I love ‘80s and ‘90s computer documentation! I once went to the book store and bought about $300 worth of computer books. Stacked on their sides, all the books were a couple of feet high! They were like phonebooks. A lot of reading.
The Next color machines were announced and shipped in around 1991. The color outclassed all the PCs (those display in low resolution and only had 8 bit color , other than the Mac II or Atari or Amiga). It’s just that the NextStation Color machine was $2000 more, and the 17” trinitron monitor was another $2000). Those who need full color would have gone all the way to the Next Dimension board - and that’s a computer on its own running DPS on an Intel i860 (yes, Intel had a RISC chip too at the time). At the time what Next could make technologically was amazing.
I am very much enjoying your videos. The presentation and quality of info is of a much higher standard than your subs and views indicate. Keep up the excellent work. Got anything on BeOS? Apple LISA? I loved your Lian Li video, subbed. Maybe other old PC mfr pieces in the future? Thanks.
This started as a blog/podcast, and I haven't been making actual video versions of the content until a few months ago, so I'm still new. I'll be the first to tell you I'm not a video person, despite helping invent video let's plays as we know them. :) So it's been a slow re-learning process. I would rather be writing or doing audio-only, but the reality is that the audience is on youtube, so I've accepted that fact and started working with it. I don't own a Lisa, and no BeBoxes either. But I've got more stuff coming down the pike soon.
In the nineties, my school, the institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of music in The Hague, owned one or a few of these huge, black NeXT boxes. We, freshmen, were allowed to work with it using very specialized audio software. I can assure you it felt like a revolution in 1994, but by 1998 most of us owned similarly capable Macs with affordable dedicated sound cards. NeXT’s lead was short, but the hype felt very real.
@@userlandia Definitely. But macOS (and Apple’s other derivatives) don’t feel light years ahead of Windows and Android nowadays. Back when the iPhone was introduced though, my first iPhone definitely felt somewhat like that school NeXT cube did in ‘94, be it less imposing.
Can't argue with the NeXT's motherboard being Art. 'Bring it into existance through sheer force of will.' For all of Jobs's *MANY* flaws, the man did have vision.
He also (generally) knew what he was talking about. If you haven't seen that NeXT sales strategy video that was making the rounds a while back, it's a good watch.
@@userlandia Sure, he knew what he was talking about which kept people from bullshitting him. However I just.... How he treated Woz alone is reason enough for me to dislike the man. Disowning his daughter, and his infamous cornering people and firing them if he didn't like their answers?
You're not wrong, although he and his daughter did reconcile later in life. Steve Jobs was a jerk on an individual basis, he at least knew not to, you know, do what certain billionaires are doing these days.
Actually the DSP and some custom DSP boards were very popular with the audio and sound design community back then. Mainly universities. The university I went to had several NeXT workstations used for the modern music composition lab. Those machines were purchased basically just to run a program called Max. I think the genius of NeXT was the Display Postcript windowing server and GUI on top of a UNIX kernel. Network boot was also great. That was done in the late ‘80s and is the paradigm for the modern OS today.
As far as I could tell music creators were the real killer app for the DSP, but I'd love to know of non-music uses for it in NeXTstep. NeXT's material always talked it up for non-sound uses, but actually finding use cases for it beyond audio seem extremely rare. Max is one of the apps I read about!
@@userlandia Hugh, I tried searching for it, does not come up any more. I have on 1/4" tape or 8mm tape or maybe on cdrom. I'll have to dig it out and send to them. It basically uses the PS renderer of the system and sends hpgl standard raster to the printer stream.
I didn't really get into how NeXT's competitors stacked up in a price comparison, but I always found it amusing that NeXT gets the bad rap for being too expensive when Sun, SGI, and my local team Apollo's workstations were more expensive. I could have easily made a ten minute detour about NeXT's initial pricing blunders and how they failed while those others succeeded. You probably know all this already but I figure a comments section is as good a place to go into a detour as any. :) I think it's because NeXT was trying to pitch itself to university staff and students, where it was legitimately expensive. Sun, SGI, and so on played in very high-end markets where their custom silicon was the real secret sauce. By that metric, the NeXT was a bargain for a UNIX workstation, especially if you could go without a printer. A base SparcStation in 1989 was what, about $9K list? Then you could option it up from there. $10K was the price when you bought a cube, display, and printer together at Businessland. Then, by the time you could actually buy a NeXT there was already an installed base of Sun, SGI, Apollo, and so on. But, IIRC, NeXT was the only one that attempted retail sales; any of the other workstations were sold via speciality sales channels where volume discounts and other special negotiations were in play. Buyers in those markets weren't necessarily interested in bargains either, they needed machines to solve specific problems and NeXT didn't really solve them... not out of the box, at least. Didn't matter if it cost less money if you couldn't run your 3D CAD software on them. NeXT solved _other_ problems, but odds are if someone was buying a Sun a NeXT wouldn't work for them. Anyway, thanks for watching!
MO discs had their role in 90s-early 00s for medical imaging / storage. Until DICOM in networking really took off. (there were a number of proprietary systems at first which were a pain)
The sticker stuck perfectly to my MBP with no issues. Maybe it won't stay as long as a fresh one but it's not like it's being subjected to the elements.
The lack of color was an absolute disaster at launch. If these things were color out of the gate, our company would have dropped everything and bought into the community overnight….simply because the Display postscript was like God touching our company and saying “here is your solution…go forth and produce!” What company? We Aran an independent yellow pages directory business that produced over 34 local community directories per year in western Washington. Right when Next came out, the push to go full color in the print directory business was coming to the forefront. Matching proofs for customers, to what was sent to the printer and eventually produced as a directory was a complete nightmare are. The print company we used, Donnelly out of Oregon, had to create custom color conversion tables to run on our massive PS dump files. Some directories were over 350 pages in length. If only…..if only….
NeXT was monochrome because they prioritized resolution over color. A decision that made sense if they hit their original 1987 ship date, but by the time they got to 1989, high resolution color was more affordable/feasible. But the hardware was baked in at that point... but color did come a year later with the NeXTstation Color and the NeXTDimension. Too little too late for them, though. RR Donnelly used to be one of my customers; I was in the raster image processing business for many years. I can tell you stories about rendering monster postscript files. :)
You’re running pretty fast and loose with the facts in this video. NeXT Computer Inc. didn’t fail as you claim. Macintosh OS X Server 1.0 was a straight port of the NeXTStep OS to run on Apple’s PowerPC hardware. Apple purchased NeXT for $427 million dollars in 1997, and the combined organisations forged ahead with Rhapsody and Macintosh OS X Server utilising the Copland originated GUI of MacOS 8. There was no demise.
I guess it depends on your definition of failure, right? NeXT, the computer corporation, absolutely failed from a business perspective. You can make great products and still fail, just as Captain Picard says you can make all the right decisions and still fail. Black hardware failed. NeXT, the software corporation, was less of a failure, but you can't look at their position in 1996 going into the merger as anything but an also-ran trying to survive. As great as NeXTstep/OpenStep/etc was, it would've died just like all the workstation Unixes did if Apple hadn't bought them. Would they've been able to survive just on WebObjects, their first truly profitable product? We'll never know. But saying something failed doesn't mean the thing was bad, or that it didn't live on in some way. Now, the NeXT executives who stewarded Apple post-merger didn't fail, but it wasn't an easy road and nothing was guaranteed. Rhapsody itself, that was a failure! That "straight port" was soundly rejected by third party developers, even if Apple sold it running on servers that I worked on in the past. It was a blip. The actual plan that finally succeeded post-Rhapsody hinged on Carbon and Cocoa in Mac OS X making the Mac and NeXT a fusion of equals. As much as the classic graybeards moaned about Mac OS X, the "purity" of OpenStep was sacrificed to mold it into the next generation of the Macintosh. Mac OS X was the best of both worlds. NeXT's identity died so its technology could live on in the Mac and Apple's other OSes.
I'm pleased that even though I lost in that bidding war, I can still enjoy this find vicariously through your video. Thank you!
You're welcome!
LOL! not ever day you get the bidding loser upvoting the guy who beat him.😂
What was your max bid?
I love ‘80s and ‘90s computer documentation! I once went to the book store and bought about $300 worth of computer books. Stacked on their sides, all the books were a couple of feet high! They were like phonebooks. A lot of reading.
Still got my NeXT step box with install disks. I'd ran it on a 486 that cost me 5k$ to build with 32Mb at the time.
The Next color machines were announced and shipped in around 1991. The color outclassed all the PCs (those display in low resolution and only had 8 bit color , other than the Mac II or Atari or Amiga). It’s just that the NextStation Color machine was $2000 more, and the 17” trinitron monitor was another $2000). Those who need full color would have gone all the way to the Next Dimension board - and that’s a computer on its own running DPS on an Intel i860 (yes, Intel had a RISC chip too at the time). At the time what Next could make technologically was amazing.
I am very much enjoying your videos. The presentation and quality of info is of a much higher standard than your subs and views indicate.
Keep up the excellent work. Got anything on BeOS? Apple LISA?
I loved your Lian Li video, subbed. Maybe other old PC mfr pieces in the future?
Thanks.
This started as a blog/podcast, and I haven't been making actual video versions of the content until a few months ago, so I'm still new. I'll be the first to tell you I'm not a video person, despite helping invent video let's plays as we know them. :) So it's been a slow re-learning process. I would rather be writing or doing audio-only, but the reality is that the audience is on youtube, so I've accepted that fact and started working with it.
I don't own a Lisa, and no BeBoxes either. But I've got more stuff coming down the pike soon.
In the nineties, my school, the institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of music in The Hague, owned one or a few of these huge, black NeXT boxes. We, freshmen, were allowed to work with it using very specialized audio software. I can assure you it felt like a revolution in 1994, but by 1998 most of us owned similarly capable Macs with affordable dedicated sound cards. NeXT’s lead was short, but the hype felt very real.
The promise of NeXT is realized today, so I think the hype finally became reality in the end. :)
@@userlandia Definitely. But macOS (and Apple’s other derivatives) don’t feel light years ahead of Windows and Android nowadays. Back when the iPhone was introduced though, my first iPhone definitely felt somewhat like that school NeXT cube did in ‘94, be it less imposing.
Can't argue with the NeXT's motherboard being Art.
'Bring it into existance through sheer force of will.'
For all of Jobs's *MANY* flaws, the man did have vision.
He also (generally) knew what he was talking about. If you haven't seen that NeXT sales strategy video that was making the rounds a while back, it's a good watch.
@@userlandia Sure, he knew what he was talking about which kept people from bullshitting him. However I just....
How he treated Woz alone is reason enough for me to dislike the man. Disowning his daughter, and his infamous cornering people and firing them if he didn't like their answers?
You're not wrong, although he and his daughter did reconcile later in life. Steve Jobs was a jerk on an individual basis, he at least knew not to, you know, do what certain billionaires are doing these days.
@@userlandia This is VERY true.
He viewed silence as a powerful tool.
Vs the mess BirdSite is right now. Glad i left.
8mm tape was also storage and transfer media, pretty good capacity and speed for the time.
Actually the DSP and some custom DSP boards were very popular with the audio and sound design community back then. Mainly universities. The university I went to had several NeXT workstations used for the modern music composition lab. Those machines were purchased basically just to run a program called Max. I think the genius of NeXT was the Display Postcript windowing server and GUI on top of a UNIX kernel. Network boot was also great. That was done in the late ‘80s and is the paradigm for the modern OS today.
As far as I could tell music creators were the real killer app for the DSP, but I'd love to know of non-music uses for it in NeXTstep. NeXT's material always talked it up for non-sound uses, but actually finding use cases for it beyond audio seem extremely rare. Max is one of the apps I read about!
@@userlandia I think they used it for the Fax application, which was a cool feature back then.
I still have my NeXT computers. love them. was fun bac in the day
my claim to fame was writing a print driver to allow use of any hp lazer printer. still out there if y'all need it.
I'm sure the folks over at nextcomputers.org would be interested!
@@userlandia Hugh, I tried searching for it, does not come up any more. I have on 1/4" tape or 8mm tape or maybe on cdrom. I'll have to dig it out and send to them. It basically uses the PS renderer of the system and sends hpgl standard raster to the printer stream.
Great video, Dan!
Thanks, Steve!
I wish I still had all the media that I got from NeXT in the 90's not to mention my one and only copy of NeXT World Magazine.
And then all you get nowadays is crappy electron apps...
I run nextstep on a HP 712 60 MHz and it's such a joy to use.
Wow, we've reached that point where people literally forget how much a sun workstation cost in the late 1980s. Problematic.
I didn't really get into how NeXT's competitors stacked up in a price comparison, but I always found it amusing that NeXT gets the bad rap for being too expensive when Sun, SGI, and my local team Apollo's workstations were more expensive. I could have easily made a ten minute detour about NeXT's initial pricing blunders and how they failed while those others succeeded. You probably know all this already but I figure a comments section is as good a place to go into a detour as any. :)
I think it's because NeXT was trying to pitch itself to university staff and students, where it was legitimately expensive. Sun, SGI, and so on played in very high-end markets where their custom silicon was the real secret sauce. By that metric, the NeXT was a bargain for a UNIX workstation, especially if you could go without a printer. A base SparcStation in 1989 was what, about $9K list? Then you could option it up from there. $10K was the price when you bought a cube, display, and printer together at Businessland. Then, by the time you could actually buy a NeXT there was already an installed base of Sun, SGI, Apollo, and so on. But, IIRC, NeXT was the only one that attempted retail sales; any of the other workstations were sold via speciality sales channels where volume discounts and other special negotiations were in play. Buyers in those markets weren't necessarily interested in bargains either, they needed machines to solve specific problems and NeXT didn't really solve them... not out of the box, at least. Didn't matter if it cost less money if you couldn't run your 3D CAD software on them. NeXT solved _other_ problems, but odds are if someone was buying a Sun a NeXT wouldn't work for them.
Anyway, thanks for watching!
14:30, I have only one piece of NeXT gear, and it happens to be THAT power cord.
MO discs had their role in 90s-early 00s for medical imaging / storage. Until DICOM in networking really took off. (there were a number of proprietary systems at first which were a pain)
You have a new subscriber from Turkiye gentlemen!
Thanks!
Any chance you would be willing to sell that next torx driver??
Sorry, but it's not for sale. Maybe someone over at the nextcomputers.com forum might be willing to part with one.
Do the stickers even stick anymore? I feel like 30 year old adhesive wouldn't work as well.
The sticker stuck perfectly to my MBP with no issues. Maybe it won't stay as long as a fresh one but it's not like it's being subjected to the elements.
This video is awesome
Thanks!
subbed
Thanks!
2:49 Tezro spotted
The lack of color was an absolute disaster at launch. If these things were color out of the gate, our company would have dropped everything and bought into the community overnight….simply because the Display postscript was like God touching our company and saying “here is your solution…go forth and produce!” What company? We Aran an independent yellow pages directory business that produced over 34 local community directories per year in western Washington. Right when Next came out, the push to go full color in the print directory business was coming to the forefront. Matching proofs for customers, to what was sent to the printer and eventually produced as a directory was a complete nightmare are. The print company we used, Donnelly out of Oregon, had to create custom color conversion tables to run on our massive PS dump files. Some directories were over 350 pages in length. If only…..if only….
NeXT was monochrome because they prioritized resolution over color. A decision that made sense if they hit their original 1987 ship date, but by the time they got to 1989, high resolution color was more affordable/feasible. But the hardware was baked in at that point... but color did come a year later with the NeXTstation Color and the NeXTDimension. Too little too late for them, though.
RR Donnelly used to be one of my customers; I was in the raster image processing business for many years. I can tell you stories about rendering monster postscript files. :)
You’re running pretty fast and loose with the facts in this video. NeXT Computer Inc. didn’t fail as you claim. Macintosh OS X Server 1.0 was a straight port of the NeXTStep OS to run on Apple’s PowerPC hardware. Apple purchased NeXT for $427 million dollars in 1997, and the combined organisations forged ahead with Rhapsody and Macintosh OS X Server utilising the Copland originated GUI of MacOS 8. There was no demise.
I guess it depends on your definition of failure, right? NeXT, the computer corporation, absolutely failed from a business perspective. You can make great products and still fail, just as Captain Picard says you can make all the right decisions and still fail. Black hardware failed. NeXT, the software corporation, was less of a failure, but you can't look at their position in 1996 going into the merger as anything but an also-ran trying to survive. As great as NeXTstep/OpenStep/etc was, it would've died just like all the workstation Unixes did if Apple hadn't bought them. Would they've been able to survive just on WebObjects, their first truly profitable product? We'll never know. But saying something failed doesn't mean the thing was bad, or that it didn't live on in some way.
Now, the NeXT executives who stewarded Apple post-merger didn't fail, but it wasn't an easy road and nothing was guaranteed. Rhapsody itself, that was a failure! That "straight port" was soundly rejected by third party developers, even if Apple sold it running on servers that I worked on in the past. It was a blip. The actual plan that finally succeeded post-Rhapsody hinged on Carbon and Cocoa in Mac OS X making the Mac and NeXT a fusion of equals. As much as the classic graybeards moaned about Mac OS X, the "purity" of OpenStep was sacrificed to mold it into the next generation of the Macintosh. Mac OS X was the best of both worlds. NeXT's identity died so its technology could live on in the Mac and Apple's other OSes.
My god Jobs was a crook
Erm. Why? And that’s what you take away from watching this video?