Hey all! I figured the hard drive might be dying in this NeXTcube, so I made a new episode where we fix it! Check it out 👉ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ROpEaDVwx6w.html
I used to have a NeXT Cube but I got rid of it to get a IBook….yes I actually did…I got a LIME IBOOK!! I love that color!! Boi I missed that NeXT cube….
“It’s an optical anomaly. To the human eye a perfect cube doesn’t look like a cube so we made it roughly a millimeter shorter than a foot on two sides.”
Hey Ken, Glad you like the Cube and great video you produced on it! It could not have gone to a better home. A couple things about it. That model did indeed come with an option 2.88mb floppy disk, and if you had it installed it had a different bezel. What you see there now is simply a slot cover that is the same size as if you had a second MO drive on top. Also, If it ever fails to boot for you, the yellow Panasonic 2/3A battery in it might have gone bad. A NeXT will not boot at all with a dead cmos battery. Finally, you can configure the next to boot right to NeXTstep, I just had it configured to boot to terminal first as a preference. Keep up the great work!
Hard to make stuff designed to be user friendly when you are busy suing small companies who dare to use a fruit logo and making sure you can take 30% of other companies money just so they can appear on the appstore of your shitty phones.
That was back in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee developed the first Web server (HTTPd; which is now in use today as Apache HTTP Server) and the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb. This was the first Web server.
Doom was developed on a Nextcube. This computer is better known for being used for development at important points in history than for being any sort of widespread success.
But back then no one was attaching it to a VISA mount so they’d expect a stand and wheels. Nowadays many high end content professional creators want the stand and wheels to be Optional for those that already have a visa display mount because why should they pay for something you don’t need.
@@Charlesb88 that would be a valid argument if the apple display came with a standard VESA mounting bracket... **or any sort of mounting system that existed before the montitor, that a person could possibly have ever owned before the monitor
@@Fobia17 the problem with that is that different users will need different mounting brackets and some will prefer a stand. Professional content creators prefer to buy or provide there own mounting brackets or stand depending on their specific needs. So Apple can't provide a one size fits all mounting/stand solution. To many people have an issue with this who aren't the target market so I prefer to defer to the pros and let them complain to Apple if they want at least a stand included. From what I hear from the folks buying the Apple Pro monitor this isn't the issue laypeople think it is.
@@Charlesb88 If that was TRULY Apple's intention, then they would have used AN INDUSTRY STANDARD SYSTEM, like VESA, instead of forcing customers to use a proprietary mounting, or charging $1000 for a stand. You are correct, the Pros I know are not complaining, they are just going another route, entirely, because it's not worth their time and money to deal with it. Between their anti- Right to Repair stance, their charger BS, and shenanigans that are thst monitor, Apple is wholly anti consumer, just like thst stand.
The thing at the end of your tape measure moves because it's dual function: You can measure both inside and outside dimensions with it, the movement is the same size as the width of the L-shaped metal thingy on the end.
You can really understand why it was so expensive. The thought out across the component positioning and servicing is amazing for the time. You can see there was A LOT of development behind those boards and the specs/capabilities from these machines were out of this world for the time.
We used two of these in my composition class for Max/FTS programming and sound design in a two-story double quadraphonic or 8 speaker playback environment. We had concerts in the evenings on weekends and 30-40 people would come into the performance room and huddle in the middle and listen to the most tripped out surround sound music you can imagine. Great times! These NeXT boxes blew away everything else that was out at the time for creative tasks, (and other things I’m sure).
Your iPhone is running 30+ year old UNIX code and it's still kicking butt and taking names. The development language Objective-C was a combination of C with Smalltalk Object Oriented language. The Interface Builder GUI rapid application development IDE and the impressive NeXT API's were way ahead of their time. Drag and drop GUI development back when programmers had to use graph paper draw and measure everything out and code the dimensions by hand! This was years ahead of Borland and Microsoft RAD development systems. Almost ALL of the NeXTStep API's are still in macOS Catalina. They all start with ns_ prefixing the API calls. It's not surprising that the dev kit wasn't included with this NeXT Cube it was very expensive. After the Cube failed to capture market share, NeXT sold just the OS and Development kit. NeXTStep became OpenStep and it ran on a myriad of operating systems and hardware architectures including Windows NT where it was called Yellowbox. You could develop an App and the application bundle would include different binaries for each architecture. This is why Apple transitioned from IBM PowerPC to Intel so easily, they likely had Mac OS X running on Intel since day one. It's also the reason the same base code runs on their custom silicon ARM CPU's in iPhones, iPads, AppleTV's, etc. It will be the same when Apple decides to replace Intel with some next generation ARM designs. The NeXT acquisition is truly Apple's secret weapon. They were way way ahead of everyone else with amazing technology that is responsible for Apple's massive continued success.
10:10 I think the NeXTBus is NuBus. From Wikipedia: "NuBus was also selected by NeXT Computer for their line of machines, but used a different physical PCB layout. NuBus appears to have seen little use outside these roles, and when Apple switched to PCI in the mid 1990s, NuBus quickly disappeared." 27:57 And the IDE was called Project Builder. The early version of what became Xcode.
Indeed: "The NextBus is a superset of NuBus, which is defined by IEEE Standard 1196." cf. www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/Hardware/NeXTbus-NBIC/NeXTbus_Specification.pdf
I just had a spit take of my coffee because at 1m35s there is an asset inventory tag that says "Property of Integrity Solutions". That seriously brought me back... I used to work with them back in the 1996/1997 timeframe. They were one of a handful of NeXT developer shops in the United States, located in Eagan MN. We were developing a WebObjects app and I was on the project as one of the few Java developers in the Twin Cities area due to the fact that NeXT had just added Java as a dev language to WebObjects in addition to Objective-C. Lots of NeXT cubes in the office, although I was actually developing on an NT 4.0 Thinkpad and deploying to a Solaris Sparc server. I never used a Cube as a daily driver personally but damn... Love seeing that. Brought me back almost 30 years... Wow. I love that this machine is still out and about. :)
Retailed for $10,000 back in 1990. Safe to say this wasn’t in many homes. At least in my neighborhood. And if it was, it wasn’t heavily broadcasted. “Hey, I bought a NeXTcube.”
They were all in university/college computer labs and in professional settings. They were often more legendary than real, unless you were university age. Something to read about in a computer magazine. My friend joked about something he called "Steve Jobs's disease". Those who had it couldn't see any colour. That's why Jobs kept making black and white computers. I miss my Amigas.
Yeah; $10k, black and white display, and featured a CPU that was nothing more special than a 68040. Okay, the 040 was a great CPU for 1990 but I was expecting something more exotic.
....and far better from a music production perspective than anything Apple have ever produced. Even today it still pops up in the storerooms of some studios I visit and they will drag them out for mysterious midi stuff from time to time.
superstar64 HP still makes them currently at Gen.10 HP Microservers.The most desirable are the Gen. 8 Microserver with Intel Xeon . The newer Gen.10 models are gimped with less server features.
I was 9 years old when this thing came out. I'm so glad we have USB C/Thunderbolt 4 now. Those chunky cables of the old days definitely won't be missed. However, the idea of passing all data through one cable definitely had it's start there. At the time, my family had a Amiga Commodore 500 which was actually quite advanced for its time especially when compared to PCs. It also had great audio, color video and supported direct output to various types of monitors (like SCART which was a European style plug that greatly simplified connecting video equipment)
What a weird blend of modern and ancient. It looks like a lot of trendy PC cases being sold today, which is amazing compared to the usual clunky beige boxes of the time.
Even having soft power control was such an amazing experience. I remember around 1993-94 or so thinking being amazed that you didn’t have this big clicking hard power switch (intels ATX didn’t introduce the concept till 1995 and wasn’t widely in clones for ~2 years)
A lot of history with the Next system with Apple, Id Software programming Doom on it, and of course the first web browser by Tim Berners Lee. The operating system was ported to other CPU architectures too.
I used to have one in 1991. As software programmer, it was a fantastic operating system. By the way, the floppy disk supported special floppies with 2.88 Mega bytes storage, twice the 1.44MB standard at that time.
It's interesting that you have the black and white monitor. When I saw this at my university in 1991, it was hooked up to a color monitor. I remember that it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I'd already had an Amiga for many years, so I wasn't that easily impressed. This thing was so polished.
You could also be on the verge of using the alan wrench on a swiss army knife. I mean there is also a phillipshead screwdriver in there. Missing cabletweesers tho
Used these in CS classes (well, NeXTstations networked to cubes bas in university, A lab with 60+ NeXTstatsions lined up on desks was a sight to see in '91.
I remember going to the old bank building that was converted into a Next store in Palo Alto with my brother when I was first going to buy a computer. Unfortunately there was not any good graphics software for the Cube so I eventually went with a Mac IIsi.
Was in college at Allegheny College ('88 to '91) when the school bought a bunch of these. They required ENDLESS tech support to keep working, unlike the IBM PS2 computers the college was trying to replace. I ended up doing my Comp on an IBM because these were just too finicky.
Was a programmer (JOVIAL) in the mid 80's on the USAF AWACs. Used an IBM 360 I believe with the huge hard drives. In the simulator we had a Honeywell 4PI like the AWAC used. We had to learn to use punch cards in tech school but thankfully the 4 PI used those big magnetic tape reels. Remember when floppy was a big thing, had a room mate who splurged for the Commadore 64 which used the floppy.
normally I tune in to learn from you... this time I tuned in to a trip down memory lane! Thank you for that! Keep an eye for the aftermarket Box to Monitor extension cable, It made placement life so much easier LOL Ciao fer now.
Lovely machines. My first experience was in 1994 at the Fire Research Station at BRE, UK. It was being used to model how people/crowds would exit buildings that were on fire, all written by the person that showed me how it worked. A lovely guy whose name I've sadly forgotten.
Great video. Another fun fact, is the HTML markup language was ripped off from the text editor on the NeXT OS. If you do another video on it, it would be cool to see that.
The menu system was similar to IRIX which was also vertical instead of horizontal. Having it a movable item made constantly mousing to the top of the screen a non-issue. It's a pity OSX abandoned that when they did the Aqua Interface to placate Mac users.
Heh, when we were using OS9, we had a program called Kaleidoscope that let you set themes for your desktop. One was a Next imitator. Didn't use but we liked the folder icons better than the one for the theme we did use.
When I was a college, I ran into a guy in the Student Union who was from NeXT, who was there to promote and sell product. I had an Apple Quadra 650 and Duo Dock at the time but really wanted one of these. Our music department owned several NeXT workstations for music synthesis. We had a two story performance room with an octagonal sound system that the NeXT workstations powered. I heard sone trippy music. It was awesome. Btw, the 68040 was an awesome CPU, especially at 25 MHz, with the FPU.
i had one of those for a while, picked it up as it was headed for the dumpster. As I eventually figured it was kinda useless I got rid. This was in the early 2000s and a Pentium system handily outperformed it, It took aboit 5min to boot and was really loud. I had already left behind NextSTEP on my 486 for Linux years before. I actually found a museum that would take it off my hands. Oh and it's not just Black and White - it's got 2 bit grayscale!
Remember Steve's demo of the NeXT in Portland, Oregon (ORY-GUN). In this demo one of the host systems had an multibutton mouse/pointing device working with a CAD application. Number of systems I would like to own, and this is one of them. I worked for a regional Internet Service Provider at the birth of the public Internet and would love to own the device that gave birth to the Internet. One of our sister companies to our ISP was both a Cisco, and Sun Microsystems representative/dealer. At the start our host systems ran on Sun Solaris Unix OS on both Sun pizza box hosts, and Compac SysPro hosts with hardware raid. So many memories over the decades.
This was really cool to see. In the 1980's, IBM used an early E-mail called "The Tube". I was elementary school age and this concept amazed me. In '85 or so my dad brought home an IBM 5155 with C-DOS. That, my B/W dot matrix printer, and I made dozens of banners.
The NeXT cube was my first introduction to the internet. In late 80s/early 90s I used to go to the NeXT lab in the basement of the Math Sciences building at Purdue and make flyers for my band on the very expensive 300dpi laser printer. And while I did get to use the original WWW app, I spent many more hours browsing university FTP servers around the country, downloading Star Wars TIFFs and other useless stuff as the world wide web was very limited at that point. Going back to Windows and Macs afterwards felt like a major step backward.
Had one of those on my desk in 1994. Was pretty sweet for the time! But the chip density on this board is pretty typical of 1988-1990 boards. If you're going to take chances (and they certainly did!), you don't typically do it on the PCB! :D
This is the most in depth next cube video I’ve watched. This machine really is an exercise in perfection for the time. It’s really quite a beautiful machine. I’d kinda like to turn that both into a powerful nas
all of the look of Next and MacOS prior to, as well as OS X, was inspired by Xerox's Alto from 1979. Windows too. the look of the Mac Classic was also inspired by the Alto, which was designed for desktop publishing.
It was a groundbreaking machine and even more the software leapfrogged the industry. It was fully Object Oriented and Network centric from Day 1. (Which is why the WWW was developed on it.) The $10K price for the day was cheaper than most Workstation class machines. It was a great machine and yes targeting upper level education. No one had made a home consumer Workstation before. Workstations at that time were departmental assets.
I'm 55 this year, from Belgium. Back in the days (1991) I was working in Paris and I remember the first demo of NeXt cube on a Paris computer show. By the way I had a sinclair spectrum as first computer. I lived the rivalry between Jobs and Gates, so every history story wakes up many memories from that crazy time in my life. Back in that time , you had X-windows on Interactive or SCO with the then new revolutionary TCP/IP ethernet networks. NOvell servers. I still have a Toshiba T100LE portable. 1 MEGA internal memory , DOs 3.51, Blue LCD screen, 20 MB (MEGAbyte) Hard Drive. Still remember the "BLAST sliding window" protocol we tried to market to big tech companies. French chauvinism had pushed "Stutel" protocol as standard (nobody knows anymore about it, cause it sucked). I remembered to debug some RNIS (ISDN) modems for ArianeSpace, installing dialing batteries of 30 to 50 IBM PC's with shitty (due to French Telecom) french modems. Man, sweet memories. The nicest one was : we had to install comm's on IBM computers in 300 locations all over France (distribution warehouses). They ordered to their labor to present a "clean PC" (in every location there was compressed air). One young employee did not quite grasp the concept of electricity : hey cleaned the PC with the water hose. ... WHilst under tension, and we were the happy spectator of a beautifull show, lol. oh, sweet memories By the way , french ladies were top ! (still are)
I wanted one of these to replace my Amiga but that price was insane... I replicated the design with a PC running Linux and XFree86 in the early 90's. The display was by far the hardest to match due to its high resolution and refresh rate.
I have always been fascinated with NeXTcube's, Congratz! you have an amazing piece of tech history there that will probably function for decades longer than anything being put out now. I believe NeXT was the most innovative collection of technologies Steve Jobs ever created. nothing has really been as impressive since Next, OSX is pretty much Next risen from the dead in many ways. I had a few friends on IRC with NeXTcubes years ago, they managed to utilize Linux servers to act as a middle man to get allot of functionality out of it such as irc chat and web browsing. With the current state of the internet i fear it's almost impossible to do now aside from having resources on a local lan. I used the windowmaker and Afterstep window managers on Linux extensively for over a decade, both are heavily inspired from NeXTstep. I often wonder what the tech world would be like if NeXT wiped the floor with microsoft and eventually made more affordable machines for the masses.
he did not create it, he assembled a team which created it, but also do not forget NextOS sits on a top of technologies which existed at that time. I am not even sure if the entire UI is next only, I think it was a collaboration with Sun, but either way taking all those technologies (Mach, Objective C, BSD Optical drives etc...) and bring it into such a form factor was truly innovative, and do not forget the main selling point its ide which was sitting on top of the OO API of the user interface, that was world class and innovative everybody else started to copy when it came out.
"I feel special. I got an email from Steve." Since he'd already been dead for 8 years, you'd be more than special, you'd be the recipient of an email from the beyond.
I remember seeing one of these machines back in the 90s at the University of Washington's computer shop. It was one of the most interesting computers there at the store.
That neXTcube is fluid in today’s standards. Also a 68040 processor in 1990, that’s about 4 or 5 years ahead of Mac came out with 68040 processor. Awesome content.
Most of the cubes were 68030 and were slow as hell. All the NeXT hardware, which I used every day, was slow as hell. The lights didn't shine until HP+Sun hardware started running NeXTStep+Openstep. The Intel port was a disaster, initially.
@@jazzlover10000 Even the 68030 had very decent speed. An issue was the optical drive in the original NeXTcube. Later models received much faster hard drives, but the optical drive was a pain.
I think you should do a vid on Hypercard. Lots of interesting stuff sprung from that. And Apple was sooo close to a breakthrough with their hyperlinked stacks. If only they had thought to merge that concept with the internet.
@Agent J I think it come from a quote from Jesus where he says "Don't let people call you hot shit on a silver platter when as a human you are only a cold turd on a paper plate compared to God",
@Agent J My beliefs have nothing to do with the point I was trying to make.It's a philosophical view that no matter how good you are or how good people tell you are there is always someone, nature/God/universe can kick your ass.
The Nextcube had an option for a 3D-VFX and component YCbCr video recording board called NextDimension which had a very expensive and powerful video-coprocessor which if proper software was created and used, you could edit S-Video and 3-channel component video on a timeline much like what Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic Resolve AVID Media Pro do today! There was to be a duaghter C-Cube MPJEG encoder daughter board that was attached to create a timeline editor but that didn't actually ever ship. The main NextDimension board just has the 33 MHz Intel i860 RISC processor on it which was something no-one else had on a super-workstation! A lot of scientific research and petro-companies bought those NextDimenion boards with the NextCube just for the i860 chip! The NextDimension board was basically a graphics supercomputer all by itself and I remember seeing demos of this in Calgary, Canada at various Oil & Gas companies using the NextDimension and NextCubes for oil and gas reservoir and directional drilling modelling. It was actually MUCH CHEAPER TO BUY and MORE POWERFUL computation-wise than the Sun and Apollo super-workstations and VAX Minicomputers of the late 1980's and early 1990's! It had an i860 RISC processor on it which was basically a supercomputer-on-a-chip it was so powerful! I personally used a Nextstation, which was more of like a pizza box workstation, for graphics development but I have used the NextCube and NextDimension boards too! As a suggestion, ALSO LOOKUP, Play Inc.'s Trinity video editor cube which was FOUR TIMES THE SIZE and weight of the NextCube and was a powerful supercomputer all by itself in 1999. Of course look up the even older VideoToaster (v1 to v5) from 1990 onwards along with its parent Amiga 4000 computer! I used those in College for broadcast television courses! Another piece of computer history is the Leitch Velocity-HD with 3D-VFX card and connector box which is a MONUMENTAL moment in real-time video editing and graphics supercomputing! It is STILL today in 2022, an awesome and complete realtime video/auido editor software/hardware combination! Another set of older BUT POWERFUL computers to lookup and buy are the SGI (Silicon Graphics) Indigo, Indy, Octane and Onyx superworkstations which I have also used and even today are pretty cool to use! The very first Jurassic Park movies were 3D-animated on these SGI units from the Early 1990's to 2003+! If you can still find it, buy the 1600SW monitor which was still one of the BEST displays I have ever used! And for the KICKER, try and buy the old Intel 80386 processor-based IBM PS/2 Model-80 tower system running IBM OS/2 Warp-4 OS which I used even up until the mid-to-late-2010's for financial trading systems work and scientific spreadsheet modelling work because all the legacy software and those HUGE number of iterative self-expanding macros was just too expensive and esoteric to re-code/convert to a modern JAVA and C++ system until about 2018! V
$10,000 was actually not as expensive as one might think at the time. Apple's most expensive computer at the time was the IIFX which retailed WITHOUT a monitor and only 8 megabytes of ram for $9800 without a monitor or keyboard and IBM's personal workstation computer started at around $12,000 with a similar configuration as this NEXT system and don't get me started on Silicon Graphics computers, those things were several tens of the thousands. For what the NEXT cube did, it was actually somewhat of a bargain for the price it cost.
I used to use a Next Workstation, at work. It was used for “stop and repeat” software to create printing plates. We had the color version. (Yay) I would play Chess while working 3rd shift. Lol. It was “crazy fast” for the time.
Holy crap. I forgot about that. I used to use NeXTSTEP on Linux. I don't remember if it was a clone, a port to X Windows, or the actual GUI from NeXT itself. But it was beautiful, and I loved it as much as Gnome and KDE 2 back in the day.
OpenStep was/is an official port of NeXTStep for x86, and like half a dozen other processors, that was made available near the end of NeXT as a company. If they hadn’t been bought be Apple, it looked like NeXT had decided they didn’t need to make proprietary hardware but could give people a good enough product as just software. But I don’t remember if there was an official announcement to that effect. It’s because of the work done for OpenStep that macOS is so easy to port to other architectures-MacOS X ran on x86 right from the start, just not publicly released.
Interesting case design. Looks like you were able to have additional boards. What kind of boards would fit in there? They seem pretty large width. Kind of has a blend of a microcomputer and minicomputer going on. But yeah, given the component density and care taken for the aesthetics, I can see why it was 10 grand. I wonder how it compares to its contemporaries, like an SGI workstation?
Oh god. Memories. I was a young, hopeful idiot, fresh out of art school, starting my first own business. Blew all my money on a "NeXT station color". The laser printer alone was 5000$ (I was living in Switzerland at the time, maybe it was more affordable here). There was no useable page layout program yet, they were promising Quark X-Press, which never happened. I did all my design work on Illustrator. Good times.
I was a young, hopeful idiot, not yet fresh out of university, starting my first own business. Blew all my money on a NeXTstation (not color). Thought that would be the next big thing. Used Illustrator, which was already really god on the NeXT. WordPerfect...well, that liked to crash a lot, but was still a decade ahead of MS Word. Lotus Improv, an impressive tool for data analysis...the 1990 version still ahead of today's MS Excel. All went down when Steve Jobs decided to pull out. Came to work that fateful morning and all NeXTs were gone, company had done a fire sale right away when that announcement came. My own NeXTstation exploded, of course, with no spare parts available for anyone except the US government (I was living in Germany at that time). Yep, the usual power supply issue they had at that time. I actually was a "Registered NeXT Developer" - and, to save cost, NeXT slashed the "Registered NeXT Developer" program as well, except for a reduced version in North America (I was living in Germany at that time..ah, mentioned that already). Steve Jobs screwed me big time. Did I mention that the "next big thing" was the Newton? Went to an Apple shop one morning to buy a Mac (yep, you could only develop Newton software on a Mac at that time) and all the guys were, like, "Lol, Steve Jobs pulled the plug on the Newton, why bother?" (except they said it in German - I was living in Germany at that time). Steve Jobs screwed me big time. Except that all Apple products were at least twice as expensive for me than everywhere else (I think I already mentioned that, but I was living in Germany at that time). So, technically, Steve Jobs screwed me even bigger time all over the place. But let's get back to the fun: a few years ago, I learnt that Lotus Improv didn't die. Some company bought it, and continues to develop and market to this day (not under the Lotus name, of course, I think it's called "Quantrix" now, and obviously under MS Windows now, of course). Seems to be "the" tool for data analysis.
This computer looks like a work horse for the time. Not sure if it was talked about but I noticed 4 bays altogether that were motherboard size. Didn't see anymore ribbons but that power supply may be able to cover it. Wonder what those things could really do? Great video. Totally nerded out on it!
Power supplies of that era (well, possibly excluding cheap PC hardware) were often overengineered. Which doesn't mean much by today's standards, as power consumption was pretty low these days. You've seen the 68040's tiny passive heat sink. The NeXTcube PSU delivered up to 20W to each of the 4 slots. More power went onto the the monitor, so the PSU could deliver up to 300W in total.
It was - the factory was in Fremont CA. Tesla Motors is using the space now. Ross Perot the angel investor for NeXT was a stickler for having things made in the US.
Oh I hope the caps in that thing are okay.. given its age, and considering Amigas from the time are currently getting digested by leaked capacitors, I think it might be a good idea to get someone check those things out and replace them if needed.. before your motherboard traces rot away =/
The NeXTstations from 1990 have probably all died from exploding power supplies, most of them shortly after the warranty period. Power supplies came from Sony, and it seems that they went cheap on the capacitors. When the capacitor went, other components would follow, making it hard to repair, if at all. Of course, my NeXTstation died as well, also shortly after the warranty period, and also shortly after Steve Jobs discontinued the hardware. "Spare parts will still be available...for US government users only."
nice!!! and nostalgic....I am an old timer who recently, reluctantly "upgraded" to Win 10 (due to some hardware incompatibility issues which now is resolved). With that said, even to this date, NeXTSTEP was the best, stable OS I have ever used (on NeXT, of course, as the Intel version crashed all the time ;-). These were school workstations (as each workstation was more expensive than my car)....oh...also Sun SPARCs...... 🙂
The data sheet was interesting, especially how one could upgrade the dedicated SRAM for the Motorola 56K DSP. I don't recall that being an option on the later Atari Falcon030 which also featured that same Motorola DSP. That was one awesome chip both for audio and for what it can do as a fast co-processor for a 68030 or 68040.
Fun factoid about the wait cursor (beach ball). If you look at it you’ll notice it’s a rainbow colored disk like a CD. It’s actually a writable optical drive. The original NeXT Cube didn’t have a hard drive. You booted from the optical drive! They are kind of slow, so you had to wait for writes, and you saw the spinning rainbow disk showing you what’s going on! And we still have it. They switched to hard drives because of the speed problem. Steve’s ideas weren’t always practical. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Amiga's OS has those double arrows where the up and down are by one another (Some quick research shows that it started in their 1.4 beta and then 2.0 official). Actually, a whole lot of this looks a lot like the stuff that was on Amiga years before this, including multitasking. But I haven't done much research on PCs before the Amiga to know where it all showed up first. I'm pretty sure from the dates I can find though that Amiga started the up and down arrows being right by each other thing. I've had access to an Amiga that I messed around when bored various times because of both curiosity with gaming history and the insane amount of software that the person had. I'm told it was ahead of its time. It's been a while but now that I think on it, for that insane amount of software, 99% of it looked like it was pirated.
Interesting, there are monitors that include audio and power over the main data cable, Displayport only. Very few users (maybe other than Mac?) actually use this. Way ahead of its time.
For a good time, install GnuStep as your next Linux desktop environment. Lightening fast and in color. Me and a friend were in the software development business back in the day and I went to class at NeXT to get my official NeXT Developer certificate. One of my first projects was to port XBBS from Xenix/System5 over to BSD so that we could run a pirate BBS on my friend's cube. We had every commercial application for free download. Stanford University had an active NeXT Users Group and there were some very smart people that would show up for the meetings. But in the end, we lost our shirts like so many other developers. NeXT simply did not sell enough computers, or later enough software to run on Intel 386 machines. Then when Apple bought NeXT they stopped sales entirely and for several years there were no customers for developers.
I worked at an government agency in which the procurer person was an Apple fanboy and he equipped the agency with NeXT junk. It had a proprietary operating system that was incompatible with everything. You were limited with applications and the ones they had were hard to use.
