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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, [...] this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems!

Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform, and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed.

There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and integration would otherwise have been attractive.

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> It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range,

Having used a lot of SPARCs and NeXT boxes side by side during that period, I'm scratching my head as to what features you're referring to, at least among machines which directly competed with, say, the NeXTstation Color Turbo. Looking back I'm really amazed at how ahead of its time that machine was.

But the critical item, I think, was the OS. NeXT had NeXTSTEP. Sun had heaven help us all) SunOS and later Solaris. SGI had IRIX. There was absolutely no comparison. I think this is why NeXTSTEP still lives on in OS X, and Solaris, um...

> and Solaris, um...

http://openindiana.org/ and http://illumos.org/ are actually pretty frikken awesome.

Does anybody really use them as workstation operating systems? Also, they don't run anything desktop-oriented that you can't run on Linux.

I love some of the lower-level tech that came out of Solaris, but NeXt was about desktop user experience rather than server stuff.

They picked the wrong horse (680x0) at the wrong time (late 80s/early 90s) in a market that no longer exists, that niche between high end personal computers and low end workstations.

This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT couldn't scale up the way SGI could.

If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on technology or HP and IBM on financials.

> In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market

NeXT was already out of the hardware business for three years when 3dfx introduced Voodoo in 1996, same year NeXT bought Apple for negative $400M.

I was referring to the workstation market, where Sun and SGI were stitching up that market. GX, LX, and Élan were arriving on the market when NeXT only had ND.

3dfx was, for obvious economic reasons, not a slice of the solid, high, or extreme IMPACT graphics that were available on the desktop at the time of its release. It was more competitive with the options for Ultra, but Sun had already conceded the high end graphics market to SGI.

The NeXT hardware wasn't just priced out of competition with PCs and Macs, NeXT wasn't allowed to compete head on with Apple, as part of the agreements that allowed Steve Jobs to leave Apple and start a new company. The workstation market was the only one NeXT wouldn't have to litigate their way into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ-G99rh0p8 - In case anyone has not seen it already, this is Steve Jobs here explaining where NeXT is competing and how it plans to compete (with, by the way, Sun).

The companies who enthusiastically picked up NeXT machines by the hundreds did it because the development environment was a decade ahead of its time. However there weren't enough of those companies, so NeXT was forced to reverse-takeover Apple and from there take over the world.

The early RISC machines were marketed on benchmark results which didn't reliably translate to real-world interactive performance. They got better with time though.

But yeah you wouldn't buy it because of its superior performance vs the RISC competitors, you got it because of the software and the dev tools etc. A bit like Mac vs Windows in the PowerPC days (only with the RISC vs CISC roles reversed!)

Sorry but you're totally missing something if you think you can compare to a Mac or 'PC' of it's time. Not only did it have a lot of special peripherals but the entire OS and environment is what made it special.

Like Apple today, you have to look at the entire package. The difference being that Apple mostly targets the general consumer today while NeXT was targeting a more advanced and smaller but richer market back then.

Missing what? These arguments were all had on the internet at the time, there's nothing we can add. Suffice it to say that the idea that an "environment" can make up for a severe performance handicap is a uniquely modern one informed by the existence of dual core multi-GHz devices that fit in a pocket.

If you were doing CAD work in 1990, you might not be so forgiving of a device that cost almost as much as a years salary for its user. And the market wasn't.

My employer spends far more on computers than staff.

The entry models were always dogs regarding storage. The first cubes had those horrid MO drives and nothing else and the first stations had 105MB(?) drives that couldn't hold a full OS installation. No Shakespeare for you!

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