Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

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.

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.

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.

> https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/cv770rd9515 Cool, look at this list titled Digital: - Staff mass storage 6A (not sure what this means) - Decide on ECC - Release DMA revision A in November - Release CPU PCB revision A in November

> 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?