In ’93 I was about to go into hock to buy a NeXT computer. The NeXT was several hundred thousand light years ahead of the PC and Apple machines at that time. I liked what I saw, and I read everything I could find about it. In 1993 I attended the NeXTWorld convention at San Francisco’s Moscone Center where I watched Steve Jobs use mass hypnosis techniques on an audience of crazed Unix hackers—and one budding novelist (me). He did a great demo of the NeXTSTEP programming environment and built a calculator by dragging widgets around: the crowd went bonkers. We went hysterical when he created an interface with a slider that changed a number in the display window. Awesome magic in 1993.
After Steve’s keynote presentation the fired up hackers surged into the concourse to lay down $2,000 for the NeXTSTEP SDK. There was electricity in the air. All around me brainiac NeXTians clutched their precious NeXTSTEP shopping bags to their bosoms as they walked back to their hotels on Market Street to start all-night hackathons. I was envious of them because they already had NeXT machines and I didn’t. I didn’t care anything about the programming. I just wanted to get my hands on one of those cool black boxes.
The WWW was invented on Tim Berner Lee's NeXT computer
It was not to be…
Before I could raise the bucks to join the party, NeXT stopped making hardware. In its time, NeXT sold only 50,000 computers. However, the company did stay alive as a software company—NeXTStep lived on in NeXTSTEP for x86.
In 1994 I bought a rip-roaring custom-made, top-of-the-line, no-name 66MHz i486 with 8MB of RAM, a monstrous 17″ monitor, an HP4MP Postscript printer (still works after 17 years) for a paltry $7,000 dollars. The 600dpi printer was 4K of that.
You might ask why a non-programming Comparative Literature Major would drop 3 months’ wages into a computer that he didn’t know how to use. I don’t really have a good answer. I just wanted it. What can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants.
The crowning glory of NeXTSTEP was the desktop. Though it may look a little plain and rectilinear in this day of glossy buttons, drop-shadows, and gradients everywhere, the NeXTSTEP look grabbed me. I found it soul-stirring, and even now, it still grabs me
Tim Berner Lee's HTML editor circa 1991-92.
My 486 is long gone, but NeXTSTEP lives on in every Mac OS X computer. That Aqua desktop you all love (except for those of who hate it) is the great-grandchild of the NeXTSTEP. When Steve rode back into power at Apple in 1997, one of the conditions he demanded was that Apple purchase NeXT Computers for $400 million. His beloved NeXTSTEP and BSD UNIX, which had evolved to OPENSTEP by that time, was to become the basis for Mac OS X.
NeXTSTEP is dead. Long live NeXTSTEP.
