5 ms·

NeXT Computer Offices

115 points by walterbell 1y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
In picture 4 - is that an actual NeXT factory in Silicon Valley? I guess I knew that used to be a thing, but it's weird to see from today.
- bhc 1y ago
  There's a promotional video of the NeXT factory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIwfu73reE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIwfu73reE
  - flomo 1y ago
    Wow, that's a great video. (Now I recall some old HN 'insider' ranting about how jobs moved this factory to china.)
  - kanwisher 1y ago
    Pretty stunning they had the factory in Fremont. Those were the days
johndoe0815 1y ago
More photos of the former NeXT offices can be found in Stanford’s Douglas Menuez photography collection: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-inc https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-in...
- Austin_Conlon 1y ago
  “Deep Shit” https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/hx166dq1602 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/hx166dq1602
  - car 1y ago
    „Ankle Deep Shit“
esafak 1y ago
3475 Deer Creek Rd, currently occupied by SAP.
adolph 1y ago
. . . famous for their wood-and-steel staircase that seemed to float in mid-air . . . But what did this staircase look like? Jobs found office space in Palo Alto, California, at 3475 Deer Creek Road, occupying a glass-and-concrete building that featured a staircase designed by the architect I. M. Pei. [0] NeXT's expansion prompted renting an office at 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive, in Redwood City, also designed by Pei. The architectural centerpiece was a "floating" staircase with no visible supports. [0] One of their main features was the wood-and-steel staircase, which seemed to float in mid-air, and came at a high cost of having elevators removed, upon Steve's demand. The stairs would later inspire similar designs in the Apple Retail Stores. Other striking features included a marble dining area and $10,000 sofas. This lavish corporate environment was later understandably held as evidence of what went wrong with NeXT. [1] finally, an inkling of one of the staircases: I had planned to shoot Steve with the incredible floating cement staircase I.M. Pei designed for him in the lobby, a precursor to the clear glass version that later became famous in the Apple stores. We begin setting up lights and talking things over with Steve’s team. Finally Steve came storming in, hours late due to traffic on his way down from Pixar, and in a terrible mood. He took one look at my set up and announced, “This is just stupid. We are not doing this.” [2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT 1. https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next 2. https://menuez.com/journal/steve-jobs-stupid-idea https://menuez.com/journal/steve-jobs-stupid-idea
- JSR_FDED 1y ago
  However mercurial, Jobs’ willingness to change his mind about things was a huge asset. So many execs I work with haven’t had an original thought in years, and certainly haven’t reevaluated their stance on anything.
  - notorandit 1y ago
    I think that's one of the huge gaps between a genius and an average man.
  - adolph 1y ago
WillAdams 1y ago
Sad. It was noted early on that they would either be the last hardware startup to make it, or the first well-funded one to fail... Ages ago, I was using similarly spec'ed computers running Windows (ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (Mac Quadra 950), and NeXTstep (25MHz '040 Cube)--- the Cube was by far the nicest and most stable and most capable --- fortunately, its legacy lives on in Mac OS since Apple's purchase of NeXT essentially resulted in NeXT taking over Apple (just we don't get the vertical menu, pop-up main menu, tear off sub-menus, Display PostScript, PANTONE colour license, nxhosting, or the "Unix expert" checkbox) --- really wish that the folks behind GNUstep and the various desktop projects would get more traction. Was lucky enough to score copies of Adobe Illustrator and Altsys Virtuoso, and I still have Macromedia Freehand set to open .vrt files (Freehand 4 ~= Virtuoso 2). Really miss Lotus Improv (I've never been able to convince an employer that it would be worth paying for me to have a license of Quantrix Financial Modeler), and WriteNow is still one of my favourite wordprocessors --- at least TeXshop was modeled on TeXview.app, and has many of the same capabilities and much the same feel --- for a long while, I was the only person in a Mac composition shop for whom it made sense to use Mac OS X, since I was using TeXshop, and it was more comfortable to me than TeXtures (I think the license I was using was serial #018).
- twoodfin 1y ago
  I dunno, it’s hard to be too sad. Turns out they really were inventing the future in that office, and the NeXT Cube has a better case for being the progenitor of the billions of slabs of glass, metal, and silicon that changed the world than any other computer.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    I am sad because: - I have to use a Windows computer to run Macromedia Freehand, the Affinity Design folks bailed on doing a full clone (and I dread their 30 Oct announcement which will probably be for a subscription model), the Quasado folks are now doing GraviT over on the Chrome store, and I haven't found a vector drawing program for Mac OS which I like which supports Services - Lotus Improv 2.0 was for Windows --- there is no multi-dimensional spreadsheet like to it for Mac OS --- closest thing I've found is pyspread, unless someone can get Flexisheet running, Numbers.app is painfully 2D last I checked - Services are woefully under-represented, really miss little apps such as poste.app (envelope printing), and sbook.app and Millenium's Notebook.app - I have to dig out a Raspberry Pi to run Mathematica - I miss writing PostScript strokes and fills and seeing them on-screen - my Wacom One quit working with my MacBook --- that never happened w/ my Wacom ArtZ attached to my NeXT Cube Yes, I'm glad to have TeXshop.app, but these days I mostly just do Literate Programming in TeXstudio, which is painfully cross-platform. My next project is to do a Cyberdeck using an rPi 5 and a Wacom Movink --- we'll have to see how that turns out.
gedy 1y ago
I'd like to Return To those Offices
- flomo 1y ago
  Probably not shown, but reportedly Jobs liked hiring lots of attractive women too. Good for sales.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
> 3475 Deer Creek Road, Palo Alto CA Holy heck, looking at this in Google Earth: how I wish other companies had their back to some gorgeous land to go together across. What an incredible exponentiator, to be situated so nicely with some lands to walk across.
watersb 1y ago
I vaguely remember the office on Chesapeake Dr in Redwood City. It had the requisite Steve Jobs interior design but that was augmented by an enormous mountain of white salt looming up behind it. Sodium chloride. From evaporation ponds on the shores of the bay.
notorandit 1y ago
Computer history is paved with faults that, in technical perspective, should have never happened. NeXT was not ahead of it's times. It hasn't been technically surpassed by any other product in the "next" 10 years. So NeXT is one. IMHO, Amiga 1200, Archimedes and Sinclair QL are other ones. It seems a mix of mismanagement and marketing (which maybe is still mismanagement). Sic transit gloria mundi.
- steve1977 1y ago
  Both NeXT and Archimedes live on in one of the most successful computer products ever, so I guess „fault“ is relative.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  If you're using a modern Mac today, you're essentially running a modernized version of NeXTSTEP, so actually it's NeXT which has survived by 'reverse-acquiring' Apple, and the original Mac has joined the technology graveyard along with Amiga, Atari etc... ...or actually... modern Macs are a NeXT/Archimedes hybrid - the software comes from NeXT, while the hardware is of Archimedes heritage ;)
gtsnexp 1y ago
Cargo Cult?
glimshe 1y ago
Where are the huge open floor plans with an army of developers wearing noise-cancelling headphones? One can't develop great products without collaboration! I miss the offices of old... In particular, Microsoft's old policy of putting people in individual offices.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  3475 Deer Creek Rd is leased by SAP AppHaus[0]. There are so many PHB bizwords on the website, I pretty much feel asleep trying to figure out if they did anything real or if it's well-meaning MBAs who sold their bosses on the wantrepreneur cargo cult fashion of renting expensive property in Palo Alto. Interestingly, Apple re-leased the W SJ Triangle Building they used to occupy in the 80's & 90's that had a giant vintage rainbow Apple logo facing I-280. It has had a history of short-term occupancy post-Apple with Accolade (games) and various other tenants over the decades. Mega rich tech areas ought to reinvest in the future by launching teaching venues and community-focused employee-/member-owned co-op sw/hw hackspaces-library-event-makespaces if they really want to attract people who aren't interested in, are put-off, or can't afford corporate-focused/-gatekept "innovation centers". Co-working space is so commodified, it needs to be local and special rather than transactional to draw people. There is/was a church (Spark perhaps) in Palo Alto that had quite a large coworking space, and the folks there were really cool. 0. https://apphaus.sap.com/network/palo-alto https://apphaus.sap.com/network/palo-alto
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Where are the huge open floor plans with an army of developers wearing noise-cancelling headphones? 30 years in the future, when everyone and their dog learned to code and the market got flooded with programmers. If you look at SW from the NEXT era, there were like 1 to 5 programmers, all stallions, per SW product, so no wonder everyone had their own office.
gnerd00 1y ago
NeXT was incredible engineering but not a drop-in replacement for Mac OS. The sociology of the use of the machine is very different. The careful and kind attention to the non-technical computer owners in Mac OS was replaced by corporate-controlled computer science with a GUI. The ambitions of Jobs became clearer later in life -- bizarrely manifesting the Big Brother that the early ad mocked. The iPhone drives Apple now, while Mac OSX slowly deteriorates with episodes of iPhone takeovers in the interface. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Windows has also shown its true colors with spyware and ad-stuffing left and right.
bni 1y ago
Looks like an Apple Store. Probably not a coincidence.

115 points by walterbell 1y ago

In picture 4 - is that an actual NeXT factory in Silicon Valley? I guess I knew that used to be a thing, but it's weird to see from today.

bhc 1y ago
There's a promotional video of the NeXT factory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIwfu73reE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIwfu73reE
- flomo 1y ago
  Wow, that's a great video. (Now I recall some old HN 'insider' ranting about how jobs moved this factory to china.)
- kanwisher 1y ago
  Pretty stunning they had the factory in Fremont. Those were the days

johndoe0815 1y ago

More photos of the former NeXT offices can be found in Stanford’s Douglas Menuez photography collection: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-inc https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-in...

Austin_Conlon 1y ago
“Deep Shit” https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/hx166dq1602 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/hx166dq1602
- car 1y ago
  „Ankle Deep Shit“

esafak 1y ago

3475 Deer Creek Rd, currently occupied by SAP.

adolph 1y ago

. . . famous for their wood-and-steel staircase that seemed to float in mid-air . . . But what did this staircase look like? Jobs found office space in Palo Alto, California, at 3475 Deer Creek Road, occupying a glass-and-concrete building that featured a staircase designed by the architect I. M. Pei. [0] NeXT's expansion prompted renting an office at 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive, in Redwood City, also designed by Pei. The architectural centerpiece was a "floating" staircase with no visible supports. [0] One of their main features was the wood-and-steel staircase, which seemed to float in mid-air, and came at a high cost of having elevators removed, upon Steve's demand. The stairs would later inspire similar designs in the Apple Retail Stores. Other striking features included a marble dining area and $10,000 sofas. This lavish corporate environment was later understandably held as evidence of what went wrong with NeXT. [1] finally, an inkling of one of the staircases: I had planned to shoot Steve with the incredible floating cement staircase I.M. Pei designed for him in the lobby, a precursor to the clear glass version that later became famous in the Apple stores. We begin setting up lights and talking things over with Steve’s team. Finally Steve came storming in, hours late due to traffic on his way down from Pixar, and in a terrible mood. He took one look at my set up and announced, “This is just stupid. We are not doing this.” [2] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT 1. https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next https://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/pics_places/next 2. https://menuez.com/journal/steve-jobs-stupid-idea https://menuez.com/journal/steve-jobs-stupid-idea

JSR_FDED 1y ago
However mercurial, Jobs’ willingness to change his mind about things was a huge asset. So many execs I work with haven’t had an original thought in years, and certainly haven’t reevaluated their stance on anything.
- notorandit 1y ago
  I think that's one of the huge gaps between a genius and an average man.
- adolph 1y ago

WillAdams 1y ago

Sad. It was noted early on that they would either be the last hardware startup to make it, or the first well-funded one to fail... Ages ago, I was using similarly spec'ed computers running Windows (ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (Mac Quadra 950), and NeXTstep (25MHz '040 Cube)--- the Cube was by far the nicest and most stable and most capable --- fortunately, its legacy lives on in Mac OS since Apple's purchase of NeXT essentially resulted in NeXT taking over Apple (just we don't get the vertical menu, pop-up main menu, tear off sub-menus, Display PostScript, PANTONE colour license, nxhosting, or the "Unix expert" checkbox) --- really wish that the folks behind GNUstep and the various desktop projects would get more traction. Was lucky enough to score copies of Adobe Illustrator and Altsys Virtuoso, and I still have Macromedia Freehand set to open .vrt files (Freehand 4 ~= Virtuoso 2). Really miss Lotus Improv (I've never been able to convince an employer that it would be worth paying for me to have a license of Quantrix Financial Modeler), and WriteNow is still one of my favourite wordprocessors --- at least TeXshop was modeled on TeXview.app, and has many of the same capabilities and much the same feel --- for a long while, I was the only person in a Mac composition shop for whom it made sense to use Mac OS X, since I was using TeXshop, and it was more comfortable to me than TeXtures (I think the license I was using was serial #018).

twoodfin 1y ago
I dunno, it’s hard to be too sad. Turns out they really were inventing the future in that office, and the NeXT Cube has a better case for being the progenitor of the billions of slabs of glass, metal, and silicon that changed the world than any other computer.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  I am sad because: - I have to use a Windows computer to run Macromedia Freehand, the Affinity Design folks bailed on doing a full clone (and I dread their 30 Oct announcement which will probably be for a subscription model), the Quasado folks are now doing GraviT over on the Chrome store, and I haven't found a vector drawing program for Mac OS which I like which supports Services - Lotus Improv 2.0 was for Windows --- there is no multi-dimensional spreadsheet like to it for Mac OS --- closest thing I've found is pyspread, unless someone can get Flexisheet running, Numbers.app is painfully 2D last I checked - Services are woefully under-represented, really miss little apps such as poste.app (envelope printing), and sbook.app and Millenium's Notebook.app - I have to dig out a Raspberry Pi to run Mathematica - I miss writing PostScript strokes and fills and seeing them on-screen - my Wacom One quit working with my MacBook --- that never happened w/ my Wacom ArtZ attached to my NeXT Cube Yes, I'm glad to have TeXshop.app, but these days I mostly just do Literate Programming in TeXstudio, which is painfully cross-platform. My next project is to do a Cyberdeck using an rPi 5 and a Wacom Movink --- we'll have to see how that turns out.

gedy 1y ago

I'd like to Return To those Offices

flomo 1y ago
Probably not shown, but reportedly Jobs liked hiring lots of attractive women too. Good for sales.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

> 3475 Deer Creek Road, Palo Alto CA Holy heck, looking at this in Google Earth: how I wish other companies had their back to some gorgeous land to go together across. What an incredible exponentiator, to be situated so nicely with some lands to walk across.

watersb 1y ago

I vaguely remember the office on Chesapeake Dr in Redwood City. It had the requisite Steve Jobs interior design but that was augmented by an enormous mountain of white salt looming up behind it. Sodium chloride. From evaporation ponds on the shores of the bay.

notorandit 1y ago

Computer history is paved with faults that, in technical perspective, should have never happened. NeXT was not ahead of it's times. It hasn't been technically surpassed by any other product in the "next" 10 years. So NeXT is one. IMHO, Amiga 1200, Archimedes and Sinclair QL are other ones. It seems a mix of mismanagement and marketing (which maybe is still mismanagement). Sic transit gloria mundi.

steve1977 1y ago
Both NeXT and Archimedes live on in one of the most successful computer products ever, so I guess „fault“ is relative.
flohofwoe 1y ago
If you're using a modern Mac today, you're essentially running a modernized version of NeXTSTEP, so actually it's NeXT which has survived by 'reverse-acquiring' Apple, and the original Mac has joined the technology graveyard along with Amiga, Atari etc... ...or actually... modern Macs are a NeXT/Archimedes hybrid - the software comes from NeXT, while the hardware is of Archimedes heritage ;)

gtsnexp 1y ago

Cargo Cult?

glimshe 1y ago

Where are the huge open floor plans with an army of developers wearing noise-cancelling headphones? One can't develop great products without collaboration! I miss the offices of old... In particular, Microsoft's old policy of putting people in individual offices.

burnt-resistor 1y ago
3475 Deer Creek Rd is leased by SAP AppHaus[0]. There are so many PHB bizwords on the website, I pretty much feel asleep trying to figure out if they did anything real or if it's well-meaning MBAs who sold their bosses on the wantrepreneur cargo cult fashion of renting expensive property in Palo Alto. Interestingly, Apple re-leased the W SJ Triangle Building they used to occupy in the 80's & 90's that had a giant vintage rainbow Apple logo facing I-280. It has had a history of short-term occupancy post-Apple with Accolade (games) and various other tenants over the decades. Mega rich tech areas ought to reinvest in the future by launching teaching venues and community-focused employee-/member-owned co-op sw/hw hackspaces-library-event-makespaces if they really want to attract people who aren't interested in, are put-off, or can't afford corporate-focused/-gatekept "innovation centers". Co-working space is so commodified, it needs to be local and special rather than transactional to draw people. There is/was a church (Spark perhaps) in Palo Alto that had quite a large coworking space, and the folks there were really cool. 0. https://apphaus.sap.com/network/palo-alto https://apphaus.sap.com/network/palo-alto
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>Where are the huge open floor plans with an army of developers wearing noise-cancelling headphones? 30 years in the future, when everyone and their dog learned to code and the market got flooded with programmers. If you look at SW from the NEXT era, there were like 1 to 5 programmers, all stallions, per SW product, so no wonder everyone had their own office.

gnerd00 1y ago

NeXT was incredible engineering but not a drop-in replacement for Mac OS. The sociology of the use of the machine is very different. The careful and kind attention to the non-technical computer owners in Mac OS was replaced by corporate-controlled computer science with a GUI. The ambitions of Jobs became clearer later in life -- bizarrely manifesting the Big Brother that the early ad mocked. The iPhone drives Apple now, while Mac OSX slowly deteriorates with episodes of iPhone takeovers in the interface. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Windows has also shown its true colors with spyware and ad-stuffing left and right.

bni 1y ago

Looks like an Apple Store. Probably not a coincidence.