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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

But ultimately most application developers wouldn't be using $15K workstations anyway.

Exactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer service representatives) and the competition within that market (Sun).

Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there.

Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off.. but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.

I wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.

Isn't that ASP.net?

Kind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript mess.

Does Visual Basic pre-.NET/WinForms even support layout at all?

Edit: Doesn't look like it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070

GUI RAD tooling is much more than just layout, and at least it can center text and quite a few other things that require CSS tricks.

Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else?

Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Apparently each browser still implements just part of it.

Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.

http://php.net/

:-D

Oracle Application Express

You can't ignore how NeXT was somewhat constrained by not being able to compete head-on with Apple without incurring serious legal expenses. They got sued once right out of the gate and would certainly have been sued more if they started to cause real trouble.

Sure you can. Sun and SGI were viable for a while.

Sun and SGI had a significant head start over NeXT. By the time NeXT shipped hardware, they were moving off 68k onto SPARC and MIPS respectively, building on successful and established product lines with the kind of hardware differentiation that NeXT didn't have the capital for. That's why NeXT had to change direction and make software such a major part of their strategy; they couldn't just re-play the same strategies that Sun and SGI got off the ground with, because those niches were now pretty well occupied.

Maybe not $15k but developers frequently have much more powerful (and thereby more expensive machines) than the users who use those apps. Many of the developer machines at work have 16 to 24 gb of ram, SSDs and very fast CPUs. Our customers on the the hand might be running machines with a non SSD drive and 4gb of ram (or less??).

GBs of RAM in 1991?

That's supercomputer stuff... maybe...

Pretty sure that the Sun workstations and NeXT workstations were about the same price at that time. NeXT might have even been cheaper if you go off list price, although Sun had huge discounts off their published prices for education and large corporate customers.

Heck, Apple was selling the IIfx for 10k at the time. Never mind the HP offerings.

So IBM Thinkpad 700C priced $4,350 was a cheap thing? With 'a beautiful 10.5-inch active-matrix color LCD - the largest screen available on any notebook computer at the time'.

They did on Wall St., where Sun and NeXT competed for a while. Neither got much penetration in the general corporate dev market.

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