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Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

83 points by Austin_Conlon ago | 37 comments

rogerrogerr |next [-]

I'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?

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.

cosmic_cheese |root |parent |next [-]

For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.

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.

LVB |root |parent |next |previous [-]

If you expand your career scope to hardware and embedded software, your odds of having to be at a facility, or some customer site, and thus be by other people, rise substantially. I've had a number of jobs where it'd be quite impractical to be remote. e.g. actually building equipment in labs and installing it in machines, aircraft, etc. There are tons of examples. The obvious downside is that the options need to be near your home, or you move. Hence the various "hubs" that pop up for various expertise (SV obviously, but e.g. if you like aviation, Wichita is a good choice)

smugglerFlynn |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

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.

cube00 |root |parent [-]

> I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day

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.

tannertech |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I did high level IT and general org management for 8 years without a single opportunity to see the office or people in person, before covid. Doesn't make it easy to manage a global team for sure.

steele |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Working with people in person died proportionally with corporate laptops featuring wireless telecom. Not because of the mobility, but more because of the collapse of the otherwise natural modes and boundaries.

larusso |root |parent [-]

Yeah. These days when the work machine actually stayed at work. Or that you had meetings with everybody in the room without in front of a laptop or mobile screen.

bennyg |root |parent |next |previous [-]

It was.

random3 |root |parent |previous [-]

It was. I think it could still be for some things.

TheAmazingRace |next |previous [-]

Because I was born right around the time the first NeXT Computer was announced in late ‘88, I wasn’t cognizant of the rise and fall of the NeXT platform, but I did come to appreciate the projects that were based on it, like the early WWW.

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.

simondotau |root |parent |next [-]

> the rise and fall of the NeXT platform

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.

pjmlp |root |parent |previous [-]

While it was kind of interesting, very few people really could use it, my graduation thesis was porting a particle visualisation framework from Objective-C, NeXTSTEP into C++, Windows, because the department was getting rid of their Cubes.

This was one or two years before Apple's deal, when no one had big hopes for NeXT's future.

felixding |next |previous [-]

I've always liked NeXTSTEP's distinctive user interface. I wish we had a version that ran on modern hardware, similar to what https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace is trying to achieve.

Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.

ithkuil |root |parent |next [-]

I have a toy recreating the visuals: https://github.com/mkmik/nextstop

(It's vobecoded in the original sense of the word)

mvkel |next |previous [-]

> By 1991 only 50,000 NeXTcubes had been sold. One of these, however, was used by Tim Berners Lee to create the first web browser and server.

Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

bigstrat2003 |root |parent |next [-]

> Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

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.

spider-mario |root |parent [-]

Doesn’t that understate it? Isn’t a sales guy still important, to figure out what to build and to actually get it in the hands of users? Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make, and the engineers just so happened to make it?

vee-kay |root |parent |previous [-]

The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers.

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.

boie0025 |next |previous [-]

I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.

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.

wpm |root |parent |next [-]

Not a lot would happen if you plugged it into the internet, unless you happened across a bot that had some exploit for a 40 year old OS at the ready and thought it was worth the time. NeXTSTEP is well into the "secure through age" part of the bathtub curve.

boie0025 |root |parent [-]

That seems reasonable.. "secure through age" is effectively "security through obscurity", which is stunningly effective most of the time... yet, I'll take a hard pass. I will let it rest in peace. Note that your point is well taken. I have an arbitrarily large collection of legacy compute that I have acquired over the years, and it all stays offline because I don't have the time or energy to deal with any fallout of plugging it in. I'm sure everything would be fine. The NeXT box, the old BBS servers, the CP/M crap I can never find time to dork around with.. maybe one day if I am able to retire I'll spin up the inefficient hoard and enjoy it. But until then, I can't risk the distraction. I miss when it was a hobby and not a career.

shrubble |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I used a NeXT mono slab for 8-10 months while working at a NeXT reseller in the mid 1990s. It was a fantastic experience.

boie0025 |root |parent |previous [-]

I should note that it runs "a patchy server" on boot.

jensgk |next |previous [-]

When I was a student at the Technical University of Denmark in the early 1990s, I remember a NeXT computer being prominently displayed in the Polytechnic Bookstore on campus. It was an absolute dream machine at the time, not least because of all the amazing software that came bundled with it.

WSSP |next |previous [-]

this is very cool: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/vv758zk7405

I'm curious about: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rw840qg3512 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rd259yj2574

(jogging club?)

js2 |root |parent [-]

Looks like it. I was working at a startup in Sunnyvale in the early 2000s and a some of us would meet before work for a run at the bay trail. Wouldn't be too unusual to do that at lunch hour either.

That said, these photos look a bit staged.

ghaff |root |parent [-]

Many were almost certainly staged. At the time, people were not generally allowed to be casually snapping photos in work environments.

EleKtr1X |next |previous [-]

the logo paul rand designed for NeXT is just so timeless, it's great

glimshe |next |previous [-]

Just look at these offices compared to the drab monstrosities we have today, even at the supposedly cool and trendy tech companies...

WillAdams |next |previous [-]

The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.

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:

https://nextworldarchive.com/

but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/

rohitkhare |root |parent |next [-]

Glad to hear from another NeXT & NCR 3125 pen computing enthusiast! Yes, it did feel like there were a lot more “new platforms” for early adopters to bet on and advocate for when so much was unsettled back “then” — but then again, none of that pen interface tech (Go and Windows for Pen Computing) worked as well as things finally work today...

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?

DanielKehoe |root |parent |previous [-]

WillAdams is a legend himself. Worth reading how Will and his brother Stephan made their journey in tech. And yes, we need a folklore.org for NeXT.

"As Black entrepreneurs with Berkeley educations, the Adams brothers experienced a complex combination of both structural discrimination and privilege as they started Adamation."

https://computerhistory.org/blog/meet-the-adams-brothers/

random3 |next |previous [-]

Those are some really good photos. I always love to look back at photos in workplaces. I took a ton myself and there's something really cool about capturing the workspaces in time.

rohitkhare |root |parent [-]

If you like that collection of photos at Stanford by Doug Menuez, he also published a coffee-table book at https://menuez.com/fearless-genius

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...

tintor |previous [-]

"Traffic control and bot detection..." Doesn't let me load the page.