10 ms·

NeXT Computer

j7 13y ago
Aside from the beauty of this restore, I thought it was cool to see the UI influences the NeXT's OS had on Mac OS. I've never seen screenshots until now, but you can definitely see aspects carried through to its successor.
tardigrade 13y ago
I had always assumed osx's aqua interface was behind the dock, very cool to get a chance to see what their predecessor looked like in action.
- frou_dh 13y ago
  There are torrents out there of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep images that you can boot right into using VirtualBox.
kickingvegas 13y ago
I have a copy of the original NeXT product information and IDC bulletin which I scanned a while back for posterity. Posting here for those interested. http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-have-your-iphone.html http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-hav...
- salgernon 13y ago
  I have been searching for, and failing to find a quote by Steve Jobs - I remember reading it in the late 80s. It was to the effect "UNIX is going to be the operating system for the 90's". I'd love to track down the original source for this...
  - glhaynes 13y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised at all if he'd said that; but you might be thinking of Gates who once said that OS/2 would be the operating system of the '90s. (He was wrong but he… still did all right in the end.)
    - nsxwolf 13y ago
      I'm willing to give his prediction some credit. Windows and OS/2 are pretty closely related.
      - glhaynes 13y ago
        Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can be.
        wtallis 13y ago
        The Windows that is related to OS/2 is NT, which was very much not the operating system of the 90's, since it didn't go mainstream until NT5.x: Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - yuhong 13y ago
      It was MS themselves that turned the OS/2 2.0 project into an entire fiasco: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
  - ryanwatkins 13y ago
    There was ad by NeXT -- "In the 90's we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." that lists making Unix usable as one of them. I have this poster framed in my office. A copy and someones review of those seven here: http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/ http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/ Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.
ebbv 13y ago
There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice in that it was standard and you knew what to expect in every application, but also could be less than ideal in some applications. Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of daily usage. In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons. A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc. and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on X. etc.
- jjtheblunt 13y ago
  Or, in the end, NeXT succeeded in being bought by Apple, morphing into XNU, Darwin, and thus OSX and iOS, and doing quite well?
  - ebbv 13y ago
    Well, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom hands you a trophy.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - cstross 13y ago
      Subsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All else is history. If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!
wtallis 13y ago
Some things to take note of: Scroll bars are on the left, and the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar. NeXTSTEP GUI programs adhered to a well-defined concept of an application: they're stored on-disk as self-contained app bundles that appear in the file manager as a single file, there's one Dock tile per application, one menu per application, and zero or more windows per running application. OS X has somewhat weakened this. Menus are vertically arranged, and can be re-positioned. Sub-menus can also be torn off and re-positioned. Unlike OS X's Dock, when you fire up an application that isn't already in the Dock, the app icon goes in the bottom-left corner of the screen (which is also where minimized windows go). The app icons in the Dock are only the ones that you have selected to stay in the Dock even when the application isn't running. The window close and minimize buttons are in different corners, and the close button provides visual indication of a window containing an unsaved document. The display is grayscale, but the software supports color.
- jfb 13y ago
  I used to have a cube with a NextDimension board in it: it was a dedicated i860 with 32MB of backing store. Whoa. 24bpp color with 8bpp alpha. Hot shit! That was the best computer I've ever owned.
- ben1040 13y ago
  >the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar. Which was also the case in OS X, up through 10.3.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being described here, I believe they were kept up through 10.6. I'm running 10.6.8 currently, and there are two scroll buttons at the same end of the scroll bars, as in NeXT. But from 10.7 the scroll buttons were scrapped entirely.
    - wtallis 13y ago
      Whether to put the buttons together or at opposite ends has been an option for as long as I have been using OS X, but I don't recall the history of the default setting. The other scrollbar-related behavior is what happens when you click on an empty part of the scroll bar. On NeXTSTEP, the scroll thumb jumps to where you clicked. On Windows, it scrolls down one page/screenfull. OS X has defaulted to the Windows behavior for at least the past several major releases.
erikj 13y ago
Those who want to experience NeXTSTEP without the hurdle of installing a VM should try GNUstep. This project aims to faithfully recreate the NeXT's software environment, with the omission of Mach and its IPC mechanisms. http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.gnustep.org/ You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.
- LukeShu 13y ago
  1. They aren't going for "faithful NeXT", they are going for modern Cocoa. 2. Holly cow, I didn't know it could look nice (screenshot on the link). I mean I did, but all of the screenshots in the RSS/email announcements on gnu lists have a theme that looks like the screenshots in the article!
  - reeses 13y ago
    In re your #2, it's like the mutant offspring of Amiga and NeXTStep.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  The problem is that their development is almost stalled. I hardly see any difference since 2004, the last time I used WindowMaker as my desktop. As for GNUStep the web site wiki is very confusing, as it is not easy to find out how close they are for Objective-C language version and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa libraries. Again, many of the pages look the same as back in 2004.
  - nglevin 13y ago
    WindowMaker split off from the GNUstep project quite some time ago, IIRC. They don't even use Objective-C, they use their own framework for widgets built on WM called "WINGs." There's still activity on the GNUstep front. Just a few things I can think of, - Their runtime, libobjc2, has done a great job keeping pace with Clang and modern Objective-C. It now has a Cmake based build system and doesn't require any bootstrapping with GNUstep-make. - GNUstep-base (the Foundation alternative) is solid, though some parts go back as far as OS X 10.6 and others OS X 10.4. You'll have to check the headers to see what's up to date. They do have an extremely capable implementation of distributed objects, last I heard they were planning to make it integrate with Apple's distributed objects implementation, but that project still seems to be pending. - GNUstep-gui (AppKit alternative) just added support for 10.6's NSCollectionView very recently. Most activity there has been in the form of refinements. As I recall, drag and drop is still on their todo list... they really could use some manpower there. - GNUstep-back (the backend renderer) still uses an API that's largely based on Display Postscript. They are planning to pitch a GSoC project to replace the Display Postscript API with one based on GNUstep-Opal (a Core Graphics alternative), and they already have a largely proof of concept Core Animation alternative running on it (GNUstep-QuartzCore.) The project's current vision is to focus on making it easier to port Objective-C to other platforms, rather than to be a desktop environment. But like most small, mature open source projects, there's a lack of manpower keeping them from easily achieving those goals. Would be nice to see more activity there, in the future. You can check out all of the projects I've named in the Github mirror at https://github.com/gnustep https://github.com/gnustep , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull requests. The mailing lists at http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html are strongly preferred. As for the current website, I think Scott Stevenson designed it a decade ago long before he joined Apple. I like the design, personally, but I do understand that it's a bit difficult to navigate... and several of the docs haven't been updated in some time.
DanBC 13y ago
> All the NeXT components are displayed here, showing a clean and well engineered assembly, demonstrating a design asthetic that extended to the inside of the NeXT cube computer. Some machines are really nice inside. IBM (and some Lenovo); some HPUX machines; etc; have really nice well laid out insides. It's a shame that this approach is dying, even though most people don't need it and benefit more from semi-disposable hardware.
- rsync 13y ago
  I'm not a mac fan, nor a mac apologist, but I have to say the current Mac Pro beats all of them ... that is an extremely well designed desktop computer. Really a joy to work with. For runner-up I would say the SGI Octane2, and for a non-desktop machine, the Sun E4500 was an extremely well designed, well manufactured system. Also a real joy to work with (although weighs something like 100 lbs fully loaded)
  - bitbckt 13y ago
    An Octane2 is still my home workstation. Irix remains a joy to use.
    - wazoox 13y ago
      And a great hardware, with the sliding boards and the pressure connectors. Its only culprit was the missing 5.25'' slot. I still have a dual R12K MXE Octane too :)
    - rplacd 13y ago
      Oh god, the amount of glowering envy I'm currently projecting could just about lift my table and everything on it two feet in the air.
  - joe_bleau 13y ago
    I hope the Octane2 was better than the Octane. While I like mine, it's really loud, the incandescent bulbs (!) in the light bar don't last very long, there's no room in the large case for a single 5.25" drive, the plastic skins are really fragile, the compression connectors are very delicate, the texture ram likes to unsolder itself, and certain generations of circuit boards fail at a very high rate. From what little I've seen, Sun gear of a similar vintage seems better built than the Octane.
kailuowang 13y ago
I have one box like this under my desk, nobody knew what it is. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/AAAAAAAADKM/ZuNIV_RAET4/w994-h1325/IMG_20130503_161810.jpg https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/A...
headbiznatch 13y ago
Steve Jobs blah blah blah UNIX blah blah blah Apple blah blah UX nerdery blah blah blah blah blah. OK - now the important stuff about the Cube: https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn
akamaka 13y ago
John Romero's blog has a nice write-up about how id Software developed Doom on Next Step back in 1993. Complete with a screenshot of the level editor: http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bernardlunn 13y ago
Ah, the memories, the memories. Yes kids I was there and it was beautiful. My company built systems for financial traders. There was always a battle between the techs in the banks who wanted something architecturally elegant e.g. object oriented and the traders who wanted a UX that worked in an incredibly high pressure environment. In some deals the techies won and in some deals the traders won and in both cases the bank lost. NeXT was the only thing that was equally good at both. We ported to NeXT and sold a few. The rest as they say is history (i.e. NeXT disappeared into the dustbin of history and remerged in Jobs's brilliant second act. Today in our real time social mobile web we are all like traders, so that is why we have NeXT 3.o aka the iPhone.
ajross 13y ago
> with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, [...] this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems! Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform, and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed. There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and integration would otherwise have been attractive.
- wtallis 13y ago
  The NeXT hardware wasn't just priced out of competition with PCs and Macs, NeXT wasn't allowed to compete head on with Apple, as part of the agreements that allowed Steve Jobs to leave Apple and start a new company. The workstation market was the only one NeXT wouldn't have to litigate their way into.
  - verytrivial 13y ago
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 - In case anyone has not seen it already, this is Steve Jobs here explaining where NeXT is competing and how it plans to compete (with, by the way, Sun).
  - verytrivial 13y ago
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 - In case anyone has not seen it already, this is Steve Jobs here explaining where NeXT is competing and how it plans to compete (with, by the way, Sun).
- dsjoerg 13y ago
  The companies who enthusiastically picked up NeXT machines by the hundreds did it because the development environment was a decade ahead of its time. However there weren't enough of those companies, so NeXT was forced to reverse-takeover Apple and from there take over the world.
cwisecarver 13y ago
I bought my first Mac a TiBook when OSX was still in beta because I knew it was based on the OS that the world wide web was invented on. I've got the NeXT Bible at home on a shelf. I've been looking to buy a cube for years and have only found them for $5k+ on ebay. I know they're rare but does anyone have one they want to sell for a reasonable amount or know of a place selling them?
- reeses 13y ago
  The NeXT Bible, 1/3 of which was an ls -R from /, right? I recall the interview with Brad Cox being particularly cringeworthy as well.
bhauer 13y ago
At first glance, I thought MazeWar looks a lot like MIDI-Maze [1]. And, sure enough on looking it up, MazeWar [2] is cited as inspiration for MIDI-Maze. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War
yanowitz 13y ago
When looking at the terminal screen shot, I can't help but think of the classic "csh considered harmful" (http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot) (Which is itself a classic "meme" before "memes" were a misused "meme").
Bud 13y ago
I owned a NeXT Cube (since sold) and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I still have and which still powers up nicely. Monitor and NeXT laser printer still work as well. Pretty impressive for 20-year-old hardware. And still a beautiful, sleek design, if you can get past the 100-pound color monitor. Owning a NeXT in the early 1990s and the first days of the Web was like having super powers.
- reeses 13y ago
  I still credit the NeXTlaser's 400dpi, clay-coated paper, and FrameMaker with half a grade point on every paper I wrote.
  - kickingvegas 13y ago
    I'm still mad that FrameMaker was never ported to OS X.
pacaro 13y ago
If this whets the appetite of anyone in the Seattle area, I have a couple of pizza boxes (one turbo color) with soundboxes, a mouse, keyboard and monitor all looking for a new home. All this is most likely non-functioning, but anyone who wants it is welcome to it. I can be contacted at gmail.com
melling 13y ago
Does anyone remember this NeXTStep game? Apple still has it for the Mac. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40012297-Intro-DontLinkElementID_2 http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/... I did some NeXTStep programming 20 years ago. I converted the Tetris game to color when they finally shipped the NeXTstation Color. If someone has the Tetris source, I'd like to look at again and see how close it is to the iOS stuff I'm doing these days.
- nglevin 13y ago
  Is this the one? http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m68k_only/Tetris1.3.N.bs.tar.gz http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m... (tar.gz file)
  - melling 13y ago
    Yes! I'm the 'melling' from the README2: -------------------------------------- If you are using a monochrome system, you should copy the Tetris blocks from MonoBlocks to this directory. You can design blocks of your own by using Icon and saving them as Block1, Block2, Block3 and Block4. Be sure to save you images as 16x16 files. NOTE: Icon will open(and save) the Block images as 48x48 so you will have to change the image size back to 16x16. Also, if you would like to design a color icon for Tetris, please NeXTmail me the TIFF at the following address. melling@cs.psu.edu Also, I'm interested in hearing about any features that you would like added. -Mike
mwexler 13y ago
Lots to love about NeXT. I got a kick out of the display PostScript screen. Very few other computers or workstations ever took that route. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript tells a bit more about how it evolved into PDFish displays in Mac OSX.
robterrell 13y ago
Not to be needlessly pedantic, but MazeWars was originally on Macs circa ...1985? I know we played it in the dorms at Virginia Tech over phone-net (some homemade!) connectors in 1986-7. Pretty sure I had seen it long before then.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dmourati 13y ago
"Your printer is out of paper" http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd
austenallred 13y ago
All I could think about as I was looking through the pictures and reading was, "Wow that is a good looking computer." Perhaps it's the designer in me, but it just has a completely different feel to it.
dredmorbius 13y ago
For those who'd like to get a sense of what the NeXT desktop was like, there's the WindowMaker window manager for X11. I've actually been using it for a decade and a half (trying others from time to time as well). It's very light and fast on modern hardware, the codebase is remarkably stable (development has just re-started after stagnating for 6-7 years), and it's configurable (I've got numerous hotkey shortcuts defined which I miss terribly when I'm in another environment). In a world where I'm coming to appreciate calming interfaces, WindowMaker is very much one such. I've only recently discovered Readability (similar to InstaPaper or Pocket / Read It Later), and there's a certain similarity of spirit between the two. Also, as others have noted, Cocoa for OS X contains a lot of NeXTstep-isms under the hood.
bambax 13y ago
On this picture: http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?
- kickingvegas 13y ago
  That's a NeXTstation, a later version in a "pizzabox" form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation
lazyjones 13y ago
NeXT was way out of my own price range in the early 90's (I only had an Atari ST). At our university there were mostly DECstations and Sun workstations, apparently due to huge discounts (50%+) these vendors gave to academic institutions and because they were also used as servers (with NCD X-Terminals as clients). The amazing design and focus on graphics power may have hurt sales in these circles because it would have been hard to justify a high price for eyecandy over raw cpu power and most universities outside the US were probably not adequately funded at that time (perhaps Jobs overestimated that market?).
camperman 13y ago
Steve Jobs demoing the NeXT in 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA
hnriot 13y ago
I remember going to their store on university avenue (palo alto) which is think today is the location of an apple store. I used Apollo workstations at the time, but the NeXT boxes looked really cool.
ludwigvan 13y ago
Since there are Mathematica screenshots on NeXT computers, here is a trivia: Mathematica owes its name to Steve Jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia

j7 13y ago

Aside from the beauty of this restore, I thought it was cool to see the UI influences the NeXT's OS had on Mac OS. I've never seen screenshots until now, but you can definitely see aspects carried through to its successor.

tardigrade 13y ago

I had always assumed osx's aqua interface was behind the dock, very cool to get a chance to see what their predecessor looked like in action.

frou_dh 13y ago
There are torrents out there of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep images that you can boot right into using VirtualBox.

kickingvegas 13y ago

I have a copy of the original NeXT product information and IDC bulletin which I scanned a while back for posterity. Posting here for those interested. http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-have-your-iphone.html http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-hav...

salgernon 13y ago
I have been searching for, and failing to find a quote by Steve Jobs - I remember reading it in the late 80s. It was to the effect "UNIX is going to be the operating system for the 90's". I'd love to track down the original source for this...
- glhaynes 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised at all if he'd said that; but you might be thinking of Gates who once said that OS/2 would be the operating system of the '90s. (He was wrong but he… still did all right in the end.)
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    I'm willing to give his prediction some credit. Windows and OS/2 are pretty closely related.
    - glhaynes 13y ago
      Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can be.
      - wtallis 13y ago
        The Windows that is related to OS/2 is NT, which was very much not the operating system of the 90's, since it didn't go mainstream until NT5.x: Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - yuhong 13y ago
    It was MS themselves that turned the OS/2 2.0 project into an entire fiasco: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
- ryanwatkins 13y ago
  There was ad by NeXT -- "In the 90's we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." that lists making Unix usable as one of them. I have this poster framed in my office. A copy and someones review of those seven here: http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/ http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/ Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.

ebbv 13y ago

There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice in that it was standard and you knew what to expect in every application, but also could be less than ideal in some applications. Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of daily usage. In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons. A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc. and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on X. etc.

jjtheblunt 13y ago
Or, in the end, NeXT succeeded in being bought by Apple, morphing into XNU, Darwin, and thus OSX and iOS, and doing quite well?
- ebbv 13y ago
  Well, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom hands you a trophy.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - cstross 13y ago
    Subsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All else is history. If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!

wtallis 13y ago

Some things to take note of: Scroll bars are on the left, and the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar. NeXTSTEP GUI programs adhered to a well-defined concept of an application: they're stored on-disk as self-contained app bundles that appear in the file manager as a single file, there's one Dock tile per application, one menu per application, and zero or more windows per running application. OS X has somewhat weakened this. Menus are vertically arranged, and can be re-positioned. Sub-menus can also be torn off and re-positioned. Unlike OS X's Dock, when you fire up an application that isn't already in the Dock, the app icon goes in the bottom-left corner of the screen (which is also where minimized windows go). The app icons in the Dock are only the ones that you have selected to stay in the Dock even when the application isn't running. The window close and minimize buttons are in different corners, and the close button provides visual indication of a window containing an unsaved document. The display is grayscale, but the software supports color.

jfb 13y ago
I used to have a cube with a NextDimension board in it: it was a dedicated i860 with 32MB of backing store. Whoa. 24bpp color with 8bpp alpha. Hot shit! That was the best computer I've ever owned.
ben1040 13y ago
>the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar. Which was also the case in OS X, up through 10.3.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding what's being described here, I believe they were kept up through 10.6. I'm running 10.6.8 currently, and there are two scroll buttons at the same end of the scroll bars, as in NeXT. But from 10.7 the scroll buttons were scrapped entirely.
  - wtallis 13y ago
    Whether to put the buttons together or at opposite ends has been an option for as long as I have been using OS X, but I don't recall the history of the default setting. The other scrollbar-related behavior is what happens when you click on an empty part of the scroll bar. On NeXTSTEP, the scroll thumb jumps to where you clicked. On Windows, it scrolls down one page/screenfull. OS X has defaulted to the Windows behavior for at least the past several major releases.

erikj 13y ago

Those who want to experience NeXTSTEP without the hurdle of installing a VM should try GNUstep. This project aims to faithfully recreate the NeXT's software environment, with the omission of Mach and its IPC mechanisms. http://www.gnustep.org/ http://www.gnustep.org/ You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.

LukeShu 13y ago
1. They aren't going for "faithful NeXT", they are going for modern Cocoa. 2. Holly cow, I didn't know it could look nice (screenshot on the link). I mean I did, but all of the screenshots in the RSS/email announcements on gnu lists have a theme that looks like the screenshots in the article!
- reeses 13y ago
  In re your #2, it's like the mutant offspring of Amiga and NeXTStep.
pjmlp 13y ago
The problem is that their development is almost stalled. I hardly see any difference since 2004, the last time I used WindowMaker as my desktop. As for GNUStep the web site wiki is very confusing, as it is not easy to find out how close they are for Objective-C language version and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa libraries. Again, many of the pages look the same as back in 2004.
- nglevin 13y ago
  WindowMaker split off from the GNUstep project quite some time ago, IIRC. They don't even use Objective-C, they use their own framework for widgets built on WM called "WINGs." There's still activity on the GNUstep front. Just a few things I can think of, - Their runtime, libobjc2, has done a great job keeping pace with Clang and modern Objective-C. It now has a Cmake based build system and doesn't require any bootstrapping with GNUstep-make. - GNUstep-base (the Foundation alternative) is solid, though some parts go back as far as OS X 10.6 and others OS X 10.4. You'll have to check the headers to see what's up to date. They do have an extremely capable implementation of distributed objects, last I heard they were planning to make it integrate with Apple's distributed objects implementation, but that project still seems to be pending. - GNUstep-gui (AppKit alternative) just added support for 10.6's NSCollectionView very recently. Most activity there has been in the form of refinements. As I recall, drag and drop is still on their todo list... they really could use some manpower there. - GNUstep-back (the backend renderer) still uses an API that's largely based on Display Postscript. They are planning to pitch a GSoC project to replace the Display Postscript API with one based on GNUstep-Opal (a Core Graphics alternative), and they already have a largely proof of concept Core Animation alternative running on it (GNUstep-QuartzCore.) The project's current vision is to focus on making it easier to port Objective-C to other platforms, rather than to be a desktop environment. But like most small, mature open source projects, there's a lack of manpower keeping them from easily achieving those goals. Would be nice to see more activity there, in the future. You can check out all of the projects I've named in the Github mirror at https://github.com/gnustep https://github.com/gnustep , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull requests. The mailing lists at http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html are strongly preferred. As for the current website, I think Scott Stevenson designed it a decade ago long before he joined Apple. I like the design, personally, but I do understand that it's a bit difficult to navigate... and several of the docs haven't been updated in some time.

DanBC 13y ago

> All the NeXT components are displayed here, showing a clean and well engineered assembly, demonstrating a design asthetic that extended to the inside of the NeXT cube computer. Some machines are really nice inside. IBM (and some Lenovo); some HPUX machines; etc; have really nice well laid out insides. It's a shame that this approach is dying, even though most people don't need it and benefit more from semi-disposable hardware.

rsync 13y ago
I'm not a mac fan, nor a mac apologist, but I have to say the current Mac Pro beats all of them ... that is an extremely well designed desktop computer. Really a joy to work with. For runner-up I would say the SGI Octane2, and for a non-desktop machine, the Sun E4500 was an extremely well designed, well manufactured system. Also a real joy to work with (although weighs something like 100 lbs fully loaded)
- bitbckt 13y ago
  An Octane2 is still my home workstation. Irix remains a joy to use.
  - wazoox 13y ago
    And a great hardware, with the sliding boards and the pressure connectors. Its only culprit was the missing 5.25'' slot. I still have a dual R12K MXE Octane too :)
  - rplacd 13y ago
    Oh god, the amount of glowering envy I'm currently projecting could just about lift my table and everything on it two feet in the air.
- joe_bleau 13y ago
  I hope the Octane2 was better than the Octane. While I like mine, it's really loud, the incandescent bulbs (!) in the light bar don't last very long, there's no room in the large case for a single 5.25" drive, the plastic skins are really fragile, the compression connectors are very delicate, the texture ram likes to unsolder itself, and certain generations of circuit boards fail at a very high rate. From what little I've seen, Sun gear of a similar vintage seems better built than the Octane.

kailuowang 13y ago

I have one box like this under my desk, nobody knew what it is. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/AAAAAAAADKM/ZuNIV_RAET4/w994-h1325/IMG_20130503_161810.jpg https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-iliZcxPMKgY/UYQcH1pKKvI/A...

headbiznatch 13y ago

Steve Jobs blah blah blah UNIX blah blah blah Apple blah blah UX nerdery blah blah blah blah blah. OK - now the important stuff about the Cube: https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn https://www.google.com/search?q=next+magnesium+case+burn

akamaka 13y ago

John Romero's blog has a nice write-up about how id Software developed Doom on Next Step back in 1993. Complete with a screenshot of the level editor: http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday http://planetromero.com/2006/12/apple-next-merger-birthday

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bernardlunn 13y ago

Ah, the memories, the memories. Yes kids I was there and it was beautiful. My company built systems for financial traders. There was always a battle between the techs in the banks who wanted something architecturally elegant e.g. object oriented and the traders who wanted a UX that worked in an incredibly high pressure environment. In some deals the techies won and in some deals the traders won and in both cases the bank lost. NeXT was the only thing that was equally good at both. We ported to NeXT and sold a few. The rest as they say is history (i.e. NeXT disappeared into the dustbin of history and remerged in Jobs's brilliant second act. Today in our real time social mobile web we are all like traders, so that is why we have NeXT 3.o aka the iPhone.

ajross 13y ago

> with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, [...] this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems! Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform, and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed. There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and integration would otherwise have been attractive.

wtallis 13y ago
The NeXT hardware wasn't just priced out of competition with PCs and Macs, NeXT wasn't allowed to compete head on with Apple, as part of the agreements that allowed Steve Jobs to leave Apple and start a new company. The workstation market was the only one NeXT wouldn't have to litigate their way into.
- verytrivial 13y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 - In case anyone has not seen it already, this is Steve Jobs here explaining where NeXT is competing and how it plans to compete (with, by the way, Sun).
- verytrivial 13y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 - In case anyone has not seen it already, this is Steve Jobs here explaining where NeXT is competing and how it plans to compete (with, by the way, Sun).
dsjoerg 13y ago
The companies who enthusiastically picked up NeXT machines by the hundreds did it because the development environment was a decade ahead of its time. However there weren't enough of those companies, so NeXT was forced to reverse-takeover Apple and from there take over the world.

cwisecarver 13y ago

I bought my first Mac a TiBook when OSX was still in beta because I knew it was based on the OS that the world wide web was invented on. I've got the NeXT Bible at home on a shelf. I've been looking to buy a cube for years and have only found them for $5k+ on ebay. I know they're rare but does anyone have one they want to sell for a reasonable amount or know of a place selling them?

reeses 13y ago
The NeXT Bible, 1/3 of which was an ls -R from /, right? I recall the interview with Brad Cox being particularly cringeworthy as well.

bhauer 13y ago

At first glance, I thought MazeWar looks a lot like MIDI-Maze [1]. And, sure enough on looking it up, MazeWar [2] is cited as inspiration for MIDI-Maze. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War

yanowitz 13y ago

When looking at the terminal screen shot, I can't help but think of the classic "csh considered harmful" (http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/csh.whynot) (Which is itself a classic "meme" before "memes" were a misused "meme").

Bud 13y ago

I owned a NeXT Cube (since sold) and a NeXTStation Turbo Color, which I still have and which still powers up nicely. Monitor and NeXT laser printer still work as well. Pretty impressive for 20-year-old hardware. And still a beautiful, sleek design, if you can get past the 100-pound color monitor. Owning a NeXT in the early 1990s and the first days of the Web was like having super powers.

reeses 13y ago
I still credit the NeXTlaser's 400dpi, clay-coated paper, and FrameMaker with half a grade point on every paper I wrote.
- kickingvegas 13y ago
  I'm still mad that FrameMaker was never ported to OS X.

pacaro 13y ago

If this whets the appetite of anyone in the Seattle area, I have a couple of pizza boxes (one turbo color) with soundboxes, a mouse, keyboard and monitor all looking for a new home. All this is most likely non-functioning, but anyone who wants it is welcome to it. I can be contacted at gmail.com

melling 13y ago

Does anyone remember this NeXTStep game? Apple still has it for the Mac. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40012297-Intro-DontLinkElementID_2 http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/... I did some NeXTStep programming 20 years ago. I converted the Tetris game to color when they finally shipped the NeXTstation Color. If someone has the Tetris source, I'd like to look at again and see how close it is to the iOS stuff I'm doing these days.

nglevin 13y ago
Is this the one? http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m68k_only/Tetris1.3.N.bs.tar.gz http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m... (tar.gz file)
- melling 13y ago
  Yes! I'm the 'melling' from the README2: -------------------------------------- If you are using a monochrome system, you should copy the Tetris blocks from MonoBlocks to this directory. You can design blocks of your own by using Icon and saving them as Block1, Block2, Block3 and Block4. Be sure to save you images as 16x16 files. NOTE: Icon will open(and save) the Block images as 48x48 so you will have to change the image size back to 16x16. Also, if you would like to design a color icon for Tetris, please NeXTmail me the TIFF at the following address. melling@cs.psu.edu Also, I'm interested in hearing about any features that you would like added. -Mike

mwexler 13y ago

Lots to love about NeXT. I got a kick out of the display PostScript screen. Very few other computers or workstations ever took that route. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript tells a bit more about how it evolved into PDFish displays in Mac OSX.

robterrell 13y ago

Not to be needlessly pedantic, but MazeWars was originally on Macs circa ...1985? I know we played it in the dorms at Virginia Tech over phone-net (some homemade!) connectors in 1986-7. Pretty sure I had seen it long before then.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

dmourati 13y ago

"Your printer is out of paper" http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd http://web.figure1.net/next/printer/english/nopaper.snd

austenallred 13y ago

All I could think about as I was looking through the pictures and reading was, "Wow that is a good looking computer." Perhaps it's the designer in me, but it just has a completely different feel to it.

dredmorbius 13y ago

For those who'd like to get a sense of what the NeXT desktop was like, there's the WindowMaker window manager for X11. I've actually been using it for a decade and a half (trying others from time to time as well). It's very light and fast on modern hardware, the codebase is remarkably stable (development has just re-started after stagnating for 6-7 years), and it's configurable (I've got numerous hotkey shortcuts defined which I miss terribly when I'm in another environment). In a world where I'm coming to appreciate calming interfaces, WindowMaker is very much one such. I've only recently discovered Readability (similar to InstaPaper or Pocket / Read It Later), and there's a certain similarity of spirit between the two. Also, as others have noted, Cocoa for OS X contains a lot of NeXTstep-isms under the hood.

bambax 13y ago

On this picture: http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?

kickingvegas 13y ago
That's a NeXTstation, a later version in a "pizzabox" form. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation

lazyjones 13y ago

NeXT was way out of my own price range in the early 90's (I only had an Atari ST). At our university there were mostly DECstations and Sun workstations, apparently due to huge discounts (50%+) these vendors gave to academic institutions and because they were also used as servers (with NCD X-Terminals as clients). The amazing design and focus on graphics power may have hurt sales in these circles because it would have been hard to justify a high price for eyecandy over raw cpu power and most universities outside the US were probably not adequately funded at that time (perhaps Jobs overestimated that market?).

camperman 13y ago

Steve Jobs demoing the NeXT in 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx684Eta4KA

hnriot 13y ago

I remember going to their store on university avenue (palo alto) which is think today is the location of an apple store. I used Apollo workstations at the time, but the NeXT boxes looked really cool.

ludwigvan 13y ago

Since there are Mathematica screenshots on NeXT computers, here is a trivia: Mathematica owes its name to Steve Jobs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematica#Trivia