Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Because I was born right around the time the first NeXT Computer was announced in late ‘88, I wasn’t cognizant of the rise and fall of the NeXT platform, but I did come to appreciate the projects that were based on it, like the early WWW.

As a matter of fact, the first time I even heard of NeXT was a decade later in around ‘98, when PC Magazine or Computer Shopper (I can’t remember exactly which one) made a brief and snarky mention of the NeXT Cube in a retrospective blurb as a novel yet highly incompatible computer system, no doubt penned by John C Dvorak (RIP) who always had it out for Steve Jobs. It stuck with me, because the image of the NeXT they used looked like no other computer I was familiar with at the time and I was head over heels for it. I even tried procuring one for many years but was ultimately unsuccessful.

Frog did an outstanding job on the design language for the NeXT hardware. They then went on to help design the look of the Packard Bell PCs from the early to mid 90s too.

These are really cool photos and, honestly, I’d love to travel back to this past even briefly, just to experience it in person if I could.

I'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?

At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.

I've always liked NeXTSTEP's distinctive user interface. I wish we had a version that ran on modern hardware, similar to what https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace is trying to achieve.

Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.

> By 1991 only 50,000 NeXTcubes had been sold. One of these, however, was used by Tim Berners Lee to create the first web browser and server.

Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.

I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.

I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.

When I was a student at the Technical University of Denmark in the early 1990s, I remember a NeXT computer being prominently displayed in the Polytechnic Bookstore on campus. It was an absolute dream machine at the time, not least because of all the amazing software that came bundled with it.

this is very cool: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/vv758zk7405

I'm curious about: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rw840qg3512 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rd259yj2574

(jogging club?)

the logo paul rand designed for NeXT is just so timeless, it's great

Just look at these offices compared to the drab monstrosities we have today, even at the supposedly cool and trendy tech companies...

The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.

I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.

Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).

Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex Bézier curve manipulation.

Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12

And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Lots of information at:

https://nextworldarchive.com/

but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/

Those are some really good photos. I always love to look back at photos in workplaces. I took a ton myself and there's something really cool about capturing the workspaces in time.

"Traffic control and bot detection..." Doesn't let me load the page.