Ne Xt

Circa 1985 when SteveJobs left (or "was ousted from") AppleComputer, he went off to form his own company, NeXT Computer, Inc., along with a group of very talented engineers. Their goal was to write a NewAmazingProduct -- a fully integrated operating system, windowing environment, and development environment that they were to call NextStep, and a visionary MotorolaSixtyEightKay based platform to run it on.

It later became that, initially it was SteveJobs' way of getting vengeance on AppleComputer. "We're going to kick their butts."

My boss has a NeXT box. It serves as a visionary platform for the monitor connected to his Toshiba laptop

Later, the hardware was dumped and the OS was ported to Intel, SPARC, and PA-RISC. Then the OS was rewritten to run on top of other OSs instead of on top of the MachMicrokernel. This project is called OpenStep.

Later still, AppleComputer bought NeXT since Apple desperately needed a new OperatingSystem. Today, the NeXT vision lives on in MacOsx and the GnuStep project.

SteveJobs came back to AppleComputer when they bought NeXt. He turned NextStep into MacOsx, and also make the G4 Cube, eerily reminescent of the original NeXt Cube.

NeXt came with a Foundation Kit that served as the, well, foundation for programming on that platform in ObjectiveCee. FoundationKit? offered objects for Strings, Arrays, Numbers, Dates, the Object class, file I/O, string scanning, and many others. FoundationKit? lives on in FoundationFramework??, a subset of CocoaFramework for MacOsx developers. It paired with AppKit??.

Merged from NextRiscWorkstation

The 68040 was kinda outdated by the time that Next really hit their heyday. So, they and others talked about the NextRiscWorkstation

The rumor was that the HP 712 was going to be licensed for this purpose. Reportedly, the 712 is the second nicest platform to run NextStep on. The first nicest being the original "black hardware" (the Cube and NeXTStation).

NextStep also runs on HP Apollo 735 (PaRisc) machines. A 735/99 is just over 3 times as fast as a NeXTstation Turbo (33MHz 68040) using a simple integer benchmark (http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/c4/fhour.html). But the nicest thing about my 735 is its 8-bit colour frame buffer! By comparison, a G4/350 running MacOsx is about 15 times as fast as the NeXTstation. --TobyThain

Merged from NextBlackHardware

"Black hardware" is used to refer to NeXt m68k computers (the Cube and NeXTStation) in the context of NextStep. In contrast, other colours refer to hppa, sun4 and x86 (IIRC). [Note: Someone could fill in the missing bits here.]

"White" hardware was x86. Not sure if hppa/sun had colors. They didn't seem to be widely used.

EditHint: Is this a well known term for NeXt, or just an anecdote? Maybe this could be moved to a MachineColor? page (but I do not know, if these color references are really typical. If not this anecdote should be factored into the NeXt page.

Understand that at this time, a black computer case was extremely rare, so a "black cube" meant only one thing: NeXt. This was well known (by some).

See: NextStep, OpenStep, WebObjects, ObjectiveCee

CategoryHardware