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Comment by ary | Hacker News Reader

The best I could find on the fate of this factory was from Wikipedia [1].

"NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 and the company was renamed NeXT Software Inc; subsequently 300 of the 540 staff employees were laid off. NeXT negotiated to sell the hardware business including the Fremont factory to Canon. Canon later pulled out of the deal. Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production."

The choice of storage technology always seemed to me to be the reason it didn't take off. Kind of a bummer that it didn't work out (some would say it did, à la Apple).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1993.E2.80.931996:_NeXT_So...

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Of course it worked out, half the people here run the latest version of NeXTStep on their phones and pads, another half run it on their desktops, and NeXT is considered the most successful contemporary computer company and is dominating the industry in innovation, all possible because of the AppKit and FoundationKit and the various NS kit APIs that came since then. They even acquired their closest rival, rebranded according to their trademark, and then deep sixed the rivals products, replacing them with their own.

I was in elementary school and a guy came in for "Career Day" to speak with the five of us who were interested in computing. He brought a NeXT computer (I have no idea which one), with some rectangular cartridge (must have been the magneto-optical media). He explained why it was such a fantastic machine, and proceeded to spend the allotted 30 minutes attempting to boot it.

I have no idea who this guy was or what he did for a living, but it was my very first experience watching a demo go horribly wrong. I have to say, that event influenced me in over-preparing for any sort of demo. I don't remember the details, but I remembered that it was NeXT, and I remembered that it didn't boot. (OK, I'll admit that I partly remembered the name because the capital XT reminded me of my clunky IBM PC XT clone I had at home).

I remember well going to a NeXT exhibit at Michigan State. I was blown away by the beauty of the machine but thought the disk storage and lack of color graphics were deal killers.

The sales guy working the booth was quick to let me know that I could order a machine with a hard drive and that I didn't have to take the optical disk. In fact he said everyone was ordering them that way. But he grew silent when asked when asked about the availability of color monitors.

Sure wish I had known when the universities NeXT cubes went through salvage because I would have certaintly bought one - they were absolutely beautiful.

There were NeXT slabs that were available from salvage circa 1998. They were likely the machines in the computing lab in Wells Hall, next to the language lab. There were also a half dozen color turbo NeXT stations in Holmes Hall.

Those machines were some of the nicest to work on Mathematica with. We also had installed the ISCA BBS client on those machines, before the remote telnet access was turned off.

When were you at Michigan State?

What's sad was how expensive Openstep was once Next was solely a software company. I had a Nextstation and decided I wanted a copy of OpenStep 4 for my PC. Next was asking for something like 800 dollars for a copy.

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