My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it.<p>It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.
UnixWorld asked on it's April 1993 cover: "Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?"<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210</a><p>One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out in '89 or '90.<p>I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox.<p>NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats.<p>I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of NeXTstep.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mrbill.net/next/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mrbill.net/next/</a>
If you've read the <i>Steve Jobs</i> biography (or biopic), you might recall Guy Kawasaki's accidentally-prescient spoof Apple press release[1] from 1994 about a (at the time) hypothetical Apple-NeXT acquisition. Choice quote:<p>> As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of the four personal computer standards (Apple II, Macintosh, and Windows).<p>1: <a href="https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-about-steves-r" rel="nofollow">https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-ab...</a>
I can imagine a distorted future reality where the natural progression of WebObjects was based on early successes with NeXT's OOP stuff with AT&T and Chrysler.<p>While iTunes, the App Store and the whole "Digital Life" stem from a Web-based Minivan Configurator, looking back at WebObjects as a product to enable that for others seems so contrary to what Apple is today.<p>That Old World of Software Product SKUs has been turned on its head to great effect, and I think it really is better this way.
OSX is one of Steve Jobs' least-discussed successes.<p>The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.
NeXTWorld Magazine in the early 90s was my favorite publication. Every issue showcased apps with elegant and surprising capabilities, like the first spreadsheet with pivotable rows and columns. John Carmack wrote Doom on NeXT, and claimed that NeXTStep made development ten times faster. Other developers agreed. People were excited about programming on NeXT, and not because of any reality distortion field. Reading NeXTWorld felt like seeing into the future! (Here's an archive, rather incomplete: <a href="https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/" rel="nofollow">https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/</a> The pdf scans convey more of the joi de vivre surrounding NeXT than the plain text files.)
Interesting parallel that both Jobs and Jean-Louis Gassée started hardware computers after Apple and that each retreated to operating systems, which they tried to sell to Apple.
The article in general is pretty good, but this is off:<p>> The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95.<p>I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.