Peter Urban at Smibs managed to find a rare NeXT Computer on eBay, and paid $400 to obtain the machine which was originally sold for $6,500. He unboxes it in the video below.
NeXT is the company Steve Jobs founded after he was booted from Apple in 1985. They originally made these extremely high end, high priced computers, but eventually moved to an all-software model.
It’s a historical device. Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer in 1991 to create the first web browser and web server, and John Carmack used a NeXTcube to build Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom.
NeXt was eventually acquired by Apple in 1996 for $429 million. That brought Jobs back to Apple, and because of that I get to have an iPhone. Cool stuff.
NeXT systems aren’t really rare. Black Hole Inc. still sells systems and parts, and the “slab” systems (with the occasional Cube) are still available on eBay and the hobbyist market.
http://www.blackholeinc.com/
NeXTStep is also the ancestor of today’s Mac OS X.
A bit of headline irony from the April 1993 UnixWOrld magazine:
http://www.flic...rbill/29870210/
That’s awesome! Thanks, Peter!
Unpacking the machine was magic. Everything plug and play. Power-up via keyboard and the user interface and object oriented approach of software integration across the system was miles ahead of anything else at the time. It’s almost shocking how similar the UI is to the current Mac OS X.
I hope I’ll have more time to ‘play’ with it over Christmas. I’ll try to post another video soon.
If you look at Cocoa and the iPhone SDK, the original App and Foundations kits were part of NeXTSTEP Developer Kit.
Each method is prefaced “NS” for NeXTSTEP. Prior to that, NeXTSTEP originated from CMU from the late 80’s. The Mac OS X is a product of over 20 years of very visionary work relying heavily on OO techniques.
Reno
Former NeXTSTEP/OpenStep Developer Product Manager
Nice to meet you
nice to meet you to peter!
$400 – whoever sold that on EBay did a very poor job of marketing their auction! I’d have paid more myself
You’ve got it and I was very glad about it too. The funny thing is that I won the auction from my iPhone sitting at a book store having a coffee
How much are you willing to pay? I will sell you the same system…
$300.00
Bill Bradford thanks… http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc
There was an audio recording of Steve Jobs on the computer welcoming us. He really knows how to get people excited about a purchase.
Robin,
I would have paid more for that myself and still wish I had mine. It was black when the industry was beige. It was a cool looking box – Jobs used this for inspiration of the Apple Mac Cube
How much are you willing to pay? I have one for sale…
Hey Bob,
give you $500 for yours. if you are interested, let me know. In SF. reno at marioni dot info
Cheers
As an old-school Mac guy, I give you props for doing the captioning in Chicago. =)
Hey Mike,
In the you-can’t-make-this-up dept, I actually own *all* of the NeXTs used by John Carmack and id Software to make Wolfenstein and DOOM. (John gave them to me years ago – see http://doom-ed....e-last-nextstep )
They’re sitting in my garage. I’m trying to find worthy causes to donate them to since I’ve totally failed to do anything interesting with them.
wow. does it boot?
You can get quite a bit of software from this site http://www.nextcomputers.org/ (and connecting links). Also lots of history, pictures, even the full M&A contract of Apple buying NeXT. See my comment below in a few minutes …
Dodn’t you work on this way back when? http://contract...996.12.20.shtml
Last time I turned them on, yes, they all boot. (I have like 7 of them).
They have all of id’s old software and everything on them, too – but John made me promise to wipe that stuff off if I ever give them away / sell them / whatever.
I was thinking I’d see if the Computer History Museum wants one (they have a NeXT but it doesn’t have this history), and then auctioning the others off for worthy causes like Child’s Play.
But I’m open to other ideas….
yeah i totally did! we worked six days straight on the merger. I met steve jobs at the end of the whole thing, went to his house to get signatures.
Cool stuff, I thought I saw an interview with you somewhere talking about that and about some spilled coffee … good ‘old’ times.
I am thinking of doing my next presentation on the NeXT cube
.
Peter, did your cube come with a copy of Concurrence? If not, you should find it for your presentation. It’s the best
Brings back a lot of fond memories of the early days of writing SW on my cube.
Alan,
I think Concurrence is missing but I’ll try to download and install it over the holidays. I’ve heard great things
.
Donate them to De Anza College in Cupertino to go along with all of the other Mac stuff Woz and Jobs donated to the school.
Do they have a museum or something?
Nice video Pete…hope you have a good time with it during the Holidalys!!!……Cheers!!
Thanks Sam, I actually also have a nice tech chop, cut and rebuild project planned – so hard to decide what to do first with the precious free time I have.
Good times – Back in the day i was a NeXT developer. After they folded, i couldn’t bear to developer for anything else so moved to marketing instead!
(From memory I can still hear Steve’s whiny voice from that ‘first email’ that all new users got):
“Hi. This Steve Jobs. I’d like to welcome you to the Next world…”
Ah, fond memories there. Interface Builder in the 0.8 days had no connectors…
How far we’ve come!
Cheers,
- Bill
This is very cool. A video documentary of ‘the machine that builds the machine’. Showing the then cutting edge fully automated process to build the NeXT cubes with the young Steve Jobs at the end http://www.next...he_Machines.mp4
NeXT was most definitely not a failure – technically it was ahead of its time and uncompromising. A whole lot of the NeXT operating system and frameworks are now the basis of the OS X. Commercially it wasn’t great but they did manage to get some big government contract.
Long live Steve !
Cheers
I guess nothing has changed from NeXT to Apple…they’re using the same ideas…and, conveniently, they are way overpriced…only reason i’d ever buy a mac is if i was doing video editing type work, they are basically a waste of money otherwise
Wow – Mike, thanks for noticing this event.
That company had technology which was *so far* ahead of everyone else. Proof of this is in OS X. More than half of it is of the same design.
I used to use the NeXT boxes back in 90 and 91. I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to develop on one of those systems. Yet, many didn’t. I did notice, though, that a lot of the NeXT developer jobs were in Chicago and Wall St.
Fast forward to now. Cocoa is now loved by many. Yet, these new faithful cannot see the flaws in the system. The just don’t realize that they are programming on something that is 20 years old (and definitely feels that way).
Anyways, again, thanks for posting about this. Great memories.
cheers
We used to use NeXT at MCILocal from 96 to about 2000. We used them for all of our circuit provisioning.
Unfortunately, they were tied into a REALLY slow backend. When trying to work, the machine would be waiting on the servers. The provisioners would yell out at once, “SPINNING!”
Wasn’t I surprised 5 years later when I bought my first Mac. That little spinning ball was there to great me again.
Awesome. How did Jobs convince Apple it was worth $400 million.
I still have mine. But I ain’t selling
What’s next?
Kiss the future is better than to embrace the past.
Steve Jobs, 1990, in Interpersonal Computing Demo http://youtube....h?v=-1wYy5qvA24
Gettysburg College used NeXT Systems for their administrative computers. They also sold them to students and my brother bought one. I remember him bringing it home and getting to play with it. Compared to my Dad’s DOS computer, it was incredible. When Gettysburg transitioned to PCs, all of the NeXTs were put in a basement and were going to be thrown out. I managed to grab them, so I have about fifty or sixty slabs in my basement, but I don’t have any monitors or keyboards. Not quite sure why I’m holding onto them. I had some projects in mind for them, but nothing has happened, yet.
Hey Chuck,
I was looking to get a slab next. I guess I’d have to complete it in your case… DM me at http://twitter.com/peterurban and maybe we can strike a deal.
Thx peter
Hi, I started my computing life on a NeXT slab. I would like to own one again just for nostalgias sake. I cannot afford a bundle of money for one but if you were willing to let one go cheap…
Nice…I’ve got 2 Nextstations full of software Improv, Mathematica etc. In looking through one of the machines it must have been a demo machine – it’s only been used for 3 months it’s entire life. Awesome machine though. I’ve got it sitting next to my Apple Lisa-1
This is very cool. I worked as VP-Marketing for NeXT in 91-92. The poster is right, Mac OS X is very much related to NeXTStep. You really want a slab, they are much faster than Cubes. The 68040 was way faster than the 030.
good price!
Hi,
Reading through everyone’s reminiscence about the wonders of Steve Jobs singular vision without compromise reminds me exactly of the technical lead the Amiga computer had as the most advanced computer for all of its time, including Apples machines.
It also continues to be used by many people today, but didn’t have the superficial stylishness, just internal elegance, intuition and efficiency.
What happened that allowed the PC, beige and cold, to takeover where no user of it cares for it a jot, unlike those earlier cutting-edge machines with personality (and community)?
Kind regards,
Shakir Razak