local linux user group and me put in a moderate bid and won. my friend picked a few machines from the pile, and i sold a few of them to others and for myself kept a slab or two, a cube (with a NeXTdimension card) and appropriate monitors. it was quite a nice catch for a decent price.

fourseventy 4y ago

Does this website run on a next box?

dsr_ 4y ago
No, HN runs on a variant of an emulated LISP Machine.
- eddieh 4y ago
  I think he was talking about https://www.nextcomputers.org https://www.nextcomputers.org, not HN.
- ngcc_hk 4y ago
  Any details of what this is?
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    It's a semi-joke about LISP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

messe 4y ago

Title should read: "NeXT Computers"

behnamoh 4y ago
HN's annoying algorithm messes with titles. I edited it now.

sproketboy 4y ago

[dead]

wkat4242 4y ago

Nice! I never 'had' much with NeXT but l love retro projects. For me the real retro thing is HP-UX 10 with VUE (not CDE!) as I used that in college.

ajross 4y ago

Unpopular opinion, NeXT hardware was kinda junk. It was a 68030 machine released into direct competition SPARC and MIPS chips that were 3x faster. It had a 2bpp framebuffer (and UI) that would have been really clever and attractive in competition with monochrome workstations of 1986, but frankly when it shipped it looked kinda awful next to the 1MB SVGA cards arriving on the market. At the OS level, Mach was outrageously primitive for a commercial unix (no shared libraries!). And the one genuinely unique and innovative feature (the big MO drive) turned out to be a technological dead end. The NeXTStep layer was really the only selling point. And in hindsight that was enough. But the hardware itself? Only barely worth remembering.

Damogran6 4y ago
I was in College at the time, comparing it to the Dec and VaxStations next to it, it held it's own. 'the one genuinely unique feature'? So Display postscript and WYSIWYG _everywhere_ wasn't a big deal? The developer environment and DSP capabilities were pretty special....the Magnesium was a cool flex and one cable going to the monitor keyboard and mouse...the MO drive was slow, but cool. Edit to add: And Mathematica. it was CRAZY cool.
- rodgerd 4y ago
  > I was in College at the time, comparing it to the Dec and VaxStations next to it, it held it's own It's interesting to me that this criticism has stayed around so many years in different forms: the iPhone has underpowered RAM compared to Androids, etc etc. Yet consistently people pick on the overall experience not particular components.
detourdog 4y ago
I had another boss at the same company that filled a NeXT cube to capacity with motherboards. For the sake of a good story I will say he had them all running under the same Mach kernel. He described the simple thing he did to get it running, but I have forgotten. Technology was moving really fast in those days.
- 4y ago

linguae 4y ago

One of the things that amazes me about NeXTstep is the fact that it brought together many technologies developed by Xerox PARC. Unlike the original Mac, where the dominant PARC influence was its GUI, NeXTstep had other PARC-inspired technologies, such as Ethernet networking, Display PostScript (while PostScript is an Adobe product, the creators of PostScript were ex-PARC researchers who worked on a similar page description language called InterPress), and dynamic, late-binding object oriented programming, albeit in the form of Objective-C rather than Smalltalk. These technologies created a solid foundation that is still relevant today; macOS more or less is still influenced by NeXT despite gradual changes. Of course, there’s also the Unix foundation of NeXTstep, which importance cannot be understated, especially during the rise of the Unix workstation in the 1980s and the 1990s. This gave NeXTstep (and later Mac OS X) a user base who could take advantage of PARC-inspired environments while at the same time being able to take advantage of the vast Unix ecosystem. Yes, the Xerox PARC and Unix philosophies are different and sometimes contradictory. However, it’s impressive how NeXT was able to bridge these worlds; the execution was great, and once again macOS serves as a living legacy. As an aside, personally I’m curious about an alternative timeline where NeXT decided to go all-in on Smalltalk, building a “Smalltalk OS” with no Unix foundation, similar in philosophy to the Lisp machines of the era. There was certainly research going on in the 1980s to improve the speed of Smalltalk; part of this was continued with the development of Self by David Ungar and other researchers. NeXT probably still would’ve had the same market challenges, and the lack of a Unix foundation may have further hurt adoption. But from a purely technical standpoint a polished Smalltalk desktop would be amazing to see and use.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
It was a bit wild to see old demo videos of Project Builder, Interface Builder, and Cocoa Bindings under NeXTSTEP functioning more or less exactly like they would when I first encountered them in OS X around a decade later. It changed how I thought about the state of computing in the late 80s/early 90s, which had previously been shaped by my first computer use on System 7.5 in 1996.
- arcticbull 4y ago

helf 4y ago

[dead]

pieterr 4y ago

Why was Doom developed on a NeXT? https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answer/John-Carmack https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answe...

spacedcowboy 4y ago
Because if you could develop on a NeXT, you would develop on a NeXT :)

kozak 4y ago

Every modern macOS computer is a continuation of the NeXT lineage.

shagie 4y ago
Documentation for the NSObject objective C class : http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/Foundation/Classes/NSObject.htmld/index.html http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/... Many of the classes in http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/Foundation/Classes/ http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/... would likely still be familiar.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  The userspace C++ framework for drivers replacing IO Kit, is called DriverKit, which happens to be an homage to the Objective-C framework for writing drivers in NeXTSTEP.
hinkley 4y ago
I had to use Macs in college. They crashed just as bad as the PCs. I worked with a Mac programmer. He explained in bits and bobs all of the things he had to take care of to make a program look like it was doing four things at the same time. Oof. My Mac friends kept trying to get me to switch. I said I'd switch when it got a real OS. Enter OS X. On first boot my first thought was, "This is a NeXT with the dock rotated 90º clockwise" I was less wrong about that than I expected.
- sixothree 4y ago
  I remember the 90's as the era of instability in desktop computing.
  - xp84 4y ago
    It really was (though I can't speak for the people working on NeXT boxes and Sun Workstations, etc). It wasn't really a matter of if a given computer would become unstable and crash every day, but how many times and how much you would lose. Somehow I still developed a liking for computers, but even with the incredible increase in complexity which works against it, a $30 prepaid Android burner phone today is more stable and reliable (though it isn't more fast and responsive) than any Mac or PC introduced in the 90s.

mandeepj 4y ago

Strange to find out the site is blocked in India - Access denied Error code 1020 You do not have access to www.nextcomputers.org. The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 7c4453141bec5c50 Country: IN Data center: fra03 IP: 122.173.25.62 Timestamp: 2023-05-08 20:06:40 UTC

bragr 4y ago
Doesn't seem all that strange considering all the authoritarian speech laws being passed there. I'd be inclined to block India too rather than deal with any potential issues.
nicenewtemp84 4y ago
My friend runs a devshop in California. He was so tired of spam forms, spam emails, and spam calls, that he setup a redirect for India to a page states the business has been closed. Spam reduced by atleast 50%.

gavmor 4y ago

I am especially glad for the NeXTWORLD magazine archive[0], which provides an insight into the tone and priorities of computer people "back then"--not too long ago, but the culture has shifted. Flipping to a random article, I came across mention of "BackSpace, a shareware program developed by NeXT employee Samuel Streeper," and dropped that into a quick web search, bringing up a demonstration of the BackSpace screensaver program[1]. Delightful! 0. https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/ https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/ 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpyRYdzmtoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpyRYdzmtoo

xp84 4y ago
Looking at old NeXT stuff as a current Mac user is funny, because here and there you spot something that has clearly been brought over nearly intact from 30 years ago. Like the color picker in that video! And I'm sure the ⌘T font pane, still used here and there, has the same origin.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  Yes, it does, though it's kind of nice that it added a nifty feature where if collapsed to the minimum vertical height it become a line of drop-down menus to pick typeface and attributes and size.
  - xp84 4y ago
    Hey, thanks! I wonder how many years/decades that little feature's been there without me ever knowing it!
    - WillAdams 4y ago
      It's been there since the early days of Mac OS X --- during one UI flamewar on usenet on either comp.sys.next.advocacy or comp.sys.mac.advocacy I suggested it as a way to address the perception of "wasted" space and it showed up (probably coincidentally) in the next iteration.

homarp 4y ago

see also Previous, a NeXT Emulator - HN discussed it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35227600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35227600 and the main development happens here https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.0 https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.0

otterpro 4y ago

I remember seeing NeXT for the first time in person, in my college computer store, back in the late 80's. When it first caught my eyes, I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't believe it was actually a computer, seeing the black cubical case and very futuristic looking monitor in time when most of us were running either DOS on IBM/clone or running early Macs. Linux wasn't even in existence back then, I had an Amiga, and the only advanced workstation that I've seen until then were Sun workstation running X11, if I remember. I was in shock for few days afterward , when we were accustomed to boring beige box PC, and even my Amiga, which I was so fond of, almost felt obsolete and dated. (Of course, I'm still a big fan of Amiga, but I don't think I've ever felt like that about a computer like I did with NeXT).

detourdog 4y ago
Frog Design had traveling exhibit called Frog Art. The gallery on my college campus ran the show. There was a NeXT cube on display and turned on. There was only a login screen. One could try to login and when the credentials were rejected. The login window jogged left to right and erased the entries like an etch-a-sketch. That completely knocked my socks off. That pretty much inspired me with the notion that going forward we would only understand technology through analogy.

nemo 4y ago

For a while back 20ish years ago I worked at Apple with a team that had been NeXT developer support team for WebObjects and related things. They did OpenSTEP/black hardware support when I got there, and I still have some nice NeXT ephemera. I had a personal Turbo Color NextStation (called "the slab" by NeXT users) running NextSTEP 3.3 and OpenSTEP 4.2 + Y2K patches that I ran on Apple's corporate LAN in the late '90s and early 2000s. It had a static IP and hostname and was bound to the corporate NetInfo domain and it was really nice to work with and really was a window into what would be Mac OS X. At one point I was running Rhapsody on a PowerMac G3 which still supported remote displays with -NXHost, running the app on slab with the UI on that thing. Mail.app bound to NetInfo was useful, the browsers were still being updated, and while setup took a lot of hand compiles, it was a really fun setup for a while. Eventually they migrated from NetInfo to Open Directory, then dropped NetInfo support. The -NXHost remote windowing was based on Display PostSript, which was dropped with Mac OS X, and the slab got to be more limited, esp. with SSL/TLS evolving, and eventually it went into storage. These days it's not useful on the modern web and I wanted to give it to a good home so about a year ago I traded it for help from a friend who's good with hardware for repairing/recapping an SE/30 I've had longer than the slab. Happy to see the slab and the SE/30 running again, they were both greats of their era.

detourdog 4y ago
I worked in a WebObjects shop that was combination of Sun, windows, NeXT, and eventually Mac OS Server 1. That shop was the best run shop I ever saw. The Sun was server running NIS, SMB, NFS. The NeXT and Mac OS Server machines NetInfo could be bound to NIS and shares were distributed using NFS or SMB. We also had NetAtalk configured for Mac OS 9 and lower. I have been trying to emulate that shop ever since.

dekhn 4y ago

I remember reading about the NeXT when I was a kid (late 80s). At the time I think I had an apple and was about to upgrade to a DOS PC with a 286. The article I read said the computer would cost around $10K and have an optical disk, bitmapped display, a number of other exotic features, and was designed for science, math, and technology work. Since my budget was $2K I really wondered how people could afford such machines. Years later, I worked with folks who had great NIH funding and they had an array of machines- including late (just before Apple acquired NeXT) HP workstations with the last version of NeXTStep. The team kept trying to get me excited about display postscript, the desktop environment, Mach, the APIs, and more. I told them no matter how cool it seemed, I wasn't going to become dependent on an OS that required absurdly expensive machines. They later moved to Mac OS X, while I stuck with PCs running Linux and PCs running Windows. I appreciate what NeXT tried to do, but I just could never get behind the whole stack.

mrpippy 4y ago
That's ironic, since NeXTSTEP 3.1 and later did run on Intel x86 machines (although with a much smaller universe of supported hardware than Linux/Windows).
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  It ran on those machines, but the license cost was still something like $800 a seat if I recall. At a time when Linux was up and coming and starting to be quite usable for all sorts of things. NeXT blew it on licensing costs for WebObjects, as well. They were early to the game on a very powerful application server, with a powerful ORM, etc. But it was hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy it. I went to a seminar/training on it in early 97ish I think? And it was priced completely out of reach for what startups etc at the time could afford. So almost nobody used it. Just a few big companies (I believe Dell's website ran on it for a time.)
  - WillAdams 4y ago
    Yes, and Dell running on WebObjects was such an embarrassment that Microsoft strong-armed them into switching to MS products (which at first were totally broken).

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

NeXT is example 1 of anytime I wonder "have we made ANY progress in desktop". Linux and Windows desktop experience is at best equivalent to x86 NeXTStep desktop environments (except the OS did have memory leaks). Especially considering that we are talking at the time a 66 - 100 MHz 486 or the first gen pentiums (again maybe 100-133Mhz), small and short hard drives, maybe 64-128 MB of ram. Example 2 is BeOS, although I never used BeOS on its era of hardware to personally comment. However, Jobs tried to make BeOS the basis of OSX, and NeXT was his backup plan. So BeOS must have been pretty compelling.

mattl 4y ago
Amelio, not Jobs
sbuk 4y ago
Jobs had nothing to do with Be. He founded NeXT. Gil Amelio was the Apple CEO when they were working on acquiring BE Inc., which was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée—another former Apple executive. Ironically perhaps, it was reportedly Gassée alerting Apples board to Jobs’ manoeuvring to oust Sculley that saw Jobs fired from Apple.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Nah? Today's laptop lasts all day without a charger, lets you watch and edit 4K video, allows you to order food and have it delivered in 20 minutes or shop for pretty much anything you need online, provides access to detailed VR worlds and advanced AI chatbots. There is a lot of work under the hood that makes it possible. Plus there are lots of new computing devices like cell phones, smart watches, voice assistants and smart TVs with entirely new UI paradigms. As for original plugged in desktop with a flat monitor, keyboard and mouse, it's relatively easy to experiment with a new window manager under Linux. So if nothing radically different caught on, maybe current design is already optimum for certain tasks like typing in lots of text. After all a text editor window is already similar to a typewriter made in 1868, not everything needs to change all the time. Microsoft learned this lesson the hard way with Windows 8.

bcantrill 4y ago

For anyone interested in NeXT, I very strongly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"[0]. The book -- written when NeXT was barely breathing and Jobs had been left for dead -- is extraordinary, and I think much more revealing of Jobs than Isaacon's biography of him. (Having read Stross, it is galling how little ink Isaacson dedicates to NeXT, as it's impossible to imagine that Jobs' experience at NeXT didn't shape him upon return to Apple!) If you're curious, we also discussed NeXT on Oxide and Friends, very much informed by Stross's book.[1] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316 [1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-objective-c-and-contrasting-histories-2021-07-05 https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-object...

tambourine_man 4y ago
I’ll never forget Siracusa's review of the book in his hypercritical podcast. His opening line paraphrased Steve’s interview regarding Sculley: “what can I say, he hired the wrong guy. (Isaacon)”
- WillAdams 4y ago
  Or David Pogue for his nasty comment about SJ using a ThinkPad to run Windows 95 (it of course ran NeXT/OPENSTEP).
- bcantrill 4y ago
  Thank you for turning me onto this! I found and listened to the episode[0], and the review was outstanding: I really didn't like the book, and it was frankly a relief to hear Siracusa just absolutely light the book up. Thank you for pointing to it! [0] https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/42 https://hypercritical.fireside.fm/42
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    You’re welcome :) one of the finest moments in podcasting.
4y ago

tourgen 4y ago

[dead]

destructuredObj 4y ago

NeXT's demo really shows just how ahead of the time NeXTSTEP was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

jcadam 4y ago

Had a professor in college circa 2000, that had a NEXTstation in his office that he still used everyday. Around this same time, the college purged the UNIX lab of proprietary UNIX boxen (mostly Suns, IIRC, though they kept a few SGIs around in the 3D graphics lab) and replaced them all with Dells running Red Hat :(

js2 4y ago

Will it burn? https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html

IOT_Apprentice 4y ago

I have fond memories of seeing Steve Jobs giving a live demo of NeXTstep at the San Jose convention center. It was a bravado performance. I had a Cube with the laser printer and later a slab. Such an elegant machine for the time.