It’s 1988, and I’ve just seen the future. It’s a one-foot black magnesium cube. After Steve Jobs left Apple, we all wondered what he’d do next. The answer is the NeXT Computer, and it is unlike anything else on the market. It’s expensive, it’s sleek, and it is a developer’s dream machine.
NeXTSTEP and Objective-C
The real star of the show isn't the hardware (though a 25MHz 68030 and a DSP are nothing to sneeze at), but the software. NeXTSTEP is a Unix-based operating system built on the Mach kernel, but it feels like it’s decades ahead of the command-line Unix we’re used to.
It uses Objective-C as its primary language, bringing true Object-Oriented Programming to the mainstream. With the Interface Builder, I can literally drag and drop UI elements and connect them to code in seconds. What used to take weeks in C on other platforms takes hours here.
// Simple NeXTSTEP code
#import <appkit/appkit.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
[Application new];
// Objects talking to objects...
return [NXApp run];
}
Optical Storage and Display PostScript
NeXT decided to ditch the floppy drive entirely in favor of a 256MB magneto-optical drive. It’s a bold move that emphasizes how much data modern applications need. And the screen! Display PostScript means what you see on the high-resolution MegaPixel display is exactly what gets printed. No more "Close Enough" WYSIWYG.
Looking Ahead
While the $6,500 price tag (and that's the educational price!) means it won't be in every home, the NeXT is going to be the "think tank" machine for the 90s. The way it handles networking and objects is going to influence everything that follows. I’ve heard rumors of people using these to build new ways of sharing information over the internet. If you want to see where computing is going, look at the Cube.