NeXT

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~ the last words ~

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple on 17 September 1985, after a summer spent holding a title with no operating role attached to it. He took five Apple employees with him. Apple sued and dropped the suit in January 1986, and by then the new company had a plan: a workstation for higher education, built to a standard nobody in higher education had asked for. Paul Rand was paid $100,000 to draw the logo and took the job on the condition that there would be no revisions.

The money came from people buying the founder rather than the business plan. Ross Perot put in $20 million in 1987 for sixteen percent of the company. Canon followed with $100 million in 1989. Jobs built a factory in Fremont rated for 150,000 machines a year, automated far enough that visitors were walked through it as part of the pitch. It never ran at any fraction of that number.

The NeXT Computer was shown at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on 12 October 1988. One cubic foot of die-cast magnesium around a 25 MHz Motorola 68030. It shipped with a digital signal processor no other desktop had and a magneto-optical drive where the floppy should have been, and that drive turned out to be slow enough to be a real problem. The base price was $6,500. Display PostScript meant the screen and the printer finally agreed about what a page looked like, which was ahead of everything else on sale. Universities took the discount and still mostly did not buy.

On 9 February 1993 the hardware stopped. About 280 of 530 employees went and the manufacturing operation went to Canon. What remained renamed itself NeXT Software and sold the operating system for other people's Intel boxes. Apple announced on 20 December 1996 that it was buying the company for $429 million in cash plus 1.5 million of its own shares, and the deal closed on 7 February 1997. Gil Amelio, who signed it, was out of Apple by July. Jobs was not.

~ the record ~

~ one cubic foot ~

The case is the part everyone remembers and it is also the part that explains the price. Magnesium die-casting to that tolerance was expensive and the internal layout was designed to be looked at. None of it made the machine faster. Roughly 50,000 NeXT computers were sold across the whole life of the company, which is a rounding error against what Dell was shipping in a quarter by then.

What the buyers got for the money was a development environment about a decade early. Interface Builder let you drag a window into existence and wire it to code, and Objective-C gave you dynamic dispatch on top of C. The frameworks were organized well enough that a small team could ship something ambitious, which is why the machines ended up in the hands of people who were not the intended customer at all.

~ the machine at cern ~

Tim Berners-Lee had a NeXT Computer on his desk at CERN in 1990. He used it to write the first web browser, which was also an editor and was called WorldWideWeb, and the first web server, which became CERN httpd. The machine is still at CERN with a hand-lettered label on it reading that it is a server and must not be powered down.

The other famous users were at id Software, who built Doom and Quake on NeXT hardware and ported the results down to DOS. So a company that sold about 50,000 units managed to be the development platform for the web and for the first-person shooter inside the same four years, which is an absurd hit rate for a product that lost money on every unit.

~ what NS stands for ~

NeXTSTEP went into Apple, spent a year as Rhapsody and shipped as Mac OS X in 2001. The lineage is not hidden. Open any Apple framework and the class names still carry the NS prefix, which is NeXTSTEP, sitting there in the middle of code written for a phone that went on sale ten years after the company was dissolved.

I learned what those two letters meant a long time after the company they belong to had stopped existing, and I suspect that is the normal order now. NeXT is one of the few dead companies you can still run. The cube was the part that died.

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