Article
<https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/steve-jobs-unveiled-the-next-computer-on-this-day-in-1988-the-cube-would-be-used-to-develop-the-www-doom-and-quake>
looking back at the introduction of the first product from NeXT, Inc,
the company Steve Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple.
This was probably the highest-profile attempt at the time to come up
with a ?user-friendly Unix?. I remember it being touted as a virtue
that it was very difficult to actually get to the command line, as
proof that you didn?t need one. Or even to tell that it was a ?Unix?
system.
Article ><https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/steve-jobs-unveiled-the-next-computer-on-this-day-in-1988-the-cube-would-be-used-to-develop-the-www-doom-and-quake>
looking back at the introduction of the first product from NeXT, Inc,
the company Steve Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple.
This was probably the highest-profile attempt at the time to come up
with a ?user-friendly Unix?. I remember it being touted as a virtue
that it was very difficult to actually get to the command line, as
proof that you didn?t need one. Or even to tell that it was a ?Unix?
system.
GUI programming was becoming popular, while the languages and APIs for
doing it were still hard to use. NeXTStep had the ?Interface Builder?,
which allowed drag-and-drop creation of UI layouts, that was the envy
of other platforms.
There were some clever things about this machine, some not so clever.
That 256MiB magneto-optical drive was a big step up from floppy disks,
but the media was expensive. The idea that third-party apps might be >distributed on such disks was simply not practical.
The inclusion of a DSP for audio and other processing was another >groundbreaking feature, that was innovative for a while until the
power of RISC CPUs made such special-purpose signal-processing
hardware obsolete.
Display PostScript sounded amazing, since PostScript was already
legendary for the print quality it made possible. It took some years
to realize that the PostScript graphics model was really only suited
for making marks on paper, not for generating interactive displays on
a screen.
Article <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/steve-jobs-unveiled-the-next-computer-on-this-day-in-1988-the-cube-would-be-used-to-develop-the-www-doom-and-quake>
looking back at the introduction of the first product from NeXT, Inc,
the company Steve Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple.
This was probably the highest-profile attempt at the time to come up
with a ?user-friendly Unix?. I remember it being touted as a virtue
that it was very difficult to actually get to the command line, as
proof that you didn?t need one. Or even to tell that it was a ?Unix?> system.
GUI programming was becoming popular, while the languages and APIs for
doing it were still hard to use. NeXTStep had the ?Interface Builder?,
which allowed drag-and-drop creation of UI layouts, that was the envy
of other platforms.
There were some clever things about this machine, some not so clever.
That 256MiB magneto-optical drive was a big step up from floppy disks,
but the media was expensive. The idea that third-party apps might be distributed on such disks was simply not practical.
The inclusion of a DSP for audio
groundbreaking feature, that was innovative for a while until the
power of RISC CPUs made such special-purpose signal-processing
hardware obsolete.
Display PostScript sounded amazing, since PostScript was already
legendary for the print quality it made possible. It took some years
to realize that the PostScript graphics model was really only suited
for making marks on paper, not for generating interactive displays on
a screen.
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