"Steve Jobs' New Machine for the '90s: the NeXT Computer" (BYTE magazine)

"Steve Jobs' New Machine for the '90s: the NeXT Computer" (BYTE magazine)(simson.net)

45 points by A_A 15 years ago | 35 comments

Fun Facts about the original Cube:

* A single cable connects the Cube to its monitor (with speakers and microphone). A single cable connects the monitor to the keyboard. And a single cable connects the keyboard to the mouse.

* Neither the Cube nor its monitor have any buttons, switches, or controls. The only way to turn the machine on is by pressing the Power key on the keyboard (which is connected to the monitor). It's basically a giant laptop split into 4 parts.

* Likewise, there's no way to turn the monitor off while the system is running. However, the OS will automatically lower its brightness after a period of inactivity.

* Startup takes a long time. Pressing the power key while the system is booting up will interrupt the boot sequence and begin the shutdown sequence.

* The keyboard has no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is engaged by pressing Command+Shift which will light up matching LEDs on both Shift keys. The Control key is where it's meant to be, next to the "A".

* The keyboard has no row of function keys. The Escape key is located next to the "1" key, where the tilde would be. But if you press Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde character, you will still get a tilde character.

* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.

jcl 15 years ago | |

The Cube also burns pretty well, once you get it going.

http://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

eru 15 years ago | | |

I thought this was trolling, but it's actually a good read.

erikstarck 15 years ago | |

The caps lock key just has to be the most useless waste of space on a standard qwerty keyboard. I don't think I have ever used it unless you count the times when you accidentally PRESS IT. Woops.

pmjordan 15 years ago | | |

You can easily remap it to another modifier key on OSX in the system preferences. Other OSes/Windowing systems typically require a modified keyboard layout, but you might be able to find software to do it easily.

ethyreal 15 years ago | | |

Every keyboard in my office has had it completey removed! For that very reason.

jonhendry 15 years ago | |

The NeXT printer also had no power buttons or other controls. It was driven entirely by the computer, powering up when needed.

I always liked the voice alerts for printer issues. Recorded people speaking various messages. For English, it was a woman with a British accent saying things like "Your printer is out of paper." Other languages each had their own set of recordings.

iwr 15 years ago | |

You could sort of get a keyboard with an included USB hub and connect a mouse to it. Or better, get a monitor with a USB hub and just connect your peripherals to the monitor. If you want to go overboard, you can even get speakers and a network card that connect through USB.

But sadly, with Intel torpedoing USB3, our dream of a one-cable computer is still far.

jonhendry 15 years ago | | |

The NeXT monitor cable also provided power for the monitor.

Apple tried this all-in-one approach again with their ADC connector for the early LCD cinema displays. That carried USB, DVI video, and power for the monitor.

The problem is, it's a hassle if you want to use the monitor with a non-ADC video card or a non-ADC monitor with an ADC video card. You end up buying expensive adapter bricks so you can plug an ADC monitor into a computer with DVI-out.

Interestingly, Apple's latest 24" and now 27" LCD goes the other way: it provides a magsafe power cord for a macbook. You still have separate USB and mini-DVI connectors, though, so it isn't a one-plug affair.

A_A 15 years ago |

Consider the innovations at that time (c 1988/89)

"It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax, and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power."

Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"

Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8 MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)

spitfire 15 years ago | |

The funny thing is, I regularly used my NeXTstation turbo right up until 2002. It still felt fast with 128meg ram+fast hard drive. Coupled with the NeXTlaser I was able to keep up with modern life. I had Mathematica, pagemaker, openwrite, email, omniweb, etc.

In fact, even today you could use it as a usable desktop. I still find it amazing that we've gone from 8meg to 8192meg ram and two orders of magnitude cpu power but we've done very little with it. We've moved video decoding onto the main cpu, offloaded graphics to a specialized chip and that's about it. (Note: Next's shipped with a DSP similar to gpgpu today.)

Now I sort of want to buy a nextstation again and see if I can live a month just on that.

EDIT: I should note that there's STILL no replacement for Quantrix and Lotus Improv. They are miles away better than excel/traditional spreadsheets. If someone cloned quantrix for OSX I'd buy it.

fractallyte 15 years ago | | |

Huh?? Quantrix is still around, and there's an OSX version available - I know, because I have it!

glhaynes 15 years ago | |

Though they don't tend to get mentioned, I'd throw .app bundles into that list, too. The idea of moving an entire double-clickable app around as a single opaque icon (but that can be easily drilled into without special binary-parsing tools) has always appealed to me.

And couple it with fat/universal binaries, and you've really got something special. As someone who just installed their first instance of Windows x64, the difference between that world of having both "Internet Explorer" and "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" icons and a world where a complete system image from a 32-bit PowerPC can be booted seamlessly (with all apps still working) on a 64-bit Intel processor is stark indeed.

mambodog 15 years ago |

If this stuff is of interest to you, here's Steve giving a half-hour demonstration of NeXTSTEP 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A

citizenkeys 15 years ago | |

damn... you beat me to it. That video never gets old. Steve actually explaining some technical details and not just being cool.

mambodog 15 years ago | | |

It also shows he obviously had somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with the "Stencil" typeface :)

jasongullickson 15 years ago |

Funny that most of you are holding that code in your hand...

jbrennan 15 years ago | |

For those not in the know, he's referring to iOS, which is modified Mac OS X which is modified NeXTSTEP. It's truly wonderful this OS lives on.

A_A 15 years ago | |

Indeed. What struck me as I was ogling at the Macbook Air 11" in an Apple store in my neighborhood was how Steve Jobs still holds true to his artist vision of a beautiful product - one that is both externally (visually, viscerally) and internally (experience-wise) a joy to use.

RexRollman 15 years ago |

In 1996, I bought a used TurboSlab from a company called Spherical Solutions, which was run by a man named Sam Goldberger (IIRC). I loved that machine and the Nextstep 3.3 install media that came with it even had x86 binaries, so I was able to install it on the PC I owned at the time (a Micron Millenia with a 200mhz Pentium Pro). I would have upgraded it to Openstep 4 but Next wanted something like $900.00 for it.

I loved Nextstep and I still prefer it to Mac OS X, even though the latter has became something far prettier. I really should see if I can run it via emulation, like I can with BeOS, another favorite OS of mine.

redacted 15 years ago | |

It is definitely possible to run Openstep in VMware, I used to do it. Not everything works, but it is very cool to see all the parts of that OS that made it into OS X.

edit: here's a helpful blog post by one of the VMware guys: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek-ou.h...

RexRollman 15 years ago | | |

Thanks!

yardie 15 years ago |

This article makes me reminisce about the Color Turboslab I had in uni. Functionally, it was limited because I didn't have much software I could run on it but the layout and design was pure genius. I had this, a few sparcstations, an indigo and an Alpha. All acquired at university auctions.

I eventually had to put them out when I graduated. My car wasn't going to hold all the stuff I had acquired and something had to give.

raffi 15 years ago |

These are amazing machines. I have a Cube and a Colorstation stashed at my father's house. I picked them up on the cheap in the early 00's. The desktop felt completely modern but it was lacking modern applications. CubX remedied this though. I had a laptop with a broken screen that I put Linux on. I then ran netscape (who remembers netscape?) and other applications via an exported X session. Good times.

jonhendry 15 years ago |

Incidentally, I just contacted ColorWare to suggest that they offer "NeXT Black", the paint used on the Cube, as an option. I found the paint specification online in an old NeXT document for developers of NeXTBus expansion cards for the Cube.

(http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&...)

Yes, 3rd party hardware developers were expected to make sure the card-end panel face matched the cube's color, rather than being unsightly bare steel.

aspir 15 years ago |

Did anyone else first read "8 Gigabytes of RAM" before doing a double take?

Moore's law is a powerful force indeed

drats 15 years ago | |

Indeed. 25 megahertz and 8 megabytes of RAM for $6500 ($11.5k in today's dollars). And a machine with 2.5 gigahertz and 8 giabytes of RAM can be had for under $1000 today; as much storage as the NeXT harddrive can be found on a $10 usb key. 1000 times more powerful, 1/10th of the price in two decades. We live in an incredible age, people too often forget.

It's these machines which indirectly enable so much as well. People like to talk about the cloud a lot, but video that gets uploaded to YouTube has to be edited somewhere. Now while it's true that YouTube has a flash based editor now, they didn't before they got big. And there is all the other video, HD quality, out there that needs to be edited on beefy machines: 3D modelling, games, music et cetera.

FiddlerClamp 15 years ago |

Beautiful machine - like the Mac Cube. I wonder if the experience with NeXT, though, helped shape Jobs' ideas about pricing, interoperability, and backwards compatibility when he returned to Apple.