https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-in...
But what did this staircase look like?
Jobs found office space in Palo Alto, California, at 3475 Deer Creek Road,
occupying a glass-and-concrete building that featured a staircase designed by
the architect I. M. Pei. [0]
NeXT's expansion prompted renting an office at 800 and 900 Chesapeake Drive,
in Redwood City, also designed by Pei. The architectural centerpiece was a
"floating" staircase with no visible supports. [0]
One of their main features was the wood-and-steel staircase, which seemed to
float in mid-air, and came at a high cost of having elevators removed, upon
Steve's demand. The stairs would later inspire similar designs in the Apple
Retail Stores. Other striking features included a marble dining area and
$10,000 sofas. This lavish corporate environment was later understandably held
as evidence of what went wrong with NeXT. [1]
I had planned to shoot Steve with the incredible floating cement staircase
I.M. Pei designed for him in the lobby, a precursor to the clear glass version
that later became famous in the Apple stores. We begin setting up lights and
talking things over with Steve’s team. Finally Steve came storming in, hours
late due to traffic on his way down from Pixar, and in a terrible mood. He
took one look at my set up and announced, “This is just stupid. We are not
doing this.” [2]
> certainly haven’t reevaluated their stance on anything
Brings to mind the idea of "simulated thinking:"
We have so many different schema that have been loaded into our brain on how
to respond to different conversational gambits or events in our environment
then we are in fact almost exclusively acting out of habit and almost not at
all actually using the part of mind to truly, deeply contemplate what’s
happening in front of us and the proposition is that that’s a trap, that we
would find ourselves in simulated thinking it can be very, very effective in
circumstances that are what’s called ordinary like say you’re in school. That
can be extremely ineffective when you’re actually in a novel environment much
worse than just a regular old habit mind because at least habit mind is more
fluidly related to seeking mind.
It was noted early on that they would either be the last hardware startup to make it, or the first well-funded one to fail...
Ages ago, I was using similarly spec'ed computers running Windows (ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (Mac Quadra 950), and NeXTstep (25MHz '040 Cube)--- the Cube was by far the nicest and most stable and most capable --- fortunately, its legacy lives on in Mac OS since Apple's purchase of NeXT essentially resulted in NeXT taking over Apple (just we don't get the vertical menu, pop-up main menu, tear off sub-menus, Display PostScript, PANTONE colour license, nxhosting, or the "Unix expert" checkbox) --- really wish that the folks behind GNUstep and the various desktop projects would get more traction.
Was lucky enough to score copies of Adobe Illustrator and Altsys Virtuoso, and I still have Macromedia Freehand set to open .vrt files (Freehand 4 ~= Virtuoso 2).
Really miss Lotus Improv (I've never been able to convince an employer that it would be worth paying for me to have a license of Quantrix Financial Modeler), and WriteNow is still one of my favourite wordprocessors --- at least TeXshop was modeled on TeXview.app, and has many of the same capabilities and much the same feel --- for a long while, I was the only person in a Mac composition shop for whom it made sense to use Mac OS X, since I was using TeXshop, and it was more comfortable to me than TeXtures (I think the license I was using was serial #018).
Turns out they really were inventing the future in that office, and the NeXT Cube has a better case for being the progenitor of the billions of slabs of glass, metal, and silicon that changed the world than any other computer.
- I have to use a Windows computer to run Macromedia Freehand, the Affinity Design folks bailed on doing a full clone (and I dread their 30 Oct announcement which will probably be for a subscription model), the Quasado folks are now doing GraviT over on the Chrome store, and I haven't found a vector drawing program for Mac OS which I like which supports Services
- Lotus Improv 2.0 was for Windows --- there is no multi-dimensional spreadsheet like to it for Mac OS --- closest thing I've found is pyspread, unless someone can get Flexisheet running, Numbers.app is painfully 2D last I checked
- Services are woefully under-represented, really miss little apps such as poste.app (envelope printing), and sbook.app and Millenium's Notebook.app
- I have to dig out a Raspberry Pi to run Mathematica
- I miss writing PostScript strokes and fills and seeing them on-screen
- my Wacom One quit working with my MacBook --- that never happened w/ my Wacom ArtZ attached to my NeXT Cube
Yes, I'm glad to have TeXshop.app, but these days I mostly just do Literate Programming in TeXstudio, which is painfully cross-platform.
My next project is to do a Cyberdeck using an rPi 5 and a Wacom Movink --- we'll have to see how that turns out.
Me too, but they are so stuck in their ways.
Holy heck, looking at this in Google Earth: how I wish other companies had their back to some gorgeous land to go together across. What an incredible exponentiator, to be situated so nicely with some lands to walk across.
It had the requisite Steve Jobs interior design but that was augmented by an enormous mountain of white salt looming up behind it.
Sodium chloride. From evaporation ponds on the shores of the bay.
NeXT was not ahead of it's times. It hasn't been technically surpassed by any other product in the "next" 10 years.
So NeXT is one. IMHO, Amiga 1200, Archimedes and Sinclair QL are other ones.
It seems a mix of mismanagement and marketing (which maybe is still mismanagement).
Sic transit gloria mundi.
...or actually... modern Macs are a NeXT/Archimedes hybrid - the software comes from NeXT, while the hardware is of Archimedes heritage ;)
I miss the offices of old... In particular, Microsoft's old policy of putting people in individual offices.
Interestingly, Apple re-leased the W SJ Triangle Building they used to occupy in the 80's & 90's that had a giant vintage rainbow Apple logo facing I-280. It has had a history of short-term occupancy post-Apple with Accolade (games) and various other tenants over the decades.
Mega rich tech areas ought to reinvest in the future by launching teaching venues and community-focused employee-/member-owned co-op sw/hw hackspaces-library-event-makespaces if they really want to attract people who aren't interested in, are put-off, or can't afford corporate-focused/-gatekept "innovation centers". Co-working space is so commodified, it needs to be local and special rather than transactional to draw people. There is/was a church (Spark perhaps) in Palo Alto that had quite a large coworking space, and the folks there were really cool.
30 years in the future, when everyone and their dog learned to code and the market got flooded with programmers.
If you look at SW from the NEXT era, there were like 1 to 5 programmers, all stallions, per SW product, so no wonder everyone had their own office.
The careful and kind attention to the non-technical computer owners in Mac OS was replaced by corporate-controlled computer science with a GUI. The ambitions of Jobs became clearer later in life -- bizarrely manifesting the Big Brother that the early ad mocked. The iPhone drives Apple now, while Mac OSX slowly deteriorates with episodes of iPhone takeovers in the interface.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Windows has also shown its true colors with spyware and ad-stuffing left and right.
yjftsjthsd-h•3mo ago
bhc•3mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhIwfu73reE
flomo•3mo ago
(Now I recall some old HN 'insider' ranting about how jobs moved this factory to china.)
kanwisher•3mo ago