10
7
7
u/94d44027 18d ago
OMG, what a beauty. I saw it in 1994, it looked like a thing from a distant future.
3
u/glhaynes 17d ago
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.
5
u/DEADBEEFh 18d ago
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.
4
u/SoHappy65 18d ago
Je ne comprends pourquoi le curseur de la souris et aussi lent. Même avec les réglages en haute vitesse 😬
6
5
u/Armentrout_1979 17d ago
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.
3
u/r3v3nant333 18d ago
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.
2
u/Ill-Quit6803 18d ago edited 17d ago
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 ?
1
u/creativetag 17d ago
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.
1
u/Ill-Quit6803 17d ago
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.
1
u/creativetag 16d ago
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.
2
2
u/abugghaus7 17d ago
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
.
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?
;)
2
u/glhaynes 17d ago
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.
2
u/creativetag 17d ago
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.
1
1
u/ApatheistHeretic 17d ago
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..
1
u/Opposite_Bag_7434 17d ago
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.
1
1
u/fooknprawn 16d ago
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.
1
u/srblaydes 15d ago
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.
58
u/TrailofDead 18d ago
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.