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

Fun Facts about the original Cube:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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".<p>* 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.<p>* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.

Consider the innovations at that time (c 1988/89)<p>"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."<p>Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"<p>Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8 MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)

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

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

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>(<a href="http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&#38;start=0&#38;postdays=0&#38;postorder=asc&#38;highlight=&#38;sid=62ead926ef12dc8217c7c736a256980e" rel="nofollow">http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&#38;...</a>)<p>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.

Did anyone else first read "8 Gigabytes of RAM" before doing a double take?<p>Moore's law is a powerful force indeed

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.