Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office
exhibits.stanford.edu
exhibits.stanford.edu
At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.
I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.
I’ve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I could’ve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC…what a time that must’ve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they don’t pay the bills yet but they’re the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.
This is sad and kinda foolish but it's refreshing to hear money going in this direction instead of the other. I hope this CEO has a good life at least.
No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.
The majority of jobs from the earlier computing era were doing mindless menial work like fixing the Y2K bug in 1000 COBOL systems doing boring stuff like accounting software.
But if you look closely you can see this editor/compiler/references thing is reviving. Its just, the kids are telling the AI to edit/compile/reference.
For example, you could have been dealing with COBOL banking software. Or order management software. Or even spreadsheet software.
The difference being that all the tools were a lot worse and everything was built from the ground up so it took a lot longer.
Exciting stuff was about as common as it is today, and the reason you aren't doing exciting stuff today is likely because you know that 90% of those companies will end up failing and might not actually pay you. The most successful of those companies will likely do something like selling insurance adjustment software.
Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.
Brains are weird.
While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.
I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.
A SW guy in the bay area costs $15,000 a month. And the MBA's won't spring for even 50 square feet of space for them? Which would be what $300/month?
I think you guys should just up and riot.
I have some good memories associated with open floor plan offices, but I totally get why others might not be so lucky. There were several days back then where the commotion surrounding me was too “loud” (e.g. people moving in my peripheral vision catching my attention) to shut out, even with good ANC headphones, and made it near impossible to work. I would’ve loved a cubicle or private office on days like that.
These days I work from home and don’t miss that aspect of modern offices a whole lot, even if they do enable the occasional serendipitous positive moments.
In a way, it hasn't changed a ton. Except, the startups now are not so scrappy, and the mission is pretty hotly debated (and for understandable reasons0.
I cant see it. I was in the embedded dev world from the early 90s to mid 2000s before I moved into infrastructure architecture. The mostly homogeneous world we currently live in is just not even close to what we had in the 90s. At one point I had a Next Cube, an IBM RS/6000 (AIX 4.x Unix), a BeBox (BeOS), an OS/2 system (PPC), a Sun SparcStation and 2 x NT 3.x system (x86 and PPC) all sat in my office at the same time. The diversity of hardware and operating systems is just not comparable to today. It was an exciting time of rapid development and change and we were aware of it. Much different to what we have now where we just like to pretend we are in a time of rapid development and change but the reality is incremental change and small increments at that outside of AI
I havent found anything in the IT world to excite me for close to 20 years. The expanding core counts were interesting to start with but soon got boring. The introduction of ARM was hardly an excitement. RISC-V is dead as far as performance designs go though its a great micro controller arch. Software is abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer. There is almost nothing new and hasn't been for a long time
Bill also had some different definitions of “getting stuff done”. At General Magic when others were driving super hard to get things done, he would make soup and ensure that everyone was eating and not totally driving themselves into the ground.
It was a really interesting group of people, with Pierre Omidyar and Tony Fadell going on to make large impacts in the tech world in different ways. Everyone there was really interesting and smart, even the ones who continued to build and work without all the publicity.
Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.
My observation about being in Silicon Valley in the 80s/90s was the overall changing environment and ethos of the people there. I am sure there are going to be some massive simplifications here, so bear with me.
One is the overall environment back then. Things weren't cheap, but rent was much more affordable in relation to pay. NeXT paid well, you could rent in decent place in Burlingame, Foster City, Redwood City, etc. The commute down Seaport was fairly quick and traffic was light. Things seemed less crowded and frenetic and that made going into the office less of a chore. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is pretty intense. The tiny townhouse I bought in Cupertino near the current Apple campus was $150,000. It recently sold for 1.2 million. I haven't charted it, but the relation between compensation and housing costs have to be wildly out of proportion to when I bought the place. I was pulling a very good salary at the time and a lot of that money went into savings and investments. Now, I imagine a lot of that income would go into mortgages and expenses. Maybe current residents can comment.
The overall attitude seemed to be more about doing new and interesting things and maybe the money will follow. There wasn't as much of a go to Silicon Valley and get rich doing a startup. Maybe this was just an echo of some Berkeley hippie vibe that was present in a lot of the tech startups back then.
The new and interesting things also seemed more accessible. It seemed like there was less gatekeeping and more ways to get involved with "cool" stuff. Maybe this was also an echo of the Homebrew Computer club and early computer hacker ethos.
I do work person to person in a company, but I feel super lucky to have gotten this role. Really good in-person roles just seem super rare. The ones that I have been exposed to at Amazon, Google, Facebook and other current hiring centers just seem miserable to me. Please correct me if I am wrong and am missing the big picture.
Maybe this is how early Google people felt or how early OpenAI felt. I don’t know. They do have an embarrassment of riches, but I am sure they also felt they were doing great things.
I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.
My current job is back working on hardware products and the software that runs in them. It isn’t quite the same feel as 80s computer companies, but some of the joy is there.
Venture Capital, working in the office, how companies operate.
The 1980s and 1990s were largely a scene of people who wanted to be there and were less concerned with KPIs and raising money.
They were engineers or designers first for the most part.
Today’s world one of the first things that happen to any startup is an MBA rolls in to “help get it off the ground”
MBAs don't roll into startups to help get them off the ground. One of the good things about what YC has done to startup culture is remove the notion that engineers can't just run the company and do sales.
Yes, but in a much less frenzier and more kept in its place VC capital mindset.
Your comment about Amazon sucking resonated as I recently talked with them about a job, but walked away being super disinterested. I do not think this is an Amazon problem (fwiw, I worked at Microsoft for a super long time), I think it's a "problem" with the massive success of technology in the world.
Back in the day of NeXT, Be and early Apple, it was alot about building something cool and fun and a less about the huge money that could/would be made. Now the whole world relies on technology and there is so much money that the environment of a tech company is alot more about the business than it is the technology.
I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.
I think this is how best to sum it up. We (tech workers) had agency back in the day as we were on the vanguard of something new and there were no best practices in how to manage us. These companies were run by and for tech workers. Today, you'd have all sorts of "stakeholders" telling us what to do. Product managers, various management and/or work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc), and top-down oversight.
At my previous job, I was literally dressed down for doing work on the side to resolve some technical debt that was hindering other work because it wasn't properly pointed. Didn't matter that I did it on my own time - showing initiative beyond the current story board was a no-no. How is one supposed to be happy in such an environment?
> work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc)
But the wonderful thing about these places is they can create/acquire/prop-up small subsidiaries. If they're self-aware enough to know the oppressive force at their size, they leave these offshoots alone (until too big, where the cycle repeats anyways). These are the parts where you can still experience the magic being discussed.
Presumably working at X Development (formerly Google X) still has a lot of this energy and autonomy.
I am trying to think of something interesting that hasn't been mentioned before. One thing I keep thinking about, when comparing it to other companies I have been at, is that I really liked the founders and the people there. So much in fact, that I ended up working with subsets of them at other companies a few more times. There was definitely stress and overwork and unpleasant things like that, but I never ended up feeling abused or treated poorly in the ways I experienced at Apple, Amazon, other startups or DreamWorks actually.
Eazel stories are very interesting because the company was trying to interact with the open source movement and this caused some friction several times. Looking back at some of those meetings, it is interesting to compare the youthful idealism of people like Miquel DeIcaza and Nate Friedman to the people they have become today.
Amazon is and always have been bean counters and toxic work culture, and any level, from warehouses to their devs. The rot starts with Bezos.
You can get a sense of what it was like in the film Real Genius.
In the film, it's college. But a lot of companies of the era weren't too different from what is pictured.
it is not too late to build a better computer and to also be in a working environment that has fun
Watch Office Space if you haven't already. That's what most of the irl white-collar existence really reflected throughout my career. And unless you actively pursued (and arguably created in part yourself by seeking out, showing up, and participating) something special even back then at a startup, you were very likely missing out then as much as now.
There are still people making things, irl even. I'd be surprised if Tenstorrent didn't have an environment like you're pining for, or Tilt Five.
I'm 43, but when I was your age I worked for a agency doing custom software development for non-software companies, in an office. I retrospectively think that could have been some of the most meaningful time that I spent in my career -- in terms of having impact on the real world that I can point to, and growth and social connections. Also, because the people who ran the company had little experience of the business world: almost no meetings, no product managers (we just talked directly to our customers). Just about 15 software devs, some UX folks and a minimum viable management layer (who was also sales).
It was mostly 1-2 people per project for the lifetime of the customer, so you had a lot of leeway over how you built software, as you were going to be probably maintaining it for the rest of your time at the company.
But at the time I hated it: meh pay, chaotic work environment, micro-management of your time, FILLING IN TIMESHEETS, an open-plan environment which was noisy and distracting, no structured knowledge sharing, CI, testing or other grown-up software practices. I was very unhappy there and don't want to over-romanticize it -- but I wouldn't be the person I am today without that experience.
They aren't mixmaxing or trying to score a promo.
In-person, copresent time spent with friends has _also_ collapsed by roughly 60% over the last two decades. The social fabric of our civilization is thinning out!
Have you seen _The Matrix_? That's pretty much where this is all headed: total corporate mediation of human experience and relationships. You are forced to passively contemplate as an audience member the very concepts of joy and creative agency that oyr current economic architecture denies you from living.
Your nostalgia is valid; you're being cheated! Swindled! Thieved blind!
Dense, multi-stranded local networks and informal support structures are an obstacle to the Capitalist imperative to enclose every non-monetized "commons" and turn every facet of human life into an immediate site of market extraction.
The only solution is engaging neighbors and co-workers in direct conversations to name our concrete, everyday grievances.
Directly! And not on moderated forums like these, where powerful techno-elitists can continue the project of mediating our reality. (Hi, Tom!)
You really don't. The world has gotten a lot worse in lots of ways when those days are compared to today, and the industry and job market for IT even more so.
Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.
(It's vobecoded in the original sense of the word)
- pop-up/vertical main menu
- PANTONE colour library
- Display PostScript
I actually used similar machines running NeXT/OPENSTEP, Mac OS, and Windows shortly after graduation and the performance was smoother and more consistent in NeXTstep 3.3, though I will admit OPENSTEP 4.2 felt just a tad more sluggish, but it was far and away the more useful and capable machine, even when running the same software (e.g., Altsys Virtuoso vice Aldus Freehand, or FrameMaker or WordPerfect).
Probably helped that the Cube had 52MB RAM, the Mac 8MB, and the Windows 12MB.
I really wish Display GhostScript had gotten traction w/ the GNUstep folks.
On comp.sys.next.advocacy Mike Paquette talked about how he might not have stayed at Apple after the NeXT acquisition if he'd realized that that first decade was going to be a re-tread of his first decade at NeXT (writing Quartz vice writing Display PostScript) which I think really understates how important that code is.
The GUI library aspect is progressing well, but getting a desktop environment going is challenging even with AI. Still I want to capture things like the document workspaces and such. Lately Ive been tempted with making a postscript like display server based on GPU accelerated vector primitives.
One of my goals with Merenda is to make a NextStep/Cocoa like GUI system but with a richer primitives - things like resizing corners dynamically with the shadows or adjusting gloss positions on skeuomorphic buttons.
Things web pages can do nowadays but in a NextStep like framework with rich MVC. Also with message passing but in Nim a more strongly typed language than ObjC.
An alternative evolution of Cocoa instead of SwiftUI.
Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?
Thus the FPS genre in gaming was pioneered on these pioneering machines.
Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system. Sun Microsystems partnered with NeXT, for the NeXTSTEP Solaris but lost interest, but it later created Java as a direct competitor to NeXTSTEP.
Apple used NeXT's software technologies as the foundation for Rhapsody, Mac OS X (later macOS), and the operating systems that followed.
So NeXT -> Doom -> Nvidia -> AI
Yes, very easily. He didn't actually make anything, he was a sales guy. It was the engineers who worked around him (Woz in the Apple days, others after) who deserve credit, not Jobs himself.
But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.
The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.
- first iPod prototype --- Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium and when bubbles rose up noted, "there's space inside, it can be smaller". https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-threw-ipod-protot...
- iDVD --- he drew a button on a whiteboard and announced, "Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make." https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/how-steve-jobs-1-design-...
I'd like to think that the current behaviour of the Apple Font pallet where when collapsed into a single bar grew out of a suggestion made after discussions on comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- but he was justifiably proud when he showed it off to one visitor (per a link I can no longer find, or which is no longer up, or behind a paywall)
This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.
Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.
The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.
> the engineers just so happened to make it?
Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.
You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.
To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.
The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?
> OSX would certainly never have shipped.
If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?
Well, honestly, in hindsight, let me correct to 10000x! But seriously, this is a discussion about a historical event, and that is what my comment expressed.
> If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?
I don't really understand this comment. I mean, Be actually ended up being worth about 11 million as a result (the Palm acquisition). Apple, meaning Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock and the other business and technical people who met with us at Be, and our counterparts at NeXT, had to to an analysis and predict the future as to which technology would replace the current Macintosh OS and eliminate the failing Taligent, Pink and whatever else efforts were going on. And even then it wasn't easy; there was infighting between the Apple teams and the NeXT teams that didn't get resolved until Steve came out of limbo during the 18 months he was acting as a advisor to Gil Amelio.
What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen, but a combination of JLG, the Be board and shareholders and Steve made that not happen. Instead, Be went into making internet appliances, audio hardware and the company and its stock price slid into decline. Be did get one additional windfall of 23 million in 2003 which was the result of lawsuit settlement, so I guess the overall company value ended up being 34 million.
Most of us would have preferred to work with the NeXT people at Apple and convert our Be shares into Apple shares, instead of seeing the stock price fall and the code become irrelevant.
I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:
"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"
"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"
"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"
If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.
And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?
I wasn't aware of this:
> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen
What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?
A bit of both and it is a fascinating thing for me to think about, because of the knock on effects. Because Steve was insightful, even if JLG was on board with it, Steve probably would have told Amelio, don't bother, because we can scoop up the people later on. Steve did something later on with Eazel, although with Andy Herzfeld's request to do so, and ended with much of the Safari team, Finder/Spotlight team, key CoreGraphics and iPhone team members and more.
If all of Be had went to Apple, perhaps Apple would have use used elements of the Media Kit, the file system (Dominic ended up at Apple doing the new file system, and more anyway), the UX team (Bill Bull ended up at Apple anyway), etc. But the effect on the industry would have been interesting. Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop wouldn't have happened, Android under Andy Rubin wouldn't have happened, Hiroshi would have ended up an exec at Apple and not running Android for Google, Eazel probably wouldn't have happened (not such a big deal). Benoit would have been an exec at Apple and not Google, Erich Ringewald would have ended up an exec at Apple and not Amazon, etc. These are must minor fluctuations I guess, but fun to think about.
That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.
But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.
I don't blame Steve Jobs
For what he's done to our bodies and our brains
I blame you and me for making Steve Jobs feel like what he done was right
...
And I don't blame Steve Jobs
For turning rock-and-roll into a store at the mall
I blame you and me for accepting the seduction
Of being normal
I don't blame Steve Jobs
For driving a spike through the heart of the public space
I blame you and me
For retreating into fantasy, fingering our half-formed thoughts
In our sleek sexy crumbling civilization
...
I don't blame Steve Jobs
For making us timid and effete
I blame you and me
For paying Steve Jobs to turn those sins into a lifestyle
And a product
And an industry
And an identity
A badge of honor
...As a matter of fact, the first time I even heard of NeXT was a decade later in around ‘98, when PC Magazine or Computer Shopper (I can’t remember exactly which one) made a brief and snarky mention of the NeXT Cube in a retrospective blurb as a novel yet highly incompatible computer system, no doubt penned by John C Dvorak (RIP) who always had it out for Steve Jobs. It stuck with me, because the image of the NeXT they used looked like no other computer I was familiar with at the time and I was head over heels for it. I even tried procuring one for many years but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Frog did an outstanding job on the design language for the NeXT hardware. They then went on to help design the look of the Packard Bell PCs from the early to mid 90s too.
These are really cool photos and, honestly, I’d love to travel back to this past even briefly, just to experience it in person if I could.
This was one or two years before Apple's deal, when no one had big hopes for NeXT's future.
In a very real sense, the NeXT platform never fell. It just changed its name to Mac OS X. Apple still ships Chess.app and TextEdit.app which can be launched from Dock.app, and you might see a spinning beachball cursor while it loads.
I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.
I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.
They left out that it was in Fremont, California, providing jobs (lol) for Americans — something that Apple famously stopped doing on their path to becoming obscenely rich: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/a-brief-history-of-steve-jobs...
For all his warts and all, Jobs is starting to age well in comparison to the current crop of wankers.
Excuse my French.
IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. This is like saying, we all tell lies, so how can we criticize Trump? There's a huge difference between normal human foibles and extreme antisocial behavior. Perhaps Jobs calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly. Some of them retained a lifetime of bitterness, and his death was a kind of catharsis for them, not that they wished him dead but rather they could finally let go of the old emotions.
Even good-natured Woz was pained when he finally learned years later that Jobs had cheated him on a pre-Apple business deal. The problem wasn't the money, which Woz was always happy to give away. It was the betrayal of trust and friendship. Jobs was not a normal dude. He was a deceitful narcissist; this is on the public record in an FBI background check: https://vault.fbi.gov/steve-jobs (credit to the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" for the link)
Does the end justify the means? That's an ethical question.
Also, how much did we really need what we have now? We can ask whether dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, but in any case the stakes were extremely high, already life and death, world war. The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?
I've listened to the most recent books, e.g. "Apple in China", "Steve Jobs in Exile", "Apple the first 50 years". By all accounts, he was a very difficult persona, but somehow folks gravitated to him or he changed gravity. Not trying to idolize the guy but failing, but I'll tell you I cried and my heart sank when I heard the news of his passing.
Who can you name now at the helm of any tech company today that has anywhere same gravitas? The charlatans at the 2 top AI firms? Certainly not MSFT, Google, Amazon and FB ether, imo. Nobody cares about their CEOs.
The stakes are not nearly the same when we're talking about luxury consumer tech gadgets. How much do workers need to be abused just to produce those?
But on this, vote with your wallet. This is not luxury though, this is - https://www.neimanmarcus.com/p/prod293940005
Neiman Marcus The 2026 Fantasy Gifts Star Wars Legacy Experience $182,500
iPhones are just phones at a different price point at a different quality point with different levels of support. Some like Hondas, others - Lexus'. I can't say about abuse, I haven't been to China or India, but do you think any people on Android assembly lines fare better off? Not arguing, just spitballing.
What I meant was he made some really horrible _business_ decisions while at NeXT, things that would be considered obvious today, like constant opinion changing on whim, constant product delays, product decisions that for the most part seemed to make the product more expensive and less functional, skipping important business meetings because oh-I'm-so-important when they really needed the sales etc. Granted I got all this from a podcast and didn't dig into the details myself, but I think for the large part he did objectively make some pretty horrible decisions in the early days at NeXT, although in the end it seems that he did seem to learn from them and turn things around, and arguably made him the guy he is more known for today.
Again, my amazement mostly stems from how he even had the chance to turn things around given the way the company was going and how he clearly still had some pretty talented people stick through the whole ordeal and end up producing valuable products through all that was going on.
I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.
Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).
Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex Bézier curve manipulation.
Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12
And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
Lots of information at:
but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/
"As Black entrepreneurs with Berkeley educations, the Adams brothers experienced a complex combination of both structural discrimination and privilege as they started Adamation."
This was clear on usenet con comp.sys.next.* since I had an aol.com address.
That said, Millenium Notebook was one of my favourite apps.
As a NeXTStep user group leader, the usergroup scene is something else “in-person” that has been as altered as in-person offices were. Not lost or gone, but yes, different. Keep connecting, though — these are the “good ol’ days,” aren’t they?
Second encounter was with my first tech job. This time, Pentium Pros was the hardware and the company used OpenStep to develop a paperless hospital solution. Spent about 2 years working on different bits and pieces. Great times!
Cool, look at this list titled Digital:
- Staff mass storage 6A (not sure what this means)
- Decide on ECC
- Release DMA revision A in November
- Release CPU PCB revision A in NovemberSteve with Ross Perot here
Btw this image viewer - per page, is extremely sluggish and slow.
Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.
I'm curious about: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rw840qg3512 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rd259yj2574
(jogging club?)
That said, these photos look a bit staged.
He also had access to the Apple Newton team and produced https://beyondword.com/products/defying-gravity-31949 , which is also part of their collection at https://archives.stanford.edu/catalog/photo451_aspace_ref192...