NeXT Computer

The vision of the future

NeXT Inc was born in 1985 and situated in Redwood City, California. It was created by the Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs after he was forced out of Apple. Many people of the staff that worked on Lisa left a secure job at Apple to follow and support them boss and help him create this new company.

NeXT Computer

The first product

The first machine created by NeXT was presented at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, on October 12, 1988, it was the NeXT Computer. The original price of the machine was $6500 and it was a very high-end workstation running the Unix-based NeXSTEP operating system.

The very bold idea coming from NeXT Inc was to suppose that during the 1990s people will rely massively on computer to speed up work processes, to increase productivity and to have more ways of communications instead of just have a personal computer at home. So, as Steve Jobs sad during a presentation of the machine in 1990: the NeXT Computer will arrange “the desire to improve group productivity and collaboration, which we think will be one of the key uses of sophisticated desktop computers in the early 1990s opposed to just personal computing”.

The idea behind the NeXT Computer

Jobs wanted a machine capable of way more operation then just a personal computer. During an interview, shortly after he founded the NeXT Inc, he clearly sad that the main purpose of the company was to create a very powerful computer thought to improve the educational system, in particular the University education. He wanted a “simulated learning environment”; that he describes by saying “you can’t give a student in physics a linear accelerator, you can’t give a student in biology a 5 million dollar recombinant DNA laboratory, but you can simulate those things”.

Personal computers were lightly decreasing in term of prices to give the possibility to more and more people to actually buy a PC, but the machine that Jobs was creating was not intended for the average user. The final product had to be capable of the most innovative thing and ready to support new generation of software that the NeXT was building. Eventually they achieved some of the purposes. One big difference from previous computers is that the NeXT Computer had a new type of removable disk: a magneto-optical disk drive which could keep 300 times the content of a conventional floppy disk. But the biggest innovation was the the signal-processor chip, very powerful and capable to act like a modem, play music or synthesise the Human voice.

But the most impressive thing was in the price, it costed roughly $3500 less than the Lisa and had even more features, more power and many improvement in the GUI system. The video that at the end of this page show the amazing results.

NeXT Computer used as server at CERN

Here comes bad news

Unfortunately the price was still to high and the NeXT Computer actually never took off in the market. There were problem such as the lack of an actual hard-disk (you could buy it separately), and University never begon to buying the machine. But it had still some very important part in history; for example it became the world first server software: the CERN HTTPd thanks to the work of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. The picture shows the NeXT computer at CERN¹ with the note "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

Components:

The computers featured:

• 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU
• between 8 and 64 MB RAM
• 250 MB optical disk drive
• 40 MB (swap-only), 330 MB, or 660 MB hard drive
• 10Base-2 Ethernet
• NuBus
• 17-inch grayscale display

A video where Steve Jobs show the features of the NeXT Computer: