I ran them in printing and graphics shops. Had one with a huge gray scale monitor that previewed postscript off a huge VMS server. It only did that its whole life, but it might have saved a million bucks of wasted film and time. I loved how it shook its head "NO" when you got the password wrong. The thing I miss the most is I had a NeXT phone number for engineering and they would answer questions. If someone wasn't there they would set up a call and call back. Those days sure are gone.

I remember watching a Next rep give a demo in college around 1992. I was pretty amazed by the machine and wanted one real bad but there was no way I could afford it back then. I now work across the street from the old Next building in Redwood City. Hallowed ground.

Woah, Jobs let the Next have a cooling fan!? How progressive.

I have fond memories of spending many hours in our University’s 24-hour NeXT lab back in the early 90s. The machines we had were the early ones with the huge boxes, optical-only for storage and monochrome displays. But the 300 dpi laser printer they had networked to all of the machines was the icing on the cake. I used to design band flyers and album art on the cube - I printed countless photos of Luke Skywalker and Yoda that I found via FTP on other college’s computer systems. I remember my hacker buddy would show off his terminal skills by sneaking into other users’ chats on the university system and making it look like they were saying nasty things to each other. We did everything on those machines and it was a blast.

That is so crazy to think how big Netware was at the time. I was just 16 years old working in the family computer store in 1994, Netware Certified Administrator for 3.1. Never got the CNE, I was already making $65/hr as a Netware IT consultant as a teenager, so I never really need to do more - I had dozens of clients. I did end up administering Netware networks until the mid 2000's. I do miss the fact that being forced to have a dedicated server that ran a completely different OS really kept people from messing with it. Netware's best part was when I went to a hotel to investigate a problem with their software and I hunted for their server, opened a cabinet and thought it was full of towels, but it was actually a big dust layer as thick as a blanket. Inside was a Netware server, with a monochrome amber screen in all its glory. Uptime was like 5 years. Ended up it had a bad network card and we had to reboot it.

It's a shame that BeOS was left behind. It seemed so good at the time

Nextstep went to multiple CPUs BEFORE openstep. Openstep was quite a few years later. I had a Pentium 90 running Nextstep on my desk for a while, before we moved on to running Openstep on some Sun machines, then later again, running Openstep on windows on P200 Pros. People didn't buy it for the OS - certainly in the research laboratories I worked in - they bought it for the RAD toolset - Project Builder, Interface Builder and EOF. Tools so good it's only recently that apple stopped using them for iOS and MAC OS Design.

I loved working with Objective-C. I came to it from a C/C++ background, and it was the first language and platform that made sense to me. I got to work professionally with some large Openstep codebases for a few years, and enjoyed it a lot. Programming with Obj-C now, with all of the Mac-isms added, is much less fun. But the early Nextstep/Openstep platform was mind-blowing.

I am one of those few who "get" the Objective-C. I did iOS development in Obj-C for three years and I loved every single day of it. Yes the paradigm is completely different from the average imperative programming language but thats what made it special. The concept of not calling a method but sending a message instead to an object was a brilliant idea - basically you eliminated NullPointerExceptions because you can always send method to a non-existing object. I would choose Obj-C over many languages. The concepts are great if you understand them. And yes I hate Swift - too many exclamation and question marks in the code.

7:33 The NeXT Cube was originally envisioned as an “academic workstation”. Jobs even brought in a panel of consultants from across academia to advise on its design. In spite of that, it never sold well into its target market. I remember him telling a reporter that, in spite of poor sales, the company was determined to continue focusing primarily on the academic market. Not long after that, the company abandoned that specialization, and tried to sell the machines more generally. That didn’t help much.

In 1991-92 I taught a class for paralegal students at our local community college. I asked Next to come in and demo their workstations, with the idea that this would be the type of technology that the students would be working on 5 years in the future. The demo was amazing. They brought in 2 68040 workstations, one with color, one monochrome. The screen resolution was mind blowing. Next’s email seemed like something from science fiction, with seamless integration of voice. The catch: the price. Within a few years, I bought a Mac with an LC68040 processor, so it was almost as fast as the Nextstation, but it was nowhere near as capable. I’ve owned at least one Mac ever since then, and even now, MacOS seems a bit dumbed down.

I always appreciate your high quality content and I love the historical context you bring to the early PC era. I never got the chance to see a NeXT computer in person, but it interesting to see the way it influenced object oriented design.

Everyone's like "see you on the next video" but this guy was the only one to actually make The Next Video for real.

We had a few NeXT workstations at school back in the nineties. I was so in love with the UI that I contributed to an opensource Windows version for a while. On Linux my UI was always something that looked like it.

Speaking as a programmer who was (and still is) a huge NeXT fan, I found Objective-C elegant. Much preferred it to Java, Perl or JavaScript. I wrote Obj-C code which ran on OPENSTEP on NeXT hardware, also cross-compiled for OPENSTEP for Windows NT and SPARC. It was elegant, felt great with easy to understand object-oriented design and the dynamic runtime meant you could do neat tricks when debugging and updating running programs. The crown jewels were NeXT's OPENSTEP frameworks and APIs, though, the programming language plays second fiddle to that. Also, to this day, NeXT's (no Apple's) development environment with Interface Builder is second to none. Back in its heyday, it was leaps and bounds more elegant than IDEs on Windows, Solaris or any other platform. Way ahead of its time. Glad we're reaping the rewards now on modern macOS.

The speaker thing was only on the colour NeXTstations, not on the monochrome ones. The monochrome stations used those nice NeXT monitors that the Cube did.

I really love that you called out Objective C. I worked at a company and we wrote Windows software in MFC C++(this is way back in 2000, 2001), but truthfully I was always just a C guy, my C++ was always as much C as possible, just using the minimum in other words classes, but absolutely no templates, etc. We wanted to make a version of our software for Mac OSX, so we bought one of the first mac minis to come out in 2005. I programmed everthing in Carbon(HIViews, etc.) and C++ . I actually loved C++ Carbon. But then some years later Apple deprecated C++ Carbon and said everything had to be switched to Cocoa Objective C. I started looking over how to port the C++ to Objective C.... it was not too long after that I decided, I am no longer developing software for Apple...

The Sound Box was only for the color machines -- the original grayscale (not just monochrome -- four shades of grey!) NeXT Computer had the speaker (and later microphone) and audio/keyboard jacks in the monitor, which incidentally was also powered by the computer itself. When they later released the NeXTDimension board for true color displays, the NeXT color monitors were made by other companies (Philips/Fimi, Sony, and Hitachi) rather than being manufactured in-house, and didn't have any of the other I/O. You'd either use a dual-head setup with a grayscale and a color monitor, or connect a sound box to the monitor port on the mainboard and plug your keyboard into that. The mouse always plugged into the keyboard, similar to the Macintosh. Fun fact: very late models of the NeXTStation used ADB keyboards and mice (and revised models of the sound box and mono monitor). These are kinda rare though. So when it comes to the "slabs", the mono ones require the NeXT grayscale monitor, and the color ones require both a Y-cable and a sound box. Never plug a monitor directly into a NeXTStation color! The monitor uses only the three coax pins of the 13W3 (it's sync on green); the other pins are for the audio/keyboard/mouse and some have voltage on them. The Y-cable splits those out to a DB-19 connector and a 13W3 with only the RGB pins.

They did fat binaries for multi-architecture support as well. Something rarely heard of in the 90s. I never seen it actually running on PA-RISC, but it was one of the supported architectures, 68k, x86, SPARC an PA-RISC, IIRC. I think of this as an important technology of Next that was brought over to Apple, when it comes to changing your hardware architecture for the platform. Apple did this transition very smoothly several times now, 68k to PPC to x86_64 to Arm64. I think of it as a much overlooked but important detail that Next could already do such complicated feats in the 90s.

A great video on a great series of hardware/software. I had a NeXTStation for 6-7 years that I used primarily as a terminal for reading email and programming on other Unix systems. You forgot to talk about that incredible keyboard. If I could find a modern keyboard with the same typing feel, I’d buy a dozen of them.

Wow, as a kid of the time (but on the MS- and DR-DOS Side of the action) I really appreciate your thoughts and insights on what NEXT and its Software ecosystem was. Aside from the glorification it got later. Pretty impressive nevertheless! Your little hints from the programmers perspektive are helpful to better get to know some things that had to be fought on the backside of things. The video content with graphics and hardware shown blends nicely with your fluent commenting and supportting background music!

I had a NeXTstation. It was the coolest, best UI ever! I owned that machine from 1991 - 2001. When the WWW became a thing, I used the NeXT to surf the web. Unfortunately, it took literally minutes to render a single JPG image. Machine sent for scrap in 2001;. Sorry to see it go.

Great video, always enjoy NeXT stories. I remember Sun did something similar with the speaker box on some of the sparcstations. Also remember the days of Sunos getting repackaged with open windows and becoming Solaris must have been around 1991/2. I was using an SLC workstation around that time.

I got to fiddle with a NeXT cube now and then my first two years in college, so this is very nostalgic for me. Thank you!

I remember reading about the NeXT Cube with its DSP and 256MB MO drive in either PCW or Byte... closest I ever got to one was an IT trade show where it was demoed on a stand next to Apple's (whose computers I somehow always managed to unintentionally crash at those shows). Really wanted one, but it was well outside my means as a college student. Ended up buying an Acorn (origin of the ARM CPU) a little later, so at least I stuck to the more "esoteric" end of the spectrum 😛 Speaking of rare and "odd" computers, an episode on Linn's object-oriented computer would be interesting (that's Linn as in the Scottish turntable/audio gear company)...

We had a graphics designer that loved his NeXT slab, but the machine died...So we replaced it with a Mac. I was assigned this task. Our graphics designer had a rooster-crow sound when the in-built e-mail client saw a new message. Well, we had NFS homedirs...So we flopped his Mac on his desk, set it up to talk to our OpenLDAP and NFS file servers, had him log in...He started his mail client, and the rooster crowed. The amount of continuity even in basic configs between NeXTStep and OS X was really surprising at times.

He was not CEO in the 80s. He was just the chairman John Sculley was the CEO.

6:10 No, OS X never used Display PostScript. By the time Steve Jobs (and the crew of NeXT) had ended up back at Apple, Adobe had decided to give up on Display PostScript, which had never been a big success.

I had a cube with an external DAC/ADC that plugged into the DSP port. The 56k has a serial bus (predecessor of i2s?) to transfer digital audio.

There is nothing wrong with Objective-C. 95% of people who object to it (pun intended) have never actually built anything with it. Those who have (I am one), don't mind it one bit. It's actually very powerful, expressive and even elegant if you squint a bit. To my mind, Swift wasn't strictly needed, they could have made Obj-C 3.0 instead. Moving from C++ to Objective-C when OS X came about was the biggest single boost in productivity in my entire career - I stopped having to spend much time just keeping the language happy, and could focus on intent instead..

So you find Objective-C *objectionable*? Yeah, yeah, get me coat.

I envy that chopstick, it now has a touch of history.

nice video. not with you on objective C. As A nextstep developer from 1993-2001 (will, webobjects by the end with java, but you still had to do some objective C here and there). Back then your choices were C or C++ both of which sucked big time. Now, it should have died sooner than it did I grant you, and should probably never had ended up in iOS, but back then, to have a real OO language that was actually usable was amazing. Combined with EOF it was lightyears ahead of anything else. I loved my days on Nextstep, openstep, webobjects and EOF. You'd be turning applications out in literally weeks compared to watching dev teams 10x the size taking years with big windows mince or X. Even into java and J2EE - EOF (re-written almost entriely in java by then, but still with some Objective C here and there) was like a flying car to J2EEs Ford Model T. Happy days.

Correction: Mac OS X didn't use Display Postscript, but Quartz. Also, in the word 'Adobe' you gotta pronounce the E at the end. Lastly, the X in Mac OS X is a Roman numeral 10, so pronounced 'ten'.

Our statistics lab had Next computers. This was 1991. Their purpose was to run Mathematica. They were well ahead of their time. The ones we used also had an XD floppy drive. This was a floppy that stored an astounding 2.8 MB, which was twice the standard floppy at 1.4 MB. The only real problem is they cost four times as much. Our university bookstore sold the Next computers for about $4,000.

I remember watching Job's on a Next VHS that came with the workstation and I was totally impressed by the demos and presentation, I immediately fell in love with it. I always like NeXT heaps starting with the Logo, and great corporate image. I even got a Nextstep version to run on Parallels (Intel Mac). And was totally happy when learned that NexTStep was to be the foundation of the MacOS

I was in university when some reps came around to demo the Next machines and boy were they gorgeous looking devices. That said our labs had some pretty decent Sun workstations and I don't think the uni was going to fork out for replacements and they didn't. And while the desktop was better than X by a mile, I don't think it was especially mattered to us since we lived in the shell and if we wanted graphics we'd walk next door to the Mac II lab. And from a price point, dear god was it expensive.

"Adobe" to rhyme with "earlobe" sounds cursed when you've spent decades hearing it said as "A dough bee" like it's 🅰️🍩 🐝

Brilliant video, loved it. I worked with Apple computers as a summer job when I was 16, during 90 - 92 and as much as i loved Apple pc's...I fell in love with the Next pc's. I even ordered a glossy brochure.....wish I still had it.

This is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. Keep it up!!

5:10 I hunted around online, and there has been a paper published in the last couple of years on the history of Objective C, first at PPI/Stepstone, then later at NeXT. It appears it was NeXT that decided to implement it on top of the GCC core from the GNU project. That article seems to imply that the open-sourcing of the resulting compiler was done with no big drama, yet I recall Richard Stallman relating that they had to be strong-armed into it, because they were trying to dodge the fact that they were building their product on code licensed under the GPL.

OSX Server came out in 1999/2000. I was using it to write code in 2000. OSX client (aka 'OSX' was 2000). OSX server was basically nextstep on powerpc

This was one of my favourite videos on one of my favourite topics. Very well researched and presented.

I loved the Next icons. And used to copy them off my mate office computer and use on my windows one. And then there were all those folks who made all those really nice icon folders with coloured folders and designs with rine stone design on them. Good old days.

The computer where you plug a keyboard into a speaker, which then connects to the monitor...and the keyboard is the power switch!!? How exactly did this machine fail on the consumer market?? 🤣😂

Have I ever told you how much I enjoy your videos? Yes... emphasis on YOUR videos. The sense of humor is fantastic. Just the best!

Here I am watching this video in Window Maker which is the successor of Afterstep, a Next lookalike for Linux. Doesn't really act like Next, but looks like it. I don't really use it so much for how it looks but the low resource use. Window Maker is a pretty minimal Window Manager. It's one step up from the "box" WMs. Window Maker actually has a GUI configuration utility. That's about all it has.

Runs very nicely on Sun and HP boxes too and still a joy to use, but then the web, where all old hardware and operating systems fall over but enough software is around for free legally to make Nextstep still cool.

Dynamic languages are inherently superior to static ones. It is easier to do things in a dynamic language like ruby, smalltalk, or ObjC. Jobs chose ObjC since it was a descendant of smalltalk.

I recall in the early 90s, they had a similar dock to the NeXT Dock available as a shareware addon. It worked fairly well as an accessory to System 7 back in the day.

SO LOVE YOUR RETRO NOSTALGIA, MY CHILDHOOD & YOUTH.

There used to be so many operating systems back in the day, I wish we could have that today.

Bro, your videos are motherloving gosh darn enjoyable to watch!! Especially your voice, your peculiar manner of speaking and your choice of words, all the lovely antics and the funny demeanor you sprinkle all throughout your videos add so much personality to them, which I think is in turn a large part of what makes watching your videos so exceptionally enjoyable 👍🤓 thank you for making these vid bro,they are truly a sight to behold and very much epic indeed!

I work with Perl every day. Your comparison with Objective C made me spill what I was eating! Thank you!

Very enjoyable episode, I knew most of what you spoke about but you have a great way of breaking things down!

Love your channel, just discovered it today. Keep up the good work!

Ok maybe I'm just thick, but if the (K)eyboard plugs in to the [S]peaker-(b)ox and the [S]peaker-(b)ox plugs into the [W]orkstation's 'Monitor-port' ergo [W] - [Sb] - (K) then Where do you connect the monitor? The video made it sound like the Speakerbox was kind of like a hub for key peripherals, but as pictured it seemingly didn't have enough ports to act as a pass through for the monitor. Did it require a special splitter cable or something; I feel I must be missing something.

The big U/I things I miss from then are NeWS and Display PostScript. It was many years after my SunOS and NeXT experience that I stuffed the Adobe red book into my brain, but I think I would have very much enjoyed using PostScript for UI rendering.

In one bank I worked in IT, they ran Nextstep on a very specific model of Compaq which happened to be compatible with the build they used. If I remember right is was a pentium2. It was basically a pre-osx hackintosh. It was a very, very niche application.

The Lisa picture used is of one in the Lisa II / Macintosh XL configuration. Basically a Lisa retooled to function as a faster Macintosh. Basically they wrote a bootloader that booted the Lisa bootstrap then the Lisa os with a copy of the Macintosh Toolbox that would then boot Macintosh System os.

We had them in the Navy when I was stationed in Hawaii - 92-95. We had some cool programs running on them and I got to learn quite a bit while working on them. We didn't have "IT' people so much and computer-savvy people were relied upon to be admins and to troubleshoot on our own. Fun times.

Great video, you've managed to stitch together so many different aspects of the products / features back then. I agree that most people won't have remembered just how stunning the Unix-style desktops were for resolution and features vs PCs/Macs - it's certainly why I fondly remember the original Solaris machines with their cute optical patterned mouse mats! But, don't diss Perl, m'kay! Early web was running loads of it! 😄

Used wmaker for years. Enjoyed the vid, thanks for putting this together.

Nicely done. Lived through that period (I'm 66) and you're telling me things I had no idea of, lol. Also I agree with others who have complimented your "storytelling" style.

I remember the library at Columbia University had several of those. I've never seen or heard of Next before and it was quite an odd experience to be using them.

Man I miss the turn-of-the-century menagerie of unix OS's and the hardware they ran on. At one point I had a pair of Sun Ultra 10s, an IBM 44p, an HP (something or other), a little Next pizza box _and_ an SGI Fuel tower on or around my desk at work. Those were good times.

I used Nextstep machines at university loved them their usability was awesome. My favorite system. Tried to find a used one. for a while. Did get a osx mac that was awesome until it's power supply decided to go boom . Went back to using cheaper x86 machines, as I am poor.

My understanding is the Dsp port was a serial communication type interface. Isdn modems would use them. It’s based on a European terminal type.

Mr. Retro, an excellent presentation on Next. I learned some stuff and it helped connect some dots I was not aware of. Really good work!

Dude, I am LOVING all of your videos!

I used an SGI Onyx for several years. Irix was a gorgeous UI for the time. I ran Jaleo, an editing and compositing tool.

My approach to what was Next was using the Window Maker window manager. A real pleasure to use. Pity I don't have the time to make it adapt to my current needs

Doom was developed on a NeXt Step Workstation that John Carmack had paid $11,000 COD for. He also had to walk to the bank in the mid-December Wisconsin winter to go get the money because he didn't have a car at the time.

Next was not the first object orient UI btw, Sun NeWS was based on PostScript but they extended with object orientation, multiple incoherence and all kind of stuff. You could write an app in that version of PostScript. In fact, the Display PostScript used by next was very much a lesser version of that idea. Sun NeWS would make a great video.

Fantastic historic video. Well researched and brilliantly delivered. I'm 56 and have lived this, I'm very impressed with your knowledge and presentation. Thank you

On Windows networking, we ran smbd and nmbd on our NeXT equipment it was freely available and worked great. Used it all the time.

The number of ports is amazing especially comparing with current Macs.

Really cool video! And the X in the Mac OS X is a Roman Numeral. It was the version that came after Mac OS 9. So it’s pronounced Mac OS TEN. But great storytelling.

Awesome video and story telling! Thanks you!

Who here has got a NeXT? I have a Nextstation TurboColor complete with monitor and everything. Haven't used it for ages, but it is an awesome piece of tech. The build quality with the magnesium alloy shell is nothing short of amazing.

A VERY interesting video. I would love to have owned one. My only complaint is the bloody Quintet of The Hot Club of France, with Stephane Grappeli fiddling away on his violin in the background. He always sets my teeth on edge. For a sophisticated machine, I'd recommend The George Shearing Quintet (the early recordings are also out of copyright).

My first Apple was the just announced Performa 630. Between the time I ordered it and picked it up from the vendor (A couple of weeks?) Apple had canned the model and recalled them to have new stickers put on them (The LC630). Mine missed that step by a day. I later qualified on BeOS just in time for it to go belly up.

The DSP port was for the motorola 56000 that was a digital signal processor (which is what I think the DSP on the port stands for) and could do high quality audio and double as a fax machine/ modem.

My previous comment aside, this was a very good and informative video. Thank you.

The NextCUBE was a heck of a machine back in the day. It was $10k each running NextStep OS.

About 20 years ago I spent a few months trying to score an old dual-PPC BeBox on eBay to play with.

It's not that Objective-C doesn't have an aesthetic, it's that it rams two very different ones together. I really loved Objective-C until I outgrew it, and it was FAR less ugly than C++, but the Smalltalk-like object stuff in square brackets feels awkwardly bolted on to C.

I'm confused, how does this monitor, speaker, thing connect. The speaker connects to the monitor port but doesn't have a video out to go to the monitor so where does the monitor plug in??

23:41 - Did you miss the video overlay of various GUIs?

I had a 68040 slab (greyscale), and it was the best computer I ever had.

NeXT Cube came first as it was NeXT first workstation computer (wikipedia is wrong), it was let down by the magneto-optical being very slow, which means everyone have to buy a SCSI HDD for it as well. I used NeXT Cube for my first Objective-C project and then moved on to NeXTStation.

You make this very palatable. I’m informed where it counts. Great fun.

I still have a full NeXT system with monitor, I haven't booted it in a couple of years, guess I need to do that!

11:22 Wow!!! That's one neat insides. Better looking than some machines today.

Great video. Very well done.

Jobs demo, what I rememebr the most was the sound demo. That is what impressed me. But I had been doing music on comuters since the Atari 400/800 and VIC 20, and yes I already had a Commodore 64, and an Atari ST at the time of that demo. Keep in mind that the top synthesizer at the time was the Yamaha DX7, Although now that I hear the music from it again, it really doesn't sound any better than a DX100 with 4-operator FM synthesis. (but better than Sound Blaster)

I feel very odd when I remember Mac fans in the 1980s, some with CS degrees, telling me that a non-protected cooperative OS was actually *better* than a memory-protected time-slicing OS, especially since there seems to be a new way for hackers to control your phone or computer every day.

My first real use of Macs was at Uni during the years when mac-os was crud. You couldn't get through a class without a crash and lose your work

Objective C is fairly well organized and structured, the "look" or syntax of a lot it is pretty baroque, clumsy in many parts (parameter passing in particular) but the actual logical structure is good.

I used to teach people how to use Next. We still make Signastation but it is completely different now but originally it ran on Next.