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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

UW had a lab of them that I got to use for a math class once or twice. I used Mathematica on a NeXT and on a Macintosh II, and it was clear NeXT was just better at everything. If you had told me they used the same processor family, I probably wouldn't have believed you. It felt like as much a step up from the Macintosh as the Macintosh did from the Apple II.

It was essentially a slow monochrome early Mac OS X release, in the days when the Macintosh had System 6 or System 7. It really was more than 10 years ahead of its time.

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> If you had told me they used the same processor family, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

I don't know how real it was, but one of NeXT's marketing points at the time was the power of all the supporting logic they put around the main CPU. There was a bunch of DMA support and a MC56001 signal processor from the beginning, and later on, it was possible to buy video boards from NeXT with onboard i860 processors.

One area where they did fall down, at least initially, was in the Magneto-Optical primary storage. The original NeXT cube shipped with one of these _instead of_ a hard disk. I think the idea was that you could take a single MO disk around from workstation to workstation and carry your environment around with you. The downside is that the access time on the MO drive was something around 80ms or more in an era when a hard disk was 20ms or so. Killed performance, as far as I understand, and the next generation machine was a more traditional hard-disk/floppy combination.

I think the idea was that you could take a single MO disk around from workstation to workstation and carry your environment around with you.

This philosophy lived on into the Apple years. The reason the original iPods had Firewire connectors on them was so that you could eventually go from Mac to Mac and just boot off of your iPod and continue your work.

It's why a lot of people who worked with Xserve servers always carried iPods with them — the servers had Firewire ports right on the front and you could plug your iPod in and access your files.

Now that I think about it, it's also interesting that it's shared with Jef Raskin's Canon Cat. (Which had to be a frustration with Raskin, given that Jobs took over his original Macintosh project and then arranged to have Canon kill the Cat, in relation to Canon's funding of NeXT.)

Back in 2003 Apple touted a feature called “Home on iPod” being petr of the then up-coming OS X Panther that would have supposedly allowed one to carry one’s home directory around on an iPod and mount it on any system one could authenticate against.

It was pulled before it was released, however, and never heard from again. As far as I know, no justification was ever given.

https://www.macrumors.com/2003/10/08/pulled-panther-feature-...

I was at Motorola Tokyo Design Ops, back in the day and the General Magic people and the old Mac people and the Next people were frequently coming through.

I learned the 56K on the NeXT (and it saved my butt when I had to emulate a slow small MCU (together with an FPGA) to build a real-time emulator so our customer (Canon) could complete development in parallel with the US mothership getting their act together for shipping verified silicon). But I didn't spend much time with the i860. I should have. And, over course, their main CPU (68040) was better than the 68020s running on my desktop workstation.

That Magnetic Optic thing, though, it turned a pretty slick design, and a very slick SDK, and an "ok" implementation of Display Postscript into something that just felt like a sluggish brick. And, of course, back in the day, Jobs hated networking because it was "just an umbilical cord back to the mothership".

> back in the day, Jobs hated networking because it was "just an umbilical cord back to the mothership"

I didn't realize this... but it completely fits both the person and the time.

For those that might be unaware, back in the 70's through maybe even the early 90's, there was a belief that personal computing represented a form of personal liberation from centralized control/power.

The idea was that a computer you could own and manage yourself represented freedom from the establishment (which took the for, of centralized minicomputers, mainframes, and the like). Of course, 30 years later, we now know how that all turned out, with the idea of the network being a connection back to a central mothership sounding pretty darn accurate.

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