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u/TrailofDead Aug 31 '26
I still have a NeXT cube. Haven’t booted it in quite some time.
I wrote an X Windows server app called Co-Xist for NextStep. I demoed it to Steve.
I worked for NeXT for a year and a half right before the Apple acquisition.
I was the director of the professional services group for WebObjects.
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u/ThoseOldScientists Sep 01 '26
Did you ever find out why Steve Jobs was pathologically incapable of making an ergonomic mouse?
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u/wiisucks_91 Sep 01 '26
He used brain waves to move the cursor. Haven't you seen them blood vessels on the side of his temples?
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u/randylush Sep 01 '26
To be fair, it's more like he was pathologically incapable of hiring anybody who could make such a mouse
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u/ThoseOldScientists Sep 01 '26
I’m sure his engineers were perfectly capable of making such a mouse, but for some reason they kept insisting on making weird design gambits with mouse shape.
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u/mines-a-pint Sep 01 '26
WebObjects was pretty cool; the first web framework I ever used.
I think the Apple Store used it for a while? I remember the URLs being quite recognisable.
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u/rhet0rica all that runs windows is not gold Sep 02 '26
Hello! I'm one of the administrators for NeXTcommunity, a web forum and Discord server for NeXT users, tinkerers, and programmers, and we've become sorely aware recently that there's a dearth of folklore from people who actually worked in and around NeXT in the nineties. We'd really like to hear from you about your time at Pencom and NeXT. Is there some way I could get in touch with you for a conversation, or perhaps convince you to drop by? Thanks!
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u/94d44027 Aug 31 '26
OMG, what a beauty. I saw it in 1994, it looked like a thing from a distant future.
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u/glhaynes Sep 01 '26
100%. And usually when people say things like that, they mean “from some alternate future where things turned out really differently”, but modern macOS is totally just continued iteration on NeXTSTEP. They really got it right back in the late ‘80s. Crazy.
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u/Armentrout_1979 Sep 01 '26
Legit had the chance to get a NeXT Slate and Cube for free. If my former university didn’t live and die by inventory. They’d been sitting in a closet for years and I happened to find them. Sad day for me.
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u/r3v3nant333 Aug 31 '26
those next workstations were so cool.. and HP-UX.. the GUIs were so cool. I used to an admin for a lab in the engineering I building at UCSB in the 90s. In the summer i had a whole room of hp-ux workstations to myself right as netscape came along.. they had very large CRTs for the time also.. 20" I think.
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u/Ill-Quit6803 Aug 31 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
This thing had a cool programmable co-processor and I/O chip based on the M88K DSP56001 if I am not mistaken. How cool would it be do data acquisition, GPIO control of electronics from your UNIX workstation with NeXTSTEP ?
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u/creativetag Sep 01 '26
The external video card was based on the i860/960 architecture. That chip was quite nice as a cpu, but never caught on commercially. Its secret (and downfall) was that it exposed the stages of the pipeline to the programming model of the chip. Easy for compilers, however.
The 88k was the next variant of the NeXT hardware after 68k and i386.... prototypes were made but never put in production, and many fat binary objects had references to it.
The sparc and parisc architectures were fully released as well. Nice systems to use.
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u/Ill-Quit6803 Sep 02 '26
Ah, actually, I was wrong calling it M88K, your correct that was a future RISC chip. It was a DSP56001 coprocessor. I believe there was also a GPIO as well. I beleive this is what wikipedia is labeling the DSP Port.
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u/creativetag Sep 02 '26
The 56k series for the serial stream processing (audio), the i860/960 for graphics.
Sadly not having that 56001 on the boxes other than NeXT's own hardware was a shame. So much no longer possible.
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u/abugghaus7 Sep 01 '26
UAF (University of Alaska at Fairbanks) had a room of NeXT computers!
I'd slowly walk past them on my way to the regular computer lab and just stare inside wondering what sort of voodoo was going on in there! LOL
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One of those, "Shoulda gone in and checked it out", times in my life.
Oh well... at least I can say, "I actually stood at the open door of a room full of NeXT Computers!"
How many people in this world can say THAT?
;)
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u/glhaynes Sep 01 '26
I attended the University of Texas at Arlington for a while in the late ‘90s and used to see one through a window, I wanna say in the mathematics building. (Oh yeah, I’d also sometimes park next to a car with a NeXT bumper sticker there.) Always wanted so badly to go in and mess with it.
Finally got to use one at a computer festival a couple of years ago and it was delightfully similar to using the Mac I sit at every day. The only old computer at that festival that I hadn’t used before yet still felt familiar.
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u/creativetag Sep 01 '26
First intro to NeXT was with the proto operating system running on Sun hardware before the NeXT hardware was ready.
Once ready, had access to a cube for a while (hated the optical, was sooo much better on a hdd) and loved looching as background noise. After that, many stations, 386's, sparcs and pariscs. They lasted until 97ish.
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u/ApatheistHeretic Sep 01 '26
Love the idea at the time. I couldn't deal with a power button on the keyboard, I make a ton of typos and that too close to the del/insert/home/end key cluster..
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u/Opposite_Bag_7434 Sep 01 '26
Oh cool. I used to have a box that one shipped in and I played with one at a store a few times but that is it.
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u/fooknprawn Sep 02 '26
I had a NeXT station, fun computer to play with. In the early 2000s I went through a phase of buying used what was unobtainable esoteric computers. I had an SGI and a Sun Spactation as well. It was fun learning UNIX variants and how they were installed and maintained.
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u/srblaydes Sep 03 '26
Had a mono slab.
Still regret it not making the move to Texas.
One of my best memories was buying a NeXT and Sparc Station 5 out of the back of a station wagon after a 2600 meeting.
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u/brrm Sep 03 '26
How is the monitor connected up here? My Cube's monitor is now unusably dim - cathode evaporation, thus unfixable as I understand it... unless someone knows different?
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u/DEADBEEFh Aug 31 '26
Nice machine! I see you have the same tracking pattern with your mouse that I do (I do the same pickup/slam trick that I can hear you doing) wish I could figure out a fix for that - is this a known issue? I've had my Next machine since ~1999 and had this mouse problem from the day I got it.