Two Stop Bits | This is a fascinating document. This was like a year after Windows 3.1 started e...

KODust 116 days ago | parent

This is a fascinating document. This was like a year after Windows 3.1 started eating the PC world, and a year before NeXT threw in the towel on hardware entirely, and approx. three years before the Internet became mainstream.

John Perry Barlow is the interviewer, very tech savvy, and he seems to have been convinced NeXT had finally figured it all out and was going to make it big in the business world. Didn't really see Windows coming, I guess, or didn't understand that high-end PC hardware would rapidly become cheap enough to make NeXT's hardware irrelevant in that space.

bmonkey325 116 days ago
Unfortunately, it was economies of scale. By 1992, NEXT was only shipping 750 units a month. PCs were shipping about 3 million units a month. Even if NEXT was 100 or 1000 times it would still be small potatoes in the face of the PC market
bmonkey325 113 days ago
Make no mistake I would have loved mass market NExT. Multitasking. Vast memory. Graphics performance only dreamed of in the pc world. Once they started shipping with a HD instead of the optical 20mb cartridge disk jt had everything one would want in a power machine.
Sigh.
- KODust 113 days ago
  The optical disk was such a terrible choice. As an option? Sure. As the primary disk for a system reliant — like nothing that came before it — on fast swapping to virtual memory for interactive perf? Yikes.
  (Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)
  - bmonkey325 112 days ago
    There was a rumour that I have never been able to validate that Steve Jobs had a shirt with an oversized pocket so he could say the floptical disk would fit in a pocket.
    Forever an urban legend I supose.