Steve Jobs’ NeXT computer

Roughly thirty years ago, in October 1988, at a lavish, invitation-only gala event, Steve Jobs introduced to the press the NeXT Computer. It was a black cube-shaped workstation computer (with matching black peripherals) developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc., a company he founded more than three years before. 

On September 1985 Jobs had chosen to leave Apple with other veterans of the Macintosh and Lisa teams. He had been ostracized in May after a failed board coup in which he opposed and lost against John Sculley, the former Pepsi Executive he brought to Apple in 1983 to “change the world” together.

The first machines were actually made available for testing in 1989, after which NeXT started selling them in limited numbers to universities with a beta version of the UNIX-based NeXTSTEP operating system installed. Initially the NeXT Computer, or The Cube, as it was nicknamed, was targeted at U.S. higher education establishments only, with a base price of 6,500 USD.
Later, in 1990. NeXT’s computers were released on the retail market, selling for $9,999. 

The NeXT Computer was widely reviewed in magazines, which lauded its hardware capabilities and the combination of UNIX underpinnings and polished Graphical User Interface, but also lamented the very high selling price. When asked if he was upset that the computer’s debut was delayed by several months, Jobs supposedly responded, “Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!”

Under the hood of the black cube (made of magnesium and designed by german firm frogdesign, who Jobs had chosen and worked with at Apple) the workstation ran on the then new 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU. Actually the Motorola 88000 RISC chip was originally considered, and the NeXTSTEP system software was even ported to it (according to lead developer Avie Tevanian) but this CPU was not available in sufficient quantities. So it was panned in favor of the latest iteration of the 68×00 line. It was same chip chosen by Apple, but running at a higher frequency (40 MHz), for its top of the line Macintosh model, the Macintosh fx, released a few months later, and sold at an even higher price, 10,000-12,000 USD.

NeXT’s machine had undoubtedly impressive hardware specifications. It supported from 8 to 64 MB of RAM, had a 40 MB (swap-only), 330 MB, or 660 MB hard disk drive, and adopted a futuristic (and sleek) 256 MB magneto-optical (MO) drive as its removable storage system, though it was later ditched in favor of a more traditional and low cost floppy disk drive. The workstation came with an Ethernet connection by default and had top-notch graphic capabilities. It implemented a licensed on-screen version of Adobe’s professional graphical printing language PostScript, and could drive a 17-inch MegaPixel high resolution grayscale display, measuring 1120 x 832 pixels with total fidelity between monitor and printed page. At the time most PCs or Macs on the market were mostly limited to 640×480 pixel displays and two of the few notable exceptions were Apple’s Two Page Monochrome Display and Portrait Display.

Owing to its education and research targetting, The NeXT Cube was also the first computer to ship fitted with a general-purpose Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip, the Motorola 56001. The chip could be used to support sophisticated music and sound processing, offloading this work from the main CPU.

The NeXT Computer was succeeded by the NeXTcube, an upgraded cube-shaped model, released together with the NeXTstation, nicknamed “the slab”, housed in a low profile “pizza box” case form-factor. Finally, in 1992, NeXT launched “Turbo” variants of the two models, with a 33 MHz 68040 processor and maximum RAM capacity increased to 128 MB. 

Due to disappointing sales, high costs, and hardware development problems, NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993. Apparently, in four years only a meagre total of 50,000 NeXT machines was sold.

NeXT reached an agreement with Canon offloading its factory, hardware-design center, and 60 employees, and in the further years devoted all resources to its operating system and revolutionary software development offer, under the new name NeXT Software Inc.