7 ms·

NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

150 points by stefanu 10y ago

lngnmn 10y ago
Like Symbolics, it was way ahead of its time.
- ci5er 10y ago
  Aren't Lisp machines always ahead of their time? What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the minicomputer?
  - milcron 10y ago
    Yep... Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized) category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. IBM PCs were cheaper and got the job done. To an extent. The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.
    - ci5er 10y ago
      I only played with one on a VMEBus on a Sun, so I wasn't aware of their stand-alone form factor (i.e. I was guessing) > The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity. Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in Austin Texas (and Doug Lenat's Cyc) took some hits from that one...
      - milcron 10y ago
        (I wasn't alive then, so I'm only informed by what I've read.) A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp code faster than the dedicated hardware! But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went belly-up, unable to sell their hardware. The standardization of Common Lisp in 1984 did help somewhat. The Japanese Fifth Generation project was oriented around logic-programming, was it not? I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.
        ci5er 10y ago
        > I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp. It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but "support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower tiers. I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs, before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.
    - lispm 10y ago
      > Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized) category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. Symbolics and TI both developed microprocessors for Lisp in the 80s. TI promoted their Lisp chip as the 'Megachip' enabling the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. It was the first microprocessor which integrated around a million transistor functions. Both put the Lisp Machine for example on small Apple Nubus cards and inside an Mac II. The TI MicroExplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory were popular Lisp Machines. This is a MacIvory board which contains a Lisp processor, a Weitek numerics chip and memory: http://fare.tunes.org/files/pics/lispm/2003-01-19-lispm-macivory3-kneeled.jpg http://fare.tunes.org/files/pics/lispm/2003-01-19-lispm-maci... A Mac II with a Lisp Machine inside: https://i.imgur.com/b3XkHpS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/b3XkHpS.jpg This is a picture of two Symbolics NXP 1000 Lisp machines, which also use Lisp chip: http://lispm.de/symbolics-nxp1000-inside/thumbnails/IMG_3044.jpg http://lispm.de/symbolics-nxp1000-inside/thumbnails/IMG_3044... Basically the size of a typical pizza box machine at that time.
    - convolvatron 10y ago
      it occurs to me that the depth of the AI winter was proportional to the excessive investment. by the end I think everyone was sick of the AI group at every lab and university that had end endless stream of DoD funding and never seemed to go anywhere. and now we know that at least on the NN side, what seemed like another silly toy was just a little more work and a little more hardware away from being demonstrably useful. so anyways, I'm positing a maximum after which additional funding does active harm.
    - convolvatron 10y ago
      it occurs to me that the depth of the AI winter was proportional to the excessive investment. by the end I think everyone was sick of the AI group at every lab and university that had end endless stream of DoD funding and never seemed to go anywhere. and now we know that at least on the NN side, what seemed like another silly toy was just a little more work and a little more hardware away from being demonstrably useful. so anyways, I'm positing a maximum after which additional funding does active harm.
  - derefr 10y ago
    I don't know if I'd say Lisp machines really died; like NeXT, their rival architectures+platforms of the era only outcompeted them by absorbing them and becoming them. Modern processor architectures look a lot more like that of the Lisp machine than they look like its competitors of the era. Instruction pipelining and memory caching to allow for "cheap" dereferences; a "flat" virtual memory; loadable modules that are source on disk and get JITed into native objects when loaded into memory... these are just generic features you could expect out of most architectures+platforms today. But those were the differentiating factors for the Lisp machine.
    - ci5er 10y ago
      I remember people wondering how the hell we were going to ever use the 50 million transistors per die that Moore's law assured us was coming straight at us in just a few years...
mmanfrin 10y ago
Dot dot com?
- lstamour 10y ago
  That kept driving me nuts. It's as if the author didn't know that at the time it was written as the "dot-com" boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Isamu 10y ago
NeXT: most successful failure ever.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zeveb 10y ago
The article in general is pretty good, but this is off: > The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95. I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.
- bitwize 10y ago
  While Apple was faffing about with Taligent and Copland, Microsoft shipped something that provided preemptive multitasking and memory isolation for 32-bit apps. Windows 95 was a collection of hacks that never should've worked but it put Apple behind the 8 ball to bring its OS tech into the present.
  - Taniwha 10y ago
    Apple also shipped A/UX which did all that
    - wmf 10y ago
      And was so expensive no one cared.
      - rbanffy 10y ago
        And this is probably the greatest inhibitor Unix had for its adoption.
    - switchbak 10y ago
      They also shipped the Lisa prior to that, which also had protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. This died for other reasons however (too expensive, upstaged by the mac, etc).
  - Angostura 10y ago
    Oh, I rather liked OpenDOC.
- FreakyT 10y ago
mrbill 10y ago
UnixWorld asked on it's April 1993 cover: "Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?" https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210 https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210 One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out in '89 or '90. I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox. NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats. I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of NeXTstep. [1] https://www.mrbill.net/next/ https://www.mrbill.net/next/
- yuhong 10y ago
  This reminds me of 4MB 30-pin SIMMs based on 350 mil 4Mbit chips, which was hard to fit into the NeXT Cube. The early 16Mbit chips was 400 mil which is even worse and probably part of why 16MB 30-pin SIMMs was never very popular.
- flukus 10y ago
  > then replacing the internal 18G SCSI Was that in the original? Most machines were around 100-200MB at the time, if that. I was still on an amiga with no hard drive.
  - mrbill 10y ago
    Not by a long shot! Put in there by the friend who threw together a working system for me from the ones he had lying around. A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...) We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY" stickers on them and had been stripped of RAM and HDs of course.
KirinDave 10y ago
My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.
- redcalx 10y ago
  > I wonder if people would be interested in it. YES!
- grzm 10y ago
  I wonder if people would be interested in it. Yes! I've seen stills. Seeing the assembly in motion would be great!
- jdugan 10y ago
  Yes, that would be amazing.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  Are you kidding me?? :) Please share it. Would be much appreciated.
- Gracana 10y ago
  That would be great content for archive.org. Send Jason Scott a message, maybe they can help you digitize it.
- javiramos 10y ago
  OMG YES
- raleighm 10y ago
  Absolutely yes.
- ch4ch4 10y ago
  Please upload this somewhere!
itomato 10y ago
I can imagine a distorted future reality where the natural progression of WebObjects was based on early successes with NeXT's OOP stuff with AT&T and Chrysler. While iTunes, the App Store and the whole "Digital Life" stem from a Web-based Minivan Configurator, looking back at WebObjects as a product to enable that for others seems so contrary to what Apple is today. That Old World of Software Product SKUs has been turned on its head to great effect, and I think it really is better this way.
calcsam 10y ago
OSX is one of Steve Jobs' least-discussed successes. The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Also, without NextStep Steve Jobs wouldn't have had a way into Apple again - Apple would look completely different today if it still existed at all.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Technically it was a Mach based OS, with a POSIX compatibility layer from BSD. The distinction is important IMO, because I beleave part of the ease of them supporting multiple platforms so easily is because it was all built around a microkernel. Now Apple has more of a hybrid with XNU, but many of the core concepts of Mach are still there.
troygoode 10y ago
I'm surprised this article didn't reference the old joke that NeXT actually bought Apple – for negative ~$400M.
cpeterso 10y ago
Interesting parallel that both Jobs and Jean-Louis Gassée started hardware computers after Apple and that each retreated to operating systems, which they tried to sell to Apple.
- itomato 10y ago
  The "whole widget" philosophy only works when you can sell the whole widget.
elvinyung 10y ago
If you've read the Steve Jobs biography (or biopic), you might recall Guy Kawasaki's accidentally-prescient spoof Apple press release[1] from 1994 about a (at the time) hypothetical Apple-NeXT acquisition. Choice quote: > As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of the four personal computer standards (Apple II, Macintosh, and Windows). 1: https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-about-steves-r https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-ab...
- delinka 10y ago
  "...and Windows)." Was that supposed to be part of the humor of the article?
  - WillyOnWheels 10y ago
    Yes.
  - rdsnsca 10y ago
    http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/ http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/ "Red Box, the planned PC Environment for Rhapsody on Intel hardware, never saw the light of day, although today’s Intel-based Macs have virtualization solutions from other vendors which allow them to run Windows or Linux alongside Mac OS X."
m_eiman 10y ago
They were aquihired before they got to the IPO.
beautifulfreak 10y ago
NeXTWorld Magazine in the early 90s was my favorite publication. Every issue showcased apps with elegant and surprising capabilities, like the first spreadsheet with pivotable rows and columns. John Carmack wrote Doom on NeXT, and claimed that NeXTStep made development ten times faster. Other developers agreed. People were excited about programming on NeXT, and not because of any reality distortion field. Reading NeXTWorld felt like seeing into the future! (Here's an archive, rather incomplete: https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/ https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/ The pdf scans convey more of the joi de vivre surrounding NeXT than the plain text files.)

150 points by stefanu 10y ago

lngnmn 10y ago

Like Symbolics, it was way ahead of its time.

ci5er 10y ago
Aren't Lisp machines always ahead of their time? What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the minicomputer?
- milcron 10y ago
  Yep... Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized) category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. IBM PCs were cheaper and got the job done. To an extent. The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    I only played with one on a VMEBus on a Sun, so I wasn't aware of their stand-alone form factor (i.e. I was guessing) > The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity. Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in Austin Texas (and Doug Lenat's Cyc) took some hits from that one...
    - milcron 10y ago
      (I wasn't alive then, so I'm only informed by what I've read.) A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp code faster than the dedicated hardware! But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went belly-up, unable to sell their hardware. The standardization of Common Lisp in 1984 did help somewhat. The Japanese Fifth Generation project was oriented around logic-programming, was it not? I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.
      - ci5er 10y ago
        > I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp. It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but "support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower tiers. I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs, before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.
  - lispm 10y ago
    > Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized) category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. Symbolics and TI both developed microprocessors for Lisp in the 80s. TI promoted their Lisp chip as the 'Megachip' enabling the 'Compact Lisp Machine'. It was the first microprocessor which integrated around a million transistor functions. Both put the Lisp Machine for example on small Apple Nubus cards and inside an Mac II. The TI MicroExplorer and the Symbolics MacIvory were popular Lisp Machines. This is a MacIvory board which contains a Lisp processor, a Weitek numerics chip and memory: http://fare.tunes.org/files/pics/lispm/2003-01-19-lispm-macivory3-kneeled.jpg http://fare.tunes.org/files/pics/lispm/2003-01-19-lispm-maci... A Mac II with a Lisp Machine inside: https://i.imgur.com/b3XkHpS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/b3XkHpS.jpg This is a picture of two Symbolics NXP 1000 Lisp machines, which also use Lisp chip: http://lispm.de/symbolics-nxp1000-inside/thumbnails/IMG_3044.jpg http://lispm.de/symbolics-nxp1000-inside/thumbnails/IMG_3044... Basically the size of a typical pizza box machine at that time.
  - convolvatron 10y ago
    it occurs to me that the depth of the AI winter was proportional to the excessive investment. by the end I think everyone was sick of the AI group at every lab and university that had end endless stream of DoD funding and never seemed to go anywhere. and now we know that at least on the NN side, what seemed like another silly toy was just a little more work and a little more hardware away from being demonstrably useful. so anyways, I'm positing a maximum after which additional funding does active harm.
  - convolvatron 10y ago
    it occurs to me that the depth of the AI winter was proportional to the excessive investment. by the end I think everyone was sick of the AI group at every lab and university that had end endless stream of DoD funding and never seemed to go anywhere. and now we know that at least on the NN side, what seemed like another silly toy was just a little more work and a little more hardware away from being demonstrably useful. so anyways, I'm positing a maximum after which additional funding does active harm.
- derefr 10y ago
  I don't know if I'd say Lisp machines really died; like NeXT, their rival architectures+platforms of the era only outcompeted them by absorbing them and becoming them. Modern processor architectures look a lot more like that of the Lisp machine than they look like its competitors of the era. Instruction pipelining and memory caching to allow for "cheap" dereferences; a "flat" virtual memory; loadable modules that are source on disk and get JITed into native objects when loaded into memory... these are just generic features you could expect out of most architectures+platforms today. But those were the differentiating factors for the Lisp machine.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    I remember people wondering how the hell we were going to ever use the 50 million transistors per die that Moore's law assured us was coming straight at us in just a few years...

mmanfrin 10y ago

Dot dot com?

lstamour 10y ago
That kept driving me nuts. It's as if the author didn't know that at the time it was written as the "dot-com" boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

Isamu 10y ago

NeXT: most successful failure ever.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zeveb 10y ago

The article in general is pretty good, but this is off: > The Macintosh’s operating system was showing its age, especially compared to Microsoft’s Windows 95. I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95.

bitwize 10y ago
While Apple was faffing about with Taligent and Copland, Microsoft shipped something that provided preemptive multitasking and memory isolation for 32-bit apps. Windows 95 was a collection of hacks that never should've worked but it put Apple behind the 8 ball to bring its OS tech into the present.
- Taniwha 10y ago
  Apple also shipped A/UX which did all that
  - wmf 10y ago
    And was so expensive no one cared.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      And this is probably the greatest inhibitor Unix had for its adoption.
  - switchbak 10y ago
    They also shipped the Lisa prior to that, which also had protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. This died for other reasons however (too expensive, upstaged by the mac, etc).
- Angostura 10y ago
  Oh, I rather liked OpenDOC.
FreakyT 10y ago

mrbill 10y ago

UnixWorld asked on it's April 1993 cover: "Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?" https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210 https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210 One of my prized possessions is my NeXT Cube[1], finally acquired in 2014. I'd wanted one ever since I saw the "Actual Size" marketing brochure that came out in '89 or '90. I owned a series of slabs (mono, color, turbo color) throughout the years, but never managed to get my hands on a Cube. A friend took pity on me in '14 and sent me one, and then I got the bits (special cable) needed to hook up a VGA flat panel though the non-ADB soundbox. NeXT steps: finding enough 4M 30pin parity SIMMs to max out the memory, then replacing the internal 18G SCSI disk (a SCA drive with an adapter) with a SCSI2SD board and MicroSD card in order to reduce the number of moving pats. I chuckle when I realize that I spend most of my day in front of a MBP at work and a Mac Mini at home - both running what is basically the descendant of NeXTstep. [1] https://www.mrbill.net/next/ https://www.mrbill.net/next/

yuhong 10y ago
This reminds me of 4MB 30-pin SIMMs based on 350 mil 4Mbit chips, which was hard to fit into the NeXT Cube. The early 16Mbit chips was 400 mil which is even worse and probably part of why 16MB 30-pin SIMMs was never very popular.
flukus 10y ago
> then replacing the internal 18G SCSI Was that in the original? Most machines were around 100-200MB at the time, if that. I was still on an amiga with no hard drive.
- mrbill 10y ago
  Not by a long shot! Put in there by the friend who threw together a working system for me from the ones he had lying around. A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...) We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY" stickers on them and had been stripped of RAM and HDs of course.

KirinDave 10y ago

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.

redcalx 10y ago
> I wonder if people would be interested in it. YES!
grzm 10y ago
I wonder if people would be interested in it. Yes! I've seen stills. Seeing the assembly in motion would be great!
jdugan 10y ago
Yes, that would be amazing.
dba7dba 10y ago
Are you kidding me?? :) Please share it. Would be much appreciated.
Gracana 10y ago
That would be great content for archive.org. Send Jason Scott a message, maybe they can help you digitize it.
javiramos 10y ago
OMG YES
raleighm 10y ago
Absolutely yes.
ch4ch4 10y ago
Please upload this somewhere!

itomato 10y ago

I can imagine a distorted future reality where the natural progression of WebObjects was based on early successes with NeXT's OOP stuff with AT&T and Chrysler. While iTunes, the App Store and the whole "Digital Life" stem from a Web-based Minivan Configurator, looking back at WebObjects as a product to enable that for others seems so contrary to what Apple is today. That Old World of Software Product SKUs has been turned on its head to great effect, and I think it really is better this way.

calcsam 10y ago

OSX is one of Steve Jobs' least-discussed successes. The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.

m_mueller 10y ago
Also, without NextStep Steve Jobs wouldn't have had a way into Apple again - Apple would look completely different today if it still existed at all.
bluejekyll 10y ago
Technically it was a Mach based OS, with a POSIX compatibility layer from BSD. The distinction is important IMO, because I beleave part of the ease of them supporting multiple platforms so easily is because it was all built around a microkernel. Now Apple has more of a hybrid with XNU, but many of the core concepts of Mach are still there.

troygoode 10y ago

I'm surprised this article didn't reference the old joke that NeXT actually bought Apple – for negative ~$400M.

cpeterso 10y ago

Interesting parallel that both Jobs and Jean-Louis Gassée started hardware computers after Apple and that each retreated to operating systems, which they tried to sell to Apple.

itomato 10y ago
The "whole widget" philosophy only works when you can sell the whole widget.

elvinyung 10y ago

If you've read the Steve Jobs biography (or biopic), you might recall Guy Kawasaki's accidentally-prescient spoof Apple press release[1] from 1994 about a (at the time) hypothetical Apple-NeXT acquisition. Choice quote: > As a cofounder of Apple and the father of Macintosh, Jobs brings back to Apple the type of visionary leadership that enabled Apple to create three of the four personal computer standards (Apple II, Macintosh, and Windows). 1: https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-about-steves-r https://holykaw.alltop.com/1994-spoof-apple-press-release-ab...

delinka 10y ago
"...and Windows)." Was that supposed to be part of the humor of the article?
- WillyOnWheels 10y ago
  Yes.
- rdsnsca 10y ago
  http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/ http://lowendmac.com/1997/red-box-blue-box-yellow-box/ "Red Box, the planned PC Environment for Rhapsody on Intel hardware, never saw the light of day, although today’s Intel-based Macs have virtualization solutions from other vendors which allow them to run Windows or Linux alongside Mac OS X."

m_eiman 10y ago

They were aquihired before they got to the IPO.

beautifulfreak 10y ago

NeXTWorld Magazine in the early 90s was my favorite publication. Every issue showcased apps with elegant and surprising capabilities, like the first spreadsheet with pivotable rows and columns. John Carmack wrote Doom on NeXT, and claimed that NeXTStep made development ten times faster. Other developers agreed. People were excited about programming on NeXT, and not because of any reality distortion field. Reading NeXTWorld felt like seeing into the future! (Here's an archive, rather incomplete: https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/ https://simson.net/ref/NeXT/nextworld/ The pdf scans convey more of the joi de vivre surrounding NeXT than the plain text files.)