* A single cable connects the Cube to its monitor (with speakers and microphone). A single cable connects the monitor to the keyboard. And a single cable connects the keyboard to the mouse.
* Neither the Cube nor its monitor have any buttons, switches, or controls. The only way to turn the machine on is by pressing the Power key on the keyboard (which is connected to the monitor). It's basically a giant laptop split into 4 parts.
* Likewise, there's no way to turn the monitor off while the system is running. However, the OS will automatically lower its brightness after a period of inactivity.
* Startup takes a long time. Pressing the power key while the system is booting up will interrupt the boot sequence and begin the shutdown sequence.
* The keyboard has no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is engaged by pressing Command+Shift which will light up matching LEDs on both Shift keys. The Control key is where it's meant to be, next to the "A".
* The keyboard has no row of function keys. The Escape key is located next to the "1" key, where the tilde would be. But if you press Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde character, you will still get a tilde character.
* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.
I always liked the voice alerts for printer issues. Recorded people speaking various messages. For English, it was a woman with a British accent saying things like "Your printer is out of paper." Other languages each had their own set of recordings.
But sadly, with Intel torpedoing USB3, our dream of a one-cable computer is still far.
Apple tried this all-in-one approach again with their ADC connector for the early LCD cinema displays. That carried USB, DVI video, and power for the monitor.
The problem is, it's a hassle if you want to use the monitor with a non-ADC video card or a non-ADC monitor with an ADC video card. You end up buying expensive adapter bricks so you can plug an ADC monitor into a computer with DVI-out.
Interestingly, Apple's latest 24" and now 27" LCD goes the other way: it provides a magsafe power cord for a macbook. You still have separate USB and mini-DVI connectors, though, so it isn't a one-plug affair.
"It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax, and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power."
Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"
Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8 MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)
In fact, even today you could use it as a usable desktop. I still find it amazing that we've gone from 8meg to 8192meg ram and two orders of magnitude cpu power but we've done very little with it. We've moved video decoding onto the main cpu, offloaded graphics to a specialized chip and that's about it. (Note: Next's shipped with a DSP similar to gpgpu today.)
Now I sort of want to buy a nextstation again and see if I can live a month just on that.
EDIT: I should note that there's STILL no replacement for Quantrix and Lotus Improv. They are miles away better than excel/traditional spreadsheets. If someone cloned quantrix for OSX I'd buy it.
And couple it with fat/universal binaries, and you've really got something special. As someone who just installed their first instance of Windows x64, the difference between that world of having both "Internet Explorer" and "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" icons and a world where a complete system image from a 32-bit PowerPC can be booted seamlessly (with all apps still working) on a 64-bit Intel processor is stark indeed.
I loved Nextstep and I still prefer it to Mac OS X, even though the latter has became something far prettier. I really should see if I can run it via emulation, like I can with BeOS, another favorite OS of mine.
edit: here's a helpful blog post by one of the VMware guys: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek-ou.h...
I eventually had to put them out when I graduated. My car wasn't going to hold all the stuff I had acquired and something had to give.
(http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&...)
Yes, 3rd party hardware developers were expected to make sure the card-end panel face matched the cube's color, rather than being unsightly bare steel.
Moore's law is a powerful force indeed
It's these machines which indirectly enable so much as well. People like to talk about the cloud a lot, but video that gets uploaded to YouTube has to be edited somewhere. Now while it's true that YouTube has a flash based editor now, they didn't before they got big. And there is all the other video, HD quality, out there that needs to be edited on beefy machines: 3D modelling, games, music et cetera.
