33 ms·

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

by 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).
ddingus 4y ago
I had similar thoughts and then jumped into SGI IRIX. Expensive as it gets, but frankly best computing experience I have had! No regrets. I did have some dependence, but it passes and I am glad to have that perspective which can come from using distinctive computers.
- dekhn 4y ago
  I remember playing with SGIs as an undergrad and they seemed so "sexy" (from the case, to the window manager, to the demos). In grad school we had a mix of machines. My professor bought the cheapest Indy's you could buy (minimal RAM and CPU), basically for the OpenGL performance. But next door another group ran a computer graphics lab and they had a bunch of high end SGIs (including an Onyx with InfiniteReality, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality which was quite impressive for its day), as well as DEC Alphas running TruCluster. All these machines were maxxed out on hardware (huge RAM, max cores, large storage) and represented the best of what you could do with UNIX at the time. No Suns, though- the group had a terrible time with NIS and never touched Solaris again. My wimpy laptop- a 486/100MHz could just barely run OpenGL (in software). When I finally got budget I spent $15K on 6 PCs to build my first cluster (1997-98). Everybody sort of laughed at the time (compared to their machines, my floating point wasn't so great) but it wasn't too long before nobody was buying "Real UNIX" machines any more.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  NeXTSTEP, Solaris and Irix are my all time favourites in UNIX world, as they all tried to be something more than plain old UNIX + X Windows/CDE, there was a kind of soul to the whole experience. Hence why I don't get those that try to replay the experience of using plain phosphor termimals + CLI, then why bother. I was there when they were new and don't miss the experience.
  - ddingus 4y ago
    NeXTSTEP! I never had the experience and wish I had. It was like IRIX in that the team really pushed things and got results! Running that stuff at it's peak was living a future for a while. Good times.

by dekhn 4y ago

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).

ddingus 4y ago

I had similar thoughts and then jumped into SGI IRIX. Expensive as it gets, but frankly best computing experience I have had! No regrets. I did have some dependence, but it passes and I am glad to have that perspective which can come from using distinctive computers.

dekhn 4y ago
I remember playing with SGIs as an undergrad and they seemed so "sexy" (from the case, to the window manager, to the demos). In grad school we had a mix of machines. My professor bought the cheapest Indy's you could buy (minimal RAM and CPU), basically for the OpenGL performance. But next door another group ran a computer graphics lab and they had a bunch of high end SGIs (including an Onyx with InfiniteReality, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality which was quite impressive for its day), as well as DEC Alphas running TruCluster. All these machines were maxxed out on hardware (huge RAM, max cores, large storage) and represented the best of what you could do with UNIX at the time. No Suns, though- the group had a terrible time with NIS and never touched Solaris again. My wimpy laptop- a 486/100MHz could just barely run OpenGL (in software). When I finally got budget I spent $15K on 6 PCs to build my first cluster (1997-98). Everybody sort of laughed at the time (compared to their machines, my floating point wasn't so great) but it wasn't too long before nobody was buying "Real UNIX" machines any more.
pjmlp 4y ago
NeXTSTEP, Solaris and Irix are my all time favourites in UNIX world, as they all tried to be something more than plain old UNIX + X Windows/CDE, there was a kind of soul to the whole experience. Hence why I don't get those that try to replay the experience of using plain phosphor termimals + CLI, then why bother. I was there when they were new and don't miss the experience.
- ddingus 4y ago
  NeXTSTEP! I never had the experience and wish I had. It was like IRIX in that the team really pushed things and got results! Running that stuff at it's peak was living a future for a while. Good times.