NeXT Computer

http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next.htm

195 109 13 years ago

j7• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

kickingvegas3• 13 years 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-hav...

salgernon• 13 years 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...

glhaynes2• 13 years 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.)

ryanwatkins• 13 years 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/

Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.

ebbv3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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?

ebbv3• 13 years 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.

nsns• 13 years ago

...à la dinosaurs as birds?

jfb2• 13 years ago

ISTR Next ads in Byte, and it being targeted at the high-end of the PC market. I had one at Chicago and loved it, but only because I didn't have to try to live with the WORM as my only storage. Great computer, great, great OS.

altcognito• 13 years ago

> (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.)

Except that it is the only comparison that ended up mattering. PC obliterated the workstation market.

erikj3• 13 years ago

And killed a lot of really good things along the way, like Lisp machines and their unique operating systems.

ebbv3• 13 years ago

Eventually. But NeXT had failed way before that happened. NeXT got bought out by Apple about the same time that the workstation market collapsed.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

To be fair, the NeXT machines were not as fast as competing RISC boxes from Sun, HP, IBM and DEC, and were equally costly. Also, as you pointed out, it was not Unix-ish enough. It was the most Mac-like Unix machine at a time being Mac-like was not an advantage in the high-end computing market.

reeses12• 13 years ago

My two favorite days with my 030 cube were similar to those with my boat. The day I bought it and the day I traded it for a 3/80. The cube, that is. I traded the boat for cash. :-)

wtallis4• 13 years 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.

jfb2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

protomyth• 13 years ago

I had a Microway that I ran NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP on that was an amazing machine at the time.

I loved the left scroll bars and still feel the menu on NeXTSTEP is better than the Apple menu (UI laws be damned) because I didn't have to constantly scroll to the top of the screen for menu options. The ability to tear off parts of the menu was amazing.

The Library app was something they should have kept. The NeXTSTEP file view / shelf still is better than Finder.

erikj3• 13 years 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/

You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.

LukeShu• 13 years 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!

reeses12• 13 years ago

In re your #2, it's like the mutant offspring of Amiga and NeXTStep.

pjmlp7• 13 years 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.

nglevin2• 13 years 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 , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull requests. The mailing lists at 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

An Octane2 is still my home workstation. Irix remains a joy to use.

joe_bleau• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

headbiznatch• 13 years 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

akamaka• 13 years 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

ajross2• 13 years 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.

wtallis4• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years 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.

SG-• 13 years ago

Sorry but you're totally missing something if you think you can compare to a Mac or 'PC' of it's time. Not only did it have a lot of special peripherals but the entire OS and environment is what made it special.

Like Apple today, you have to look at the entire package. The difference being that Apple mostly targets the general consumer today while NeXT was targeting a more advanced and smaller but richer market back then.

ajross2• 13 years ago

Missing what? These arguments were all had on the internet at the time, there's nothing we can add. Suffice it to say that the idea that an "environment" can make up for a severe performance handicap is a uniquely modern one informed by the existence of dual core multi-GHz devices that fit in a pocket.

If you were doing CAD work in 1990, you might not be so forgiving of a device that cost almost as much as a years salary for its user. And the market wasn't.

reeses12• 13 years ago

The entry models were always dogs regarding storage. The first cubes had those horrid MO drives and nothing else and the first stations had 105MB(?) drives that couldn't hold a full OS installation. No Shakespeare for you!

SeanLuke2• 13 years ago

> It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range,

Having used a lot of SPARCs and NeXT boxes side by side during that period, I'm scratching my head as to what features you're referring to, at least among machines which directly competed with, say, the NeXTstation Color Turbo. Looking back I'm really amazed at how ahead of its time that machine was.

But the critical item, I think, was the OS. NeXT had NeXTSTEP. Sun had heaven help us all) SunOS and later Solaris. SGI had IRIX. There was absolutely no comparison. I think this is why NeXTSTEP still lives on in OS X, and Solaris, um...

fungi• 13 years ago

> and Solaris, um...

http://openindiana.org/ and http://illumos.org/ are actually pretty frikken awesome.

reeses12• 13 years ago

They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers and low end workstations.

This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT couldn't scale up the way SGI could.

If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on technology or HP and IBM on financials.

zurn• 13 years ago

The early RISC machines were marketed on benchmark results which didn't reliably translate to real-world interactive performance. They got better with time though.

But yeah you wouldn't buy it because of its superior performance vs the RISC competitors, you got it because of the software and the dev tools etc. A bit like Mac vs Windows in the PowerPC days (only with the RISC vs CISC roles reversed!)

cwisecarver• 13 years 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?

reeses12• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/Maze_War

yanowitz• 13 years 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) (Which is itself a classic "meme" before "memes" were a misused "meme").

Bud• 13 years 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.

reeses12• 13 years ago

I still credit the NeXTlaser's 400dpi, clay-coated paper, and FrameMaker with half a grade point on every paper I wrote.

kickingvegas3• 13 years ago

I'm still mad that FrameMaker was never ported to OS X.

pacaro• 13 years 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

melling2• 13 years ago

Does anyone remember this NeXTStep game? Apple still has it for the Mac.

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.

nglevin2• 13 years ago

Is this the one?

http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m... (tar.gz file)

melling2• 13 years 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• 13 years 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 tells a bit more about how it evolved into PDFish displays in Mac OSX.

robterrell• 13 years 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.

dmourati• 13 years ago

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

bernardlunn• 13 years 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.

austenallred• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

On this picture:

http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg

there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?

kickingvegas3• 13 years ago

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

lazyjones• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

hnriot• 13 years 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• 13 years 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

NeXT Computer

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