Steve Jobs and the Rise and Fall of NeXT Part 1
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- Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
- Steve Jobs was an enormously influential figure in the history of personal computing, not only as a founder of Apple computer, but also as the man who significantly changed the way we experience computing, music, communications, and media.
But in between introducing the Macintosh in 1984 and the iMac in 1998, Jobs went through an interesting but rarely covered period in life where he was essentially fired from Apple and started a new computer company called NeXT. His goal was to repeat his success with the Macintosh and bring to market an entirely new platform that would go as far beyond the Macintosh as the Macintosh had gone beyond the IBM PCs.
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Credits
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I have just posted the provisional final draft of the script for part 2, check it out on our free Substack anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/steve-jobs-and-the-rise-and-fall
Edit 7/1/2024 - Two nights of recording done so far, comprising roughly 2/3 of the script.
Also wound up adding another 900 words to the script tonight so it’s almost 20k words long now.
Greetings from México. We looking forward for the second part. ✋
nice man!
really looking forward to the next part! this is great.
looking forward to the second part 🙏
Where is it, 3 months after this big announcement?
I'm looking forward to part 2
Spoiler: NeXT dumped the hardware division to develop some joint software projects with Sun before it was bought by Apple and used to develop OS X.
So,no part 2? 🤣
A pity actually because it is a good documentary
Part 2 is definitely coming, it was actually supposed to be released last fall. However I wasn’t happy with the script, and couldn’t seem to get it to where I wanted it. Hence it’s been sitting on the backburner. I’m going to take another crack at it after the next two videos, if I’m happy with it then it should be released this summer.
@@AnotherBoringTopic try you best please,because the happy ending is yet to come 👍
@@AnotherBoringTopic The perfect is the enemy of the good. Looking forward to part two. Love your channel, man.
no matter how long part 2 takes, this part 1 is already excellent work. A LOT better researched than the other Steve-and-Next stories I find on RUclips.
yeah - waiting
I saw a demo of a NeXT computer in college around 1991. I was smitten but of course couldn't afford it. I now work in a building across from their old headquarters in Redwood City. There's a harbor next to it; I can only imagine the walks Jobs took there having deep discussions with his engineers and staff (or yelling at them).
Probably more yelling, from what I understand.
The problem and lesson from NeXT was that you can’t sell all of the latest hardware technology in a single product at once; you have to gradually implement things over a planned timeline, market each feature and tell stories and show customers what the value of each new technology is and why hey want it. Steve was so ambitious with all the new things he was trying to roll into the NeXT machines, he forgot about what this added to the cost and showcasing why each feature and piece of tech was useful.
Fast forward to his return to Apple and he has learned and created a much more long-term and consumer price optimized approach.
"Imagine Steve Jobs as part of the Amiga team." Why did you have to plant that seed in my head? We'd all be still using amigas now probably.
The NeXT cube was in a different class than PCs. It was more similar to Sun and Apollo workstations that were far pricier than an OC/Mac.
You were SO RIGHT about how Isaacson spent far too little time on Jobs's maturity due to NeXT. Thank you so much for taking in the reigns here!
A really good book I read was “Becoming Steve Jobs “. it really focuses a lot on how his failures and his ability to adjust finally lead to his extraordinary successes. I felt like it was much more grounded than the Isaacson book.
That is a very good book on Jobs, it’s one of my sources for whenever I have time to do part 2.
You have definitely put your finger on one of my problems with Isaacson’s book, it really is more of a hagiography than a biography. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good stuff in it, but the book skips over or only briefly touches on a ton of key events in Jobs’s life. I mean his time at NeXT is almost entirely glossed over so Isaacson can get straight to the iCEO years.
Also check out iFailed.
Yet treatable cancer finally killed him. Nutjob.
NeXT was also the platform on which Mathematica invented the notebook interface. It was also the development platform for Lotus Improv, one of the most impressive spreadsheet programs ever conceived. Among many, many other things.
I loved Mathematica. Wish I had a use for it today.
Mathematica’s graphics looked advanced for the time, but 3D technology progressed, and it didn’t.
I did my Master's project on NeXT as "The Future of Graphical Workstations" at the University Of Western Ontario in 1990. NeXT sent me to their week-long developer camp at Carnegie-Mellon. I used one of the few machines on campus owned by the director of library science. After graduation I bought a used Cube and commercialized my project as "At The Beep", a digital answering machine. I sold the Cube when I moved to Australia, one of my major regrets in life.
Is your thesis available online now? If so, is it still relevant?
@@editingsecrets Ha, that was back in 1990 so it's probably on a shelf in the library somewhere, not online. As for relevancy, it predicted everything we see in graphical user interfaces, networking and developer tools, but the world has gone another 1000% past anything I could have imagined!
I was told that, when NeXT was set up, the goal for the company was to create a workstation with a million-pixel display, a million bytes of RAM and a CPU that did a million instructions per second.
By 1987 or so, these specs were no longer so cutting-edge. So the goal for the company changed to producing an “academic workstation”. They even had an advisory panel from academia to guide them on the design of the Cube. And yet, with all this feedback, that same market stayed away from the resulting product in droves.
Man oh man i remember seeing the first NeXT machine and being totally blown away
At university in the early 1990s, there were a half dozen NeXT computers in a basement lab. I used them mainly only to access the (early) internet using a simple terminal program, but, having never heard of NeXT, they were intriguing machines.
My impressions at the time: The case, monitor, keyboard, etc. being all black was very striking at the time (when computers were all beige). The display on the monitor was impressively large and sharp; I remember thinking 'too bad it was only grayscale, if it was in color it'd be gorgeous'.
The case was a big cube shape...although kinda cool-looking, it took up a lot of space on the desk. I think there was a black, NeXT-branded printer there too. I played around only a little with the very few programs that seemed to be installed...I remember where a Trash Can would be on a Macintosh, there was Recycle Symbol instead (IIRC a "dot" would appear inside the Recycle Symbol to indicate there were files in the 'bin').
You're right about the printer. All processing done in the Cube, only the bitmap squirted to the printer by high speed custom network.
It's hard to believe that NeXT became the biggest company in the world. All it did was change it's name from NeXT to Apple.
Two words: reverse merger.
I took a calculus class in college in 1991 that was done in Mathematica on a NeXT system.
Great video! Now I am waiting for part 2
Glad you enjoyed it!
No worries :-) I’m really happy I stumbled onto this channel.
Me too. Still.
I have a good chunk of the script for part 2 written, and I was hoping to have it done and released before the end of 2022. Unfortunately I am just not happy with the script and until that changes it’s going to be on the back burner for a bit.
@@AnotherBoringTopic No rush. Keep up the excellent work. Cheers.
Mac OS was never known as 'OS Ecks' - it was for a while branded as 'OS ten'. X is the roman numeral meaning 10.
There's good research on this channel but I cringed at hearing Jonathan pronounce 'OS Ecks'. "That's wrong! Did he not even skim Wikipedia?!" I thought to myself.
Then I _actually_ read the Wikipedia page and 'OS Ecks' was very common in common usage by common people. And that's okay. I accept that now. I forgive you Jonathan.
Wikipedia quote from BBC Click:
"Of course X ("ex") does mean 10, but anyone who used to poke around on Unix systems will know that in those days anything Unix had an X ("ex") in it, and OS Ten is written OS X ("ex") in honour of the fact that it is based on UNIX, unlike its predecessors. So, hey, you can say it any way you want; me, I'm showing my age and sticking with X (ex)." -- Kelly, Spencer
@@matthewboehlig1073 It has nothing to do with age. People who were around then know that it was always 'OS ten', it came after System 7, OS 8, OS 9 and then OS X.
@@BillRey I agree. You were derided back in the day if you referred to it by 'X' instead of '10'.
You know its actually "jif" with a soft g not "gif" with a hard g, like 80% of people say?
Fun fact that doesn't matter either.
"OS Ecks" is the way most normal people referred to it. And yes, we know it's a Roman numeral.
Where is next part 2 haha I'm dying for more content on your channel. And I know that a loooooota other people are waiting for you to expand your library. You're amazing at this stuff man
Interesting factoid: the designers used a trick made popular by the greeks and romans (I think w/ the Parthenon?) one dimension of the "cube" is actually purposefully shortened. I think here by about 1/8". This makes it look more perfect to our human eyes.
Love these vids, cheers!
I did not know that, very interesting fact! It doesn’t surprise me to hear it, it’s the sort of little design detail that Jobs loved
Urm. Make it less square to make it look more square... What garbage that is
@@procactus9109 no they really did shorten one side, it’s an optical thing.
@@ColdRFusion I don't doubt it, but the reason stated is absolute bullshit.
@@procactus9109 > I heard that the magnesium injection molded cube was part of the reason the machine was so damn expensive, and it couldn't be a perfect cube since it would have been impossible to remove after molding, so it really needed what is termed a draft angle on the sides to make it removable from the mold.
Jobs apparently argued that the thing must be a perfect cube, and I'm guessing he must of eventually relented when the cost of an automated multipart die was put to him.
I suspect the non-cubiness story was just Jobs reality distortion field kicking in around anyone who noticed it wasn't a perfect cube.
All of his products failed until the ipod. Then he realized he was selling electronic bling.
Love to see part 2
Excellent video. Where is part 2?
Glad you enjoyed it!
Part 2 has been written and fully recorded, but is quite a ways away from release. Editing is going very slowly as I haven’t had much time to work on it. Total length is well in excess of two hours long.
The script is available for free over on the Substack :)
-Jonathan
I can tell you exactly what would have happened if Steve Jobs had been in charge of the Amiga Team. It would have cost 5 - 10 times the price that Commodore charged for them. LOL. It would have been packaged in a rather elaborate and elegant box (for which Apple would have charged an exorbitant price for the privilege of opening).
Man you know you stuff once I figured out how to keep up with ya ....your all right 👍👍👍👍👍 great video 👍👍👍👍
I think the big problem was investing in hardware too early. If NeXT held off on that and solely focused on developing the OS and software until capable and affordable components existed, the NeXT Computer could have entered the market as a refined product with a full suite of offerings.
NeXT is an extremely important chapter of Job’s life. Today’s Apple is only possible because of the work done at NeXT. Much of NeXT is still at the heart of every OS Apple powers their hardware with. Using a UNIX-like microkernel, (much of Mach has been removed from MacOS according to the folks working on the BSD kernel), a Postscript windowing kernel, (now PDF based and called Quartz - which always set all Apple operating systems apart), Object Oriented Programming, fast video and audio I/O, and its ability to server boot, (a feature I wish Apple never removed). Jobs had a T1 line routed to his house, and that worked well for him. No one else did at home! With today’s 5Gb fiber optics internet now available this feature would be interesting to have. Nevertheless it was mainly designed for the classroom by the time it became Apple’s. You may remember when Jobs rolled out a bunch of iMacs on a huge cart and they were all booted and running from one server. Great demo. Just a little head of its time. Great video too. Thanks!
Thanks a lot for the video and the transcript! I wasn't aware of the two books you cited and purchased both of the now. 🙂
Can you re-upload Part 2? I can't find it
Part 2 doesn’t exist yet unfortunately. The script currently sits at 5200 words and is probably 60% done or so. The remainder is fully outlined but I’m not sure yet when it will be finished and ready for recording.
16:45 I was informed sometime around 1992 that it was pretty much a requirement in the computer science department at Virginia Polytechnic that incoming students purchase a NeXT computer.
I really loved this video. How can we help make part 2 of this series happen?
I was a developer (called an Analyst/Programmer at the time), starting in 1990. I was a Clipper Programmer working for a large bank and we had 386SX IBM PCs with small LANs that held the database, of which there were many at the time, I think we used Sybase. We didn't need NEXT machines to get the job done. Yeah they were very pretty, but too expensive, and we got the job done with DOS machines. NEXT is a classic case of what's called "Gold-Plating" in Project Management - overengineering a product in a very expensive way.
WHERE IS PART 2 it’s been three years dude. Haven’t you learned from doing these videos on Steve Jobs that bring a perfectionist bites you in the ass in the end. The irony that this video series is based off of a man who was notorious for delays when shipping new products.
I’m certain I’ll be dead before part 2 ever drops.
. . . and I’m only 27.
It’s coming I promise!
Last night I posted the provisional final draft of the part 2 script to the Substack
open.substack.com/pub/anotherboringtopic/p/steve-jobs-and-the-rise-and-fall
i always wanted a NeXT computer when i was a kid they look so cool and i wanted to learn unix and thouht this would be a good system to start i beg my father for one these and said it was way to expensive and couldnt afford it so i got a packard bell in 1993 ... not a next computer, but at least i still got a computer to use which was super cool.... though i still dream of owning a next computer... now im a apple guy even though i love my amd pc i do however use apple computers as well ..... i also like linux whichi i use a lot as well, but yeah windowmaker is a cool desktop and im still glad to see it in macOS ... great video :)
yooo dude, part 2, pleeasee
I’m happy to say that I finished the rough draft of part 2 a few days ago (14k words), I can’t say when the final draft will be done, but significant progress is being made. Once it’s done, I’ll post the whole script to the Substack for people who want to read it while I spend a few months making the video.
Regards,
- Jonathan
@@AnotherBoringTopic Thanks man!
lol 4 years for part 2 b 😂. Well I guess better late than never. Cant wait to see this, I’ve watched your first one several times over the last several years. Funny enough, I actually just received my first NextCube this past week.
Part 2 is well over two hours long, hopefully it’s worth the wait :) Not sure when I’ll be done editing, but I am making slow progress.
It’s awesome that you got your hands on an actual NextCube!
@@AnotherBoringTopic I’m sure it will be!! Yes I am very excited, yesterday I spoke with Rob at BlackHole and am in the process of getting some NOS parts for it to make it like new. Next is a Lisa and MacTV and my grail list will be cut down significantly. Look forward to the video!! Thanks again.
The problem with NeXT was the 030 and 040 Motorola chip(s). They couldn't do CAD. If they could, it would have been right there with Sun, HP, and Silicon Graphics and would have likely saved the company. CAD was just starting to come into it's own and still required more computing power then Windows could handle. Of course Windows NT did away with all of the above names, but it would have given NeXT another 10+ years. Looking back it's clear that Steve was just writing the next version of the Mac OS. He used all of us employees to further his personal agenda, and it worked. For him.
I worked at an government agency in which the procurer person was an Apple fanboy and he equipped the agency with NeXT junk. It had a proprietary operating system that was incompatible with everything. You were limited with applications and the ones they had were hard to use.
Just a small correction here.
Wolfenstein 3D was NOT developed on NeXT.
What an amazing channel! I hope it'll grow in subscriptions and produce more outstanding videos.
Appreciate the compliment! It’s definitely been very cool to see more and more people finding their way to this obscure corner of RUclips. :)
Around 1995, I bought a handful of "Next" logoed binders from a thrift shop in Milpitas, CA. I still have one binder with the "Next" logo. I wonder if it is worth anything on the memorabilia market.
Where is part 2 ? I cant find a link for it. Did he end up doing a part 2 ? I love these videos :-)
It's not uploaded yet.
Part 2 is going to be awesome
5:10 I love how people talk about the failure of OS/2 and Next, but 95+% of all current desktop/laptop computers run what is essentially OS/2 or NextStep as their default OS.
Great video. I wonder if you'd be able to get more views by also posting to alternative platforms. RUclips is very crowded by others are rapidly growing. Just an idea, you do great work and I'd love for it to get more attention.
Appreciate the compliment :) The channel is slowly but steadily growing, which is very encouraging of course, but it would be nice to get it in front of more eyes. I think our concern would be that other alternative platforms such as DailyMotion are even harder to get noticed on, and although there is a ton of noise on RUclips, it’s still where most people start looking for content to consume. We would be very interested in being part of something like CuriosityStream or Nebula, but those platforms are pretty closed to tiny creators like us. My understanding is that we would need hundreds of thousands of subs to even be considered.
@@AnotherBoringTopic what I was thinking is mirror your channel on other sites, that way you won't lose anything on RUclips. Lots of creators do this. There are several good ones out there Bitchute, Locals, Minds, etc. Bitchute in particular has been growing quickly in the last few years.
I have looked at Bitchute before but it seemed like it was difficult to use and for people to find you. Still, having backups is always a good thing, and RUclips’s ad algorithm is very capricious (not that it’s relevant right now since we can’t monetize until 1k subs).
Appreciate the suggestions!
5:06 the dual arm robot was an Adept one that was integrated by CHAD Industries in Anaheim ca, now part of Jabil. They were selected for their "odd form" connector feeder and gripper products. Odd form means to specifically handling large parts, a typical pick and place machine could not support. Steve Jobs made all machine suppliers pain their machines the same color to make a uniform production line.
Very neat detail, thanks for sharing! I read that Jobs also had the assembly line reversed in some way so that it “looked better” for visitors watching it in operation.
Yes, I think it was in the Isaacson bio I read about him having the manufacturing robots and other equipment painted. He didn't understand those machines are designed the way they are for, among other things, efficient heat dissipation. The paint interfered with that and pretty much ruined the assembly line. Jobs also insisted on having the inside of the computer case painted to look nice just like the outside. Total waste. Apparently he also had the inside of the factory repainted multiple times. More waste. I appreciate his concern for aesthetics, but he would let stuff like this just wreck his judgement. I think John Scully was right, Jobs needed to be fired and go grow as a CEO before coming back to Apple wiser.
Thought it looked like one, with the changed color/branding it makes sense now :)
Amazing how much pointless aesthetic touch-ups there were in the factory that added no value. Toyota would consider that sort of thing a waste.
This isn’t a boring topic it’s intriguing but I already watched some video about this I think
Was there ever a part 2? Cant find it.
Part 2 is still being scripted, script is about 60% done or so.
Thanks for this amazing work. I would suggest to compare NeXT with Sun Microsystems, as they are the ones who succeeded where NeXT failed.
I think the core problem with NeXT is they had technological solutions before there was a problem Ovject oriented programming is not perceptible by consumers, and developers cannot afford to write software only few people can afford. Networking TCP IP was useful at universities networking researchers , but there was no consumer front facing app like WWW when NeXT launched. But it is this failure that turned around Jobs to prioritize solution / market demand over pure technological coolness. Jobs NeXT started developing for Windows (WebObjects, EOF) and started to be profitable, despite his publicized dislike of Microsoft . The near death experience of NeXT made him a bigger and more mature person .
So, what happened to The Rise and Fall of NeXT part 2? Have you had the same (dis)organizational problems NeXT had?
That’s a very fair question (and a hilarious analogy 😂). I have always intended to do the second part and finish out NeXT’s story, however I have kept pushing the video back on what we very loosely refer to as our schedule. The biggest reason for this was the fact that I kept getting sidetracked with other videos that I wanted to make, plus the fact that until recently, the NeXT video has not performed very well.
Given two subjects that I am equally interested in and have done a lot of research for, I tend to prioritize the one that either is tied to something already performing well, or is something new that I haven’t tried to build an audience for yet.
However I am tentatively planning to start scripting NeXT part 2 by the end of this month. Scripting it will probably take at least 4-6 weeks, then production will take another month or two. Earliest it will come out is end of August. Ahead of it(in no particular order) is the final OS/2 video, a RTB video on the former king of the word processing market, and an untitled video from my partner on a certain streaming company. These are all in production right now.
I truly appreciate your patience and I promise to do my best to finish out NeXT’s story by fall.
@@AnotherBoringTopic- My impatience is entirely due to the extremely high quality of your content and script. I enjoyed this video immensely. I realize that a production of this caliber takes a lot of research and search for supporting graphics. I will look forward to the next chapter. If it is of the same quality as the first chapter and the entire Rise & Fall of IBM series, it will definitely be worth the wait. Thanks.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Sounds like ABT is suffering from major "Feature Creep"
Hmm “feature creep” might have worked well as an alternate channel name…
@@AnotherBoringTopic second season was canceled/
Came for the Reality Distortion Field, Perot and Canon investment, object-oriented programming, virtual labs for higher education, beautiful case interiors and factories, business pivot after pivot, built-in multimedia mail, and outselling Gasse and Be as the future of Apple. Now to watch the video and see how much payoff I'll get.
Hmm, seems to cover about half the story as someone who closely followed it at the time.
The oft-delayed Part 2 covers the other half.
I currently plan to put it out this summer, script is fully outlined and about half written. Schedule will heavily depend on how long it takes me to get the next Windows video done.
@@AnotherBoringTopic Looking forward to it! You have a very pleasant documentary style.
I’m looking forward to part 2
Please God, make part 2 happen.
I believe that Next’s biggest customer was the then covert National Reconnaissance Office. If fact, before closing down the factory, the last production run was made explicitly for the NRO.
Part 2 please :)
Excellent video. I was always wondering why Next failed.
might say it's the Rise, Fall and Big Rise of next since MacOS, iOS, IpadOS, TVOS, WatchOS and now visionOS are based off NeXT
“Well the answer is that … the NeXTStep operating system is still SOMEWHAT with us today…” yeah on every Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AppleTV. I’d say that’s still “somewhat” with us 😂😂😂
I had a NeXTstation at the time. A genius perfect implementation of a product nobody wanted.
The genius of NeXT was indeed the software. The late Dr. Michael Hawley was a dear friend of mine. He was best man at my wedding and lived with Steve Jobs at the Jackling house. He appears in Isaacson‘s Jobs biography. Look him up in the index….
NeXTstep OS was definitely wildly ahead of the curve, by probably close to ten years. It’s neat that you personally knew Hawley, he seems very much like the type of person that Jobs liked to surround himself with, highly intelligent people who understood the need for aesthetics in computer technology.
I like Issaacson’s biography of Jobs but I do wish it didn’t give such short shrift to his time at NeXT
@@AnotherBoringTopicInteresting tidbit: Jonathan “Ponytail” Schwartz was Scott McNealy’s successor at Sun. He arrived at Sun because he headed a company called Lighthouse Design which had a Microsoft Office type product (Desktop publishing, Spreadsheet and presentation suite) for NeXT. Lighthouse also did custom code for Wall Street Trading. Sun was negotiating a NeXTStep on SPARC port. And hoping to leverage Lighthouse and NeXTStep to combat Windows. A truly object-oriented desktop system that took the Xerox PARC concept to the NeXT level! 😉
Unfortunately Schwartz became the most hated CEO in Silicon Valley.
Great video, when does part II drop?
Just consider that steve job's name would have been stefan arbeitsplätze, had he been a german.
Where's part 2? Won't watch part 1 unless I find it.
Was part 2 made?
Next Step was decades ahead of OS/2. If IBM had licensed Next Step and included it with all the PS/2 systems. It would have really given Microsoft NT a run for it's money.
They were paid $100,000 for that logo? I'm in the wrong job.
24:25 Now that's an accurate statement about Steve Jobs (I would think). His obsession with the aesthetics of product design (because, after all, you can only grossly overcharge your customers for products if they are neatly packaged and presented) was incessant. Forcing those you lead to pursue unobtainable goals and capitulating only when they have exhausted themselves in such pursuits ... he excelled at that. I would liken him to having been a bit like a coachman driving his team of horses to exhaustion across the plains and discarding the team for a new one after he has lamed them.
So where's part 2?
Provided I can get the script where I want it, it will probably be out sometime this summer. However I also meant to have it out last fall so this can always change.
I plan to focus on it after I get the OS/2 and rise of windows part 2 videos out the door
I guess there is no part 2?
didn’t Next computer end up being acquired by Apple? One of the underpinning of macOS, so it’s a bit premature possibly to talk about the fall may be a better term is the rise and rise of next step
Where's part 2?
It's coming, I promise. Meant to have it done last year but I wasn't happy with the script so it's been sitting on the back burner for a bit.
Funny the Atari Falcon ended up with the specs of the NextCube (including the DSP)
The only NeXT system I ever saw in person was a lone system that the University of California Irvine had purchased, which must have been in late 1989 or early 1990. I remember reading about it and being excited about the specs, but it was obvious to me even as a college student that seven thousand dollars in 1989 was a sum of money that not even the most ardent computer enthusiast could justify for a completely non-standard system with no available software.
My host dad has a next computer in the basement office next to a 486 back in 1997. I was mesmerized by its UI.
Where is part 2 bro
Still no part two? I'll be back in 3 months
RUclips has turned into one big ad machine
You must not have seen the internal next video where jobs lays out their target market, next was only a ploy for acquisition in the end.
What video? Do you have a link?
is there a Part 2
The tablet long, long predates the iPad. Well over a decade, closer to 2 decades.
It's crazy Commodore could build Amiga computers with 68000 cpus and other similar specs to the Next cube but sold for a fraction of the price. Jobs has never managed to build a product and sell it for a good value price.
Title should be rise and fall and rise of the Next 🤔 OS X based on Next OS is insane success story. Apple is now not only the biggest computer company in the world and biggest mobile phone company with other products that are massively successful and all based on Next OS. What Steve Jobs was missing was Tim Cook. Someone that knows how to make a fantastic product and then mass manufacture it with profit.
Evolution of the Next cube went to Apple cube and to Mac mini. Apple cube was ridiculously difficult to manufacture and it never made profit even though it had a hefty price tag like the Next cube. Mac mini finally got the form factor and the manufacturing was automated. I can remember being in the factory lab and trying to figure how to take apart the Apple cube and then get it back together. Yikes that was difficult 😬 Beautiful machine but so horribly wrong from the manufacturing point of view 😱
The sales numbers were always under reported by virtue that several Intel agencies used them for custom app development including the FBI, CIA and AFDoI. (I personally dealt with AFDoI personnel looking for apps sourced from our European partners. The point being - those were 'off book purchases' - although enough of them were needed - the factory - shortly after being shut down in 1993 - was restarted to provide extra inventory and surplus units for a 5 year plus installation. The best guess is how many units can be made a day X the number of days the factory ran at peak capacity (I want to say it was for a week, but I'd have to run a deep-dive to confirm that).
Very interesting! So in theory there could be something like an additional ~2500 NeXT computers that were quietly built off-the-record, based on what Randy Heffner (NeXT head of manufacturing) said was the factory's capacity of 10,000 computers a month.
@@AnotherBoringTopic - The NeXTstation that I purchased in 1991, was put to task and paid for itself the same year running Adobe Illustrator for advertising and packaging illustrations. Although the price was high (by today's standards) it was a fraction of the cost of the Mac IIfx's of the day - particularly when paired with the laser printer (Apple laserprinters still cost as much as the NeXTstation itself at that time). I was pushing project files that took over 15 minutes on the Mac to print - in literally seconds - thanks to the 040 and the display postscript engine that drove both the display and the printer. Niche to be sure, but if you had a specific application for it - you could justify the purchase against a slower Apple workstation that cost 3X plus as much.
One fun aside, the display postscript engine wasn't limited to the display and printer. I was transmitting faxes to clients - and the DP implementation bit-blasted HQ images to the recipient at 200 (or more) DPI when most faxes were crippled by a 100dpi or less scanner. I had many clients call back drop jawed at the in-progress output images they received.
Nitpick : 22:00 the 040 wasn't just in the turbo models - it was in all the machines post 1990. The turbos were using faster 040s. 33 vs 25mhz (as well as swapping ports from serial to ADB).
Oh and finally - the networking was so over the top - it didn't just file share or link to other NeXTstations - the whole user config could be dialed up on another machine - apps and all. You could walk down the hall and login and be faced with the same desktop as the one you were using previously.
They were overall such amazing machines, I really hope to own one at some point. Jobs wanted to create something five years in the future and I think the NeXT team succeeded far more than they failed.
Its always interesting to hear from people who actually used them, how many years of service did you wind up getting out of the NeXTstation? And when you upgraded, did you go Windows or a Macintosh?
No worries about nitpicking, my goal is to be as thorough as possible and the feedback and corrections I receive are very useful for when I script part 2 (probably next year sometime).
@@AnotherBoringTopic I used the NeXT as a daily driver until 1994 and NeXT machines were used both at home-and in-office (more on that down below), but it was still running alongside the Quadra 800 that linked to the growing amount of photoshop work I was doing at the time. I've always (tried) to be OS agnostic and migrated to Windows in 1996 when the pre-OSX MacOS was turning into a restart dumpster-fire. I've also used SGI-Irix, Solaris, NT and others in-office (not to mention the parade of 8bits in the 80s). I jumped back to Mac when OSX became stable and useful in the 2000s (so nice to come home to NeXTstep). In fact, until recently they were really nice boxes - the mini's particularly - in running OSX, Windows and Linux at the same time (although I'd only dipped my toe into linux on rare occasion).
One last thing - I was plugged into NeXTworld magazine's staff, interviewed for NeXT, worked for an OEM & VAR supporting NeXT & NeXTstep - and even prepped and hauled NeXT machines for refurbishment before sending to Japan with an independent reseller (started by an OEM co-worker). If you want some inside skinny, I'm glad to share for part 2. I still regret not rolling the dice with working for NeXT - regardless of the horror stories / drama / lore which I have a few that's undocumented - because those that migrated from NeXT to Apple all took senior positions - and made out financially quite handsomely. More than a few valley insiders referred to the Apple-NeXT pairing as a 'reverse-merger' because it was a total housecleaning of Apple vets for NeXT folk (some of those senior Apple members I ran into working with various dot-com 1.0 companies in the 2000s during my own Silicon Valley tenure).
You can find me via the VCS zine link which includes a publisher address in another reply.
I am looking forward to working on part 2 as the story of how NeXT went from almost bankrupt to basically taking over Apple is probably the most interesting part of the saga. I am quite fond of the Classic MacOS, but its limitations were a real problem in the 90s and I will be covering some of their attempts to rectify it prior to the NeXT acquisition with videos on Copland and BeOS.
I will absolutely be reaching out to you once I start scripting part 2, information on NeXT is rather sparse and your perspective would be invaluable.
Really enjoying your videos :-)
Appreciate the compliment!
Since it was bought out and made into the os of all future Apple devices was there ever a fall?
He really have a nack for reading the wind, so to speak, we can't forget about Pixar either.
if you compare the Next cube to the Xerox PARC Alto or later varients far predating the Next cube you find very similar specs and capabilities but they had it in 1972. By 1989; you could have a rather powerful Windows system at a lower price than the Next Cube; though it still did have some interesting elements like object programming.and unusual incorporation of a math coprocessor. Clearly the Next Step OS was derived from BSD Unix and that was on many workstations of the time. The Next was compeditively priced but lacked applications mostly due to poor market penetration
Wasn't exactly a fall though. Lives on in Mac OS X now, and even Linux if one so chose to do so with AfterStep - "window manager with the NEXTSTEP look and feel".
GOLD info here!
Jobs wasn't "fired" from Apple (you correct that yourself later in the video). Thank god they ousted him in 1985 because if the had a saying back then apple wouldn't have survived long enough for Job coming back 10 years later and eventually saving the struggling company from bankruptcy.
I would argue that he basically was fired from Apple, in everything but name. It’s actually kind of reminiscent of the Japanese business practice of putting people who majorly screw up something into a “window seat” where they are still formally employed, but have no power, projects, reports, or anything to do(for example, Gunpei Yokoi wound up in the window seat after the abject failure of the Virtual Boy, even though he was the creator of the Game Boy). As the cofounder of Apple, which was publicly traded by this time, Jobs couldn’t really be summarily fired without potentially serious stock repercussions. On the other hand if he was stripped of all power and humiliated, he might just resign on his own, which would look far better (or at least less bad) to stock holders.
I do agree though that whatever you want to call it, it needed to be done. The original Macintosh had serious design errors as a result of Jobs’ dictates that ensured it would be a sales failure until they were rectified, and he was standing in the way of those badly needed changes. His time “in the wilderness” and the failure of NeXT matured him to where he was able to take Apple back to success 10 years later. Then after his death Johnny Ive started getting carried away with form over function and Apple started making beautiful but crippled computers AGAIN….
@@AnotherBoringTopic Fortunately Johnny Ive was fired, after MacBooks PRO 2016 series fail.
What happened to part 2?
The script is currently sitting at 11k words and I am pretty close to completing the rough draft. However the final draft usually takes me a while to be happy with so I still do not have an estimate as to when it will be ready for recording.
Once recorded it will take at least 6-8 weeks of editing before it’s ready for release.
- Jonathan
@AnotherBoringTopic Thanks, Jonathan. I'm looking forward to it. Part 1 was riveting. Thanks for the great work.
Wow. It DOES sound like Jobs wanted to invent the Amiga. Specialty chips, multitasking OS, more storage on the floppy, and the specs were what I had my Amiga expanded with back in college.
25MHz 68030, 68882, 56001, 8-64MB RAM and a harddrive is basically a slightly suped-up Atari Falcon 030.
And at 1/8th of NeXT price you would also get an actual 8-bit VGA. No wonder it was a failure.
Amazing channel name, instasubbed
0:00 I object to this being called "The Rise and Fall of Next" It should be called the stumble and fall of next or something like that which does not imply a metioric rise followed by a fall. There was no rise. Only the fall, which granted was not from any great height.
Another person pronouncing it Mac OS Ex! The X is a Roman numeral because it’s the 10th major version of the Mac OS. It’s Pronounced Mac OS TEN. Just like the iPhone X is pronounced iPhone TEN. 5:28
We need part 2 now
I was ready to subscribe after watching 2 videos. However, both were part 1, and no part 2. This was a video from 3 years ago. The other was fairly recent. As much as I really enjoyed the content, I'm glad I didn't like or subscribe. I feel like I'm being led on with subscribing, which would falsely boost your channel, with the hope of not being left on a cliff hanger. I understand that you probably have more important, and profitable duties. But you are rolling out new cliffhangers without finishing the last. I just wanted to relay this information, and please keep up the amazing detail videos. But can you please try to finish them??????
Thanks for taking the time to comment with constructive criticism and feedback, I really appreciate it :)
I am not deliberately leaving series unfinished, I promise. NeXT part 2 is coming, and was supposed to be done last fall. However the script wasn’t coming together well, so I put it aside for the time being while I worked on other videos. I think I’ve got it sorted out now, and I do tentatively plan to get it out as the third video this year. But I refuse to record a video until I am happy with the script, and sometimes that takes a lot more time (and tweaking, rewriting, getting frustrated, etc) than expected.
Regarding the Windows series, 1-2 episodes a year is probably the best I can do without burning myself out. The rough draft for part 2 is largely done (I already did the bulk of the research), and I will be focusing on it after the current video (fall of OS/2) that I am currently editing is done.
I am very slow at content creation, but I promise that I am always working away at it. Have a great day!
@@AnotherBoringTopic Thank you the update. I will patiently be waiting, for an A+ script. You just raised your standard lol. Yes, burn out is an important factor that I didn't fully consider, due to the other videos posted after. Thanks again for the information, and I will be sure to subscribe to get the updates when they roll out.
He's just recreating the NeXT enthusiast experience for a new generation!
part 2 ?!
real questiopn is were was WOZNIAK all this time.... ohh yes he's still the GOAT in 2023!!!!!
Jobs made him millionaire.
@@nnnnnn3647 lol
Wozniak chose to leave Apple before NeXT started, pursued his interests in education, philanthropy, and concert production, and didn't return to technology design until years after the time discussed in this video.
I wonder if Steve ever felt that some of the things at Apple were archaic compared to some of the things that were innovated at NeXT.
The Part 2 never came
I’m currently working on editing part 2, although it is still at least 6-8 weeks away from being done.
In the meantime, the script is publicly available on our Substack :)
anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/steve-jobs-and-the-rise-and-fall