“NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 – 1990. Back then it was a very expensive machine as a complete system would start at $6500 (in 1988 dollars). The machine is a 1 foot cube magnesium case that houses the computer. At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the “Ferrari” of desktop systems!” No new information for the average OSAlert reader, but lots of beautiful photos for a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
Thanks for posting this. That guy did a very good restoration job.
Yeah this is the kind of stuff that is nice to see here on the weekends…maybe that should be a weekly thing? Every Saturday have another “Portrait of a PC from the Past” for us to drool over.
Boy back in the day the NeXT cube and the SGI workstations were the dream rigs you could never afford, sleek, powerful, crazy expensive but like a McLaren F1 built from the ground up to blow everything else away in second gear, man those were some nice units…sigh.
Am i the only one who misses having all those choices when it comes to hardware?
I have owned both NeXTstation Turbos and a NeXTcube. Beautiful machines with an great operating system. Today I miss NeXTstep’s elegant design asthetics. It has gone downhill ever since, and now 20 years later we have to contend ourselves with the atrocity called “Windows 8”
Edited 2013-05-04 10:50 UTC
Why does every thread have to descend into “why I hate Windows 8?” I don’t like it, which is why I don’t use it. But that’s just me. You don’t like it either? Don’t use it.
This is really starting to get old.
Somebodies just want flame-wars everywhere.
They don’t pay for it.
They don’t use it.
They aren’t affected by it.
They still have their own freedom to choose what they want.
But they still yelling at it and try to restrict the others’ freedom to pay for it/ use it. (Of course, they can’t do it physically, so they do it verbally, spreading wrong/ outdated information.)
Don’t like it? Yeah, then don’t talk about it and ignore it as if it doesn’t exist.
I think this kind of culture becomes popular since Apple’s “PC vs Mac” advertisements. I think this just spreads hate everywhere and brings negative impact on people mind.
Yes it is off-topic but those flame-wars are polluting the discussion environment.
Nah, it was just like that since the begining of home computing.
ZX Spectrum vs C64 vs Apple II vs Sam Coup~A(c) vs ….
Nintendo vs Atari vs Sega vs …
Atari ST vs Amiga vs PC vs Mac vs …
People seem to want to be assured they are on the right side.
Nowadays I don’t care any longer as long as I can do my work.
It just like that since the begining of… forever!
And it’s not limited to home computing, far from it.
And it will not stop until humankind’s end.
Get over it.
As one can ask to not use W8 instead of whining about it, one can ask to not listen to people whining about W8 instead of whining about people whining about W8…
People are free to whim.
They’re also free to listen it or not.
And the most long-lasting and holiest of holy wars: Vi vs Emacs!
Also, some of your examples are generally about the grander Commodore vs Atari holy war :p
I’ve been exclusively a Linux user for over ten years now and switched because of Microsoft’s corporate policies and anti-competitive practices. Don’t try to say with a straight face that Windows 8 doesn’t affect those who don’t use nor want it.
All new PC shipping with Windows 8 have UEFI and secureboot enabled by default. Different providers locate the secure boot kill-switch, if there is one, in different places and under different names in the scarily complex and dangerous UEFI control panel. Disabling secureboot cannot be done from within the operating system. Some OEM’s try to obscure the killswitch so that some users can’t find it. For example, on ASUS laptops it is not called ‘Secure Boot’ at all, but ‘Legacy Mode’, giving the impression that you are using something outdated and insecure. This arduous process makes it either difficult (or impossible in some cases) to install another OS. Those alternative OSs that have managed to install on these systems do so with custom bootloaders and either self-made or other special keys signed by Microsoft. How Microsoft got away with this from a legal standpoint is ridiculous.
Thankfully I can build my own systems so I can choose fully featured motherboards and avoid the hassle of secureboot myself. Unfortunately recent Linux converts, perhaps those who are trying to escape Windows 8, may not have the skills to bypass secureboot or the machine might be hindered in such a way that it can’t be turned off at all. This is how Windows 8 is affecting people who otherwise wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole and this is why those people lash out and bash Windows 8 every single chance they get!
If someone is going to install and manage an operating systems on his own, he should have enough knowledge and spend enough time to read the hardware and software manual. If they do spend time to read the manual and they should know that there is a switch to disable Secure Boot.
If someone is just trying to install an operating systems or even a piece of software without knowing why he want to do it and how to do it in proper way, he shouldn’t do it at first.
Edited 2013-05-04 18:40 UTC
Your comment makes absolutely no sense. Why would people switch to Linux to avoid Windows 8? It’s not like somebody’s pointing a gun to their head and forcing them to upgrade. Windows 8 is not going to magically appear on your system while you sleep. If you don’t want to run Windows 8, then don’t install it. By the time your current Windows apps stop working, we’ll probably be at Windows 11. I would imagine anyone wanting to get out of the Windows ecosystem (who aren’t Freetards or server admins) would switch to OSX anyway.
It’s funny that the only people I hear bitching about secureboot are the ones that a) want to work around it and b) already know how to. Nobody else seems to give a damn, except for the people that it doesn’t affect.
Edited 2013-05-05 00:18 UTC
I’m typing this on a new desktop that I bought ten days ago. It came with Windows 8 (64 bit) pre-installed. It doesnt’ have secure boot.
Whether or not it was enabled by default is largely a non-issue for me since I run Linux within a VM anyway, but to claim that it’s enabled by default on all x86-64 machines is patently false.
What make and model? I’m planning to buy a new machine in the next month or so.
I cannot speak to your specific desktop because you didn’t mention the model or OEM. But, with the release of Windows 8 in October 2012, Microsoft’s certification requirements now require that computers include firmware that implements the UEFI specification. Furthermore, if the computer supports the “Connected Standby” feature of Windows 8, then the firmware is not permitted to contain a Compatibility Support Module (CSM). As such, systems that support Connected Standby are incapable of booting Legacy BIOS operating systems. Microsoft also requires that new computers certified to run its Windows 8 operating system ship with secure boot enabled using a Microsoft private key. Those are the facts my friend.
You mean those people who need to buy a new computer and their only choice is Windows 8 are somehow not paying for it? How the hell did you come to that conclusion? I would say that at least a part of them–their bank account–was unnecessarily affected by it.
Unfortunately after the fact, in most cases.
It honestly sounds like you’re talking about Microsoft and Secure Boot there… only they *can* and *are* attempting to lock other operating systems out physically (or virtually), not verbally.
In case you don’t know, Dell offers laptops with Linux pre-installed. You can also consider Chromebook.
So I think you need to re-think your arguments.
Are you kidding? When asked about Ubuntu, Dell’s “tech support representative” had no clue what we were talking about. They were, or at least acted, completely clueless. I eventually just gave up because at the time the computer wasn’t going to be mine anyway, but also their site was extremely cryptic on Ubuntu, prominently advertising Windows every chance they got.
That was a while ago, sometime in 2006 back when they first started supposedly pre-loading Ubuntu, but every couple years I hear similar things. And I believe it, because I went through the same shit myself and Dell is as far down in Microsoft’s pants as they can get (like most of the major OEMs).
After that experience, needless to say I don’t plan on ever getting another Dell, and once I get a new machine this one’s going back to my mom. To get a decent base system, you pretty much have to choose Windows; their FreeDOS and Ubuntu models were crap when we got this machine, crap last few times I checked over the years, and are most likely crap now.
The next machine I’m considering will probably be from system76, although they are Ubuntu-exclusive and I no longer have any desire to use Ubuntu and would prefer not to fuel Canonical. But oh well, it’s better than paying Microsoft for yet another Windows license. It’ll just be wiped anyway, so nothing new there… some things never change.
Or you can pay a license to Apple, or in the old days a license to Commodore, a license to Atari, a license to Acorn, or whoever the vendor is.
I remember the days when the OS and Hardware platform were meant to be sold as one, which I quite liked.
The last time I wanted to get a Linux system, I just bought a Asus netbook with Linux pre-installed, as they are sold via Amazon here in Germany from time to time.
Who is kidding and why kidding? If Dell isn’t doing their job well, it is their problem, how come Microsoft is responsible for that? Do people nowadays blame Microsoft whatever is related to “poor” PC experiences?
As mentioned by another person, you can consider Mac from Apple, you DO have choices. I haven’t tried it myself but there was a software called rEFIt for booting OSes on Intel Macs, which may be suitable for Mac/ Linux dual systems.
But see, that’s the thing. Dell is doing their job damn well. Their job, as a Microsoft partner, is to advertise the living shit out of Windows and to try to get people on it, no matter what. It’s no surprise why Ubuntu machines were always hard to find on their site, and why even on those very pages they still recommended Windows. That’s just how far out Microsoft’s reach is, and yet it was already claimed that somehow, supposedly “no one” is affected by Windows. Sorry, but no.
They indeed managed to sell another Windows license from us because we gave up, but never again.
Buy a Mac? I’d rather start a fire and roll around in it than buy anything from Apple. At one point I may have considered their products… possibly. Years ago. Back when Mac OS X was still new and a pretty decent alternative to XP. Now, I see them and their business practices as virtually the same as Microsoft (especially in the 1990s), only they have traditionally been worse with vendor lock-in, DRM, and walled gardens. There is no way in hell I will support such a company. Never mind all the lawsuits.
These are some of the reasons I left Windows in the first place, and there’s no way I’d switch to a company that does them all (and more) but to a far more extreme level than even Microsoft. I’ll pass on the iDictator.
Edited 2013-05-05 18:23 UTC
Unless you can provide a clear evidence that Microsoft pay Dell to advertise Windows machines on Dell’s website, I think what Dell doing is simply marketing what they want to sell. If Dell doesn’t want you (i.e. customers) touch Linux, then they won’t sell Linux machines from the beginning.
Also, have you considered Chromebook? IIRC it is just running Linux with modifications made by Google (well, *everyone* loves Google, right?).
Well, people tend to reflect on disappointments in the light of better accomplishments…and NeXTstep was/is a huge milestone.
Critizing something isn’t descending into hatred. Badly made products should be subjected to critique – often and repeatedly – until they are improved or replaced.
It is not simply a question of “using” or “not using” a product, you ignorant fcuk. It is a comment on the lack of GUI progress the past 20 years.
If you do not like reading opinionated comments, well then stop reading them!
That being said, I am really and truly tired of people using the phrase “This is starting to get old”.
Edited 2013-05-04 15:12 UTC
“This is starting to get old” is really & truly starting to get old.
Progress is a matter of opinion. I for one, adore GNOME 3. I suspect you see that as a step in the wrong direction. I’m also quite fond of the recent trend toward tiling window managers. That’s my opinion. One could, in principle, engage in civil discourse. Disagreeing with you does not make one an ‘ignorant fcuk.’ I know it’s the Internet, but that’s a poor excuse for abandoning respect and cool-headedness.
My blunt retort was meant as a sarcastic example of decending into hatred. Nothing more.
My impression of your statement was not that of disagreement, but of complacency and tacit acceptance. Values that I do not hold in high regard.
However, even if progress is a matter of opinion and reality is a matter of perception etc. I think that we can both agree that progress can only be influenced through the expression of opinion and engaging in civil discourse.
One’s choice of desktop environments on Linux and FreeBSD are not limited in the same way as with Microsoft.
Check out “Windows 8: The Animated Evaluation” by Brian Boyko, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
I fail to see the difference with offerings from any other commercial vendor since the dawn of computing.
Well, take Microsoft itself in its early days. On early versions of Windows, the graphical shell could be replaced and some OEMs shipped Windows with a very desktop environment. Back in the days of Win 3.1, Compaq used to ship their high-end multimedia-oriented PCs with Xerox’s TabWorks as the default shell rather than progman.exe. I think they even did this for a while on Win 95. Microsoft ultimately changed the OEM license to stop PCs from being shipped with anything other than the standard GUI.
Yeah, but most users replaced it back to the default, because some programs had issues due to DLL conflicts.
And in the other platforms at the time you had the OS in ROM so you could hardly change anything.
The few alternative environments were nothing more than gimmicks patching the live execution of the OS due to lack of memory protection.
I get the feeling it was quite a bit more than that. I’m no prude, and I’ve been known to throw around some language here in a heated discussion, but your “blunt retort” was quite jarring even for me.
I can see merit in both sides of your discussion, but to descend that quickly into name calling and f-bombing is pretty telling about your state of mind. Chill, dude.
Your poor manner shows why those “PC vs Mac” advertisements have negative impact on people. If you disagree with me, show us your points, instead of swear at me.
Whether GUI itself has improved in last 20 years or not, I don’t know, but I think we can’t limit GUI design for mouse + keyboard only as nowadays more touch-based and motion-based input are being used.
Sure that user can use Flubox/ GNOME/ KDE/ IceWM with mouse + keyboard perfectly, but how about touch-based input? I think the start screen and Windows Store apps are just trying to serve users who are using touch-based input, BUT at the same time the desktop remains here. Just click into the desktop in Windows 8 and I can still use my keyboard and mouse to do my work, it is not hard.
I don’t understand why people only focus on and restrict themselves in the start screen. Consider that start screen is a larger start menu, do you open start menu and make it stay on screen all the time? I don’t do it because I just open start menu, type program name, press Enter and work with the program, the start menu is hidden. This is the same for start screen.
Some say that they’re force to look at the start screen every time they switch on the computer, but ask yourself: What do you do when you see the desktop at first? I for myself would open start menu and launch a program. Here is the point: I can pin the program on start screen, and click on it right after login without looking at my desktop.
Yeah there is a learning curve, but so do for people switching among OSes. They need to find the tools they used to use on previous OS, they need to adapt to the look and feel.
Silly people thinking their computers should adapt to them and not the other way around, amirite?
I don’t know what do you mean, but with higher demand of touch-based input, Modern UI does have its purpose. Yet, people still want to use mouse + keyboard, Windows 8 still provides desktop and let users to run applications as if they do on previous versions on Windows. The OS is adapting the needs of users, I think.
Touch based input makes sense on form factors where touch based input is comfortable.
Mouse and keyboard makes sense on other form factors.
The UI Formally Known As Metro is probably a fine touch interface, but putting it on a UI where touch input doesn’t make the slightest sense is just…well, senseless.
The same criticism can go to Unity and a lesser extent to Gnome 3, too.
What about Unity is so much touch? It’s more keyboard & widescreen optimised.
Why are we stuck with Windows 8? Still several systems to choose from, including Mac OS X which is as close to a direct descendant of NextStep as you’ll find. If I have to content myself with Windows 8, then this OS X desktop I have here in front of me and which I’m using to write this must be an illusion.
Ain’t floptical drives (21 MB) in it ? I believed Fujitsu’s MO drives (128 MB, 230 MB, 540 and 640 3″1/2 drives) to arrive later.
Anyway, almost the same techspec were used for the 1992 Atari Falcon030 (68030 @ 16 MHz on 16 bits bus, optional FPU but integrated DSP 56001 @ 32 MHz) but with little success due to even more little support.
Kochise
well NeXT had faster processor, better graphics… but Falcon cost only 1500$ at end of 1992. It was great and cheap Audio workstation computer
(and it also had unix-like environment!)
Yeah, unix…”-LIKE”
MultiTOS was sluggish as Hell on the 16 MHz 68030, the PMMU was underused which ensured regular memory corruption by applications that never followed strict rules regarding multitasking.
The ATW-800 Transputer computer ran HeliOS, a more Unix-like system though :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS
http://www.michaelp.org/transputer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation
http://www.transputer.net/hbooks/hbooks.asp
Kochise
It’s what a UNIX workstation should look like.
My final project at the university was to convert my supervisor’s thesis from Objective-C/Renderman to C++/DirectX as they considered the NeXT a dead end.
He had a couple of cubes on his office, sadly all piled up on a corner.
I used one back in ~87 at the University of Houston. The engineering department had a half dozen of them for circuit simulation.
You know, the first sentence of this news post talks about how they were made from 88 ;p
I miss my NeXTs
I worked for a company where everyone from the CEO to the receptionist had a NeXT workstation. I personally owned a color turbo slab.
Those keyboards were the best I’ve ever used. Even better than the Model Ms.
The interface was great. You could drag and drop files in email (in 1996), they were stateless (NFS dialtone as Jobs called it), and easy to use while still giving you Unix tools for the command line.
The only thing you couldn’t do reliably on them was web browse. We all had a second desktop for that. It just couldn’t handle the graphics load.
Edited 2013-05-04 17:58 UTC
Kind of ironic that web browsing was less than optimal, considering that the World Wide Web was first implemented on a NeXT computer.
Then again, think of how text-oriented the original Web pages were. Very limited use of graphics. The NeXT server/workstation was perfect for stuff like that. But, yes, very ironic
I think you’re wrong there. I’ve got a NeXT and the keyboard is fairly average. It has black ALPS switches. There are many keyboards far better – including the Model M, AT Model F, beam spring IBM terminals, even Apple M0115/M0116 (orange ALPS).
The NeXT keyboard definitely beats cheap modern rubber dome keyboards though.
Qube cases need to come back. Nostalgia’d hard.
Thanks for the beautiful pics. They don’t make machines like this anymore…
I’m surprised Thom neglected to correlate the relationship between the NeXT and the birth of the WWW, since TBL did the initial server and browser in NeXTStep.
A friend recently stumbled across the source code (I forget the link at the moment), and it was fun reminiscing and going through the code.
In ’92 I ponied up the $3K to get a “Student” Mono Slab NeXTStation: Grayscale monitor, 25Mhz 040, 8MB RAM, 120MB hard drive. These specs basically allowed it to boot up, and I was fortunate to be able to quickly upgrade it to 20MB of RAM and a 400MB drive.
At the student discount rate, the machine was not completely insane — almost, but not completely — to purchase in contrast to the 33Mhz PCs at the time, and there was no readily available Unix for humans then really either. You certainly couldn’t get a Sun for that price.
But it was a formative experience, Got my first UUCP News and Mail feed on that over my Hayes 2400 SmartModem. The wonders of Perl 4, the bitching about the rich news posts (basically mime encoded w/attachments) on the comp.sys.next.
13 years later, I put down another $3K for that slab workstations power house progeny — a Mac Pro. The contrast in specifications is measured in several orders of magnitude on all levels.
I’m glad the legacy, and essence of NeXT has survived.
In ’92 linux was there and ready. I ran it on my 80386 with cyrix co processor, I can’t even remember how much RAM it had. Had a null modem cable to my roommate’s pc-xt, he logged in and ran his prolog homework on my system. We had NeXT systems in our CS lab, right next to the IBM RTs. Much nicer. I didn’t like the persistent menu thing on the interface much though. Today on my development machines I run windowmaker as the window manager.
Edited 2013-05-05 00:34 UTC
Ready is a relative term.
On my system I had to install it from floppies on the ’95 Summer, because my CD-ROM drive was IDE and only SCSI models were handled at the time.
NeXT was without a doubt the high water mark of computing at least from an elegance / efficiency standpoint.
IMO, OSX has continued steadily downhill since. I would like to know, why with 20 years worth of effort, we still can’t have a Linux desktop that approaches the consistency and usability of NeXT? What exactly does OSX do that requires over a gig of ram when NeXT ran just fine on 8-16 meg?
Look how elegant the package system was on NeXT, all apps are self contained in .app directories, these contain the binaries, icons, resources, and a config file that tells the desktop what icon to display them with, what binary to run and what env vars to set. All self contained. Why do we need .desktop files in special directories? Why do I need to write a .desktop file, edit it to reference an icon, binary just to use an app not in a Linux repo?
Enough of my rant, NeXT was just awesome along with BeOS, wish we could one day have something that simple and usable again.
Everything in the past looks much better in comparison with the present, when one gets the luxury to forget what sucked about the past…
http://www.windowmaker.org
Then look at GNUstep stuff and start from there.
I’ve tried window maker on and off for 10 years, and it sucks as bad today as it did in 2000. For some bizarre reason, they wrote their own toolkit that supposedly visually resembles NeXT, but that’s about it, zero integration with GNUStep, gnome or KDE, because, you know what, we want to write our own homegrown toolkit and not just use something sane like GTK or Qt.
I use unity these days, it’s far from perfect, but at least it’s improving, and starting to get some integration with apps.
I gave up on GNUStep long ago. It would have been a great API if the underlying toolkit was GTK, but no, they have to rool their own widget set, so GNUStep apps look like crap when running along side GTK (or Qt because Qt is smart enough to use the GTK theme engine so Qt apps look just like GTK).
The original Openstep API was actually cross platform, and used native Windows widgets on Windows so they looked right.
Apparently, the Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field was not limited to Apple.
First off, unlike GNUStep, Openstep Enterprise on NT cost a pretty penny, and although it showed great promise, it still had some very rough edges. Also the resulting applications had a look and feel that was not quite native. And a lot of the “widgets” in the NS/OS specification had no equivalent on the NT APIs (and viceversa).
Perhaps, the problem at play is that you could be indicting current products/projects for not complying with your personal version of history, which never happened.
Oh give it with this RDF crap, whenever anyone says says something positive about Apple, and does not fawn over whatever, the first resort by the weak minded is invariably this RDF crap.
Note from my original post, that I am LESS THAN PLEASED with Apple, and I grow ever more displeased with Apple with every subsequent release.
IMO, the two most elegant, consistent and usable operating systems ever made were NeXT and BeOS. It has nothing to do with admiring Jobs, but to do with admiring operating systems like BeOS and NeXT, and the principles (simplicity, efficiency, consistency) behind them.
Applications have no doubt improved the years, yet operating systems / desktop environments seem to grow ever more bloated with who knows what. BeOS has all the functionality to compile a modern framework like WebKit, so there is no reason for modern OS to be this massive.
Oh the victimization theatrics…
I was simply pointing out that you’re basing your arguments on a very particularly subjective and erroneous version of history.
Cheers
I used both Yellow box and the prior version that was Openstep branded on NT4. It had issues, but the UI wasn’t all that different. Might be the version you’ve seen? The main issue was that the NIB files for the Windows version of the code were completely separate to the Openstep ones, so you needed to create the UI twice to make it cross platform. However, the actual UI is loosely coupled to the underlying controller, so the actual code rarely needed to change. Back then, most controls were declared as “id” in the controllers (which is probably bad form now, modern Objective-C seems to want to use real class names), but it just worked. And the fact that the same skillset worked on Openstep’s version of Project Builder and Interface Builder as it did on the Windows version, seriously sped up development. Shame it was a dead end product and it never went anywhere. The short period I used it was wonderful.
From some other posts (the whartung one just above: “8MB RAM […] These specs basically allowed it to boot up, and I was fortunate to be able to quickly upgrade it to 20MB”), it seems NeXT really wasn’t running fine on 8.
But generally, it does seem like an amazing OS, given its age. Not really “the “Ferrari” of desktop systems!”, more a Porsche
(as in, a supercar that is also actually useful)
Edited 2013-05-09 20:27 UTC
But I prefered the esthetic of the SGI workstation, and the OS wasn’t crummy either.
Having seen news surface about the introduction of the web and NeXT I also tend to bath in old feelings remembering good old NeXTSTEP. At the time of early 1990ies me and some friends bought early Nextstations and started working with them. I was able to figure out nxmachportdevice() and use it to create eXTRASET (Best of Breed Award Winner 1993), a software RIP for NeXTSTEP driving a linotype hell imagesetter, of which we had the SCSI docs before and actually used before to write a driver for Atari ST Calamus (publishing software). This program was the ticket for me to get into the USA, SFO and Bay Area for about a year Was a great time. Was a pity to see NeXT went down, but we still get to see its best product NeXTSTEP alive in OSX and IOS