Internal NeXT video by Steve Jobs (1991)

This was very much spot on. As a middle level manager I tried to bring these in our Healthcare business, but got very little traction. The senior executives could not or would not appreciate the benefits. A portion of the development team were more interested in skills for their next job. I cannot understate the amount of time, money and people we burned through by taking another path.

I am glad this technology survived in MacOS and its hardware.

> They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there.

Well they were already buying Sun and Sgi boxes. I don’t know the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those Unix machines were far better priced.

NeXT suffered the same commercial challenges Apple faced. You have to develop things in THEIR world, albeit a more polished, user friendly one.

In our case it was display postscript.

We wrote a WYSIWYG editor for Yellow Pages (Gouden Gids in NL). It was also used for the Golden Pages in Ireland, the Puerto Rico YP, the YP for Norway, the YP in SA and the NTT one in Japan.

Understandably for the time, people were blown away by it.

In the video jobs mentioned he wanted to sell 50,000 units in 1992. The actual numbers were 20,000 units in 1992 and 50,000 in 1993. This just reminded me of Tesla ramp up. Musk was right about volume but too optimistic on timing.

They were aimed initially at students and higher education but too expensive for many.

In 1991 most of us were still dealing with BBS, Compuserve, networking MS-DOS with Novell Netware, gaming on Amigas with null modem cables.

Not to mention the outrageous rates even for local telephone calls.