[A_A]

Consider the innovations at that time (c 1988/89)

"It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax, and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power."

Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"

Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8 MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)

[spitfire]

The funny thing is, I regularly used my NeXTstation turbo right up until 2002. It still felt fast with 128meg ram+fast hard drive. Coupled with the NeXTlaser I was able to keep up with modern life. I had Mathematica, pagemaker, openwrite, email, omniweb, etc.

In fact, even today you could use it as a usable desktop. I still find it amazing that we've gone from 8meg to 8192meg ram and two orders of magnitude cpu power but we've done very little with it. We've moved video decoding onto the main cpu, offloaded graphics to a specialized chip and that's about it. (Note: Next's shipped with a DSP similar to gpgpu today.)

Now I sort of want to buy a nextstation again and see if I can live a month just on that.

EDIT: I should note that there's STILL no replacement for Quantrix and Lotus Improv. They are miles away better than excel/traditional spreadsheets. If someone cloned quantrix for OSX I'd buy it.

[fractallyte]

Huh?? Quantrix is still around, and there's an OSX version available - I know, because I have it!

[spitfire]

It's written in java and it just isn't quite the same as the old next quantrix. Doesn't play as nice as native nextstep quantrix does.

[fractallyte]

Yes, it's certainly a downside. And one would think they'd release a Linux version too, in that case...

That's why I prefer to use Lotus Improv under WINE ;-)

[glhaynes]

Though they don't tend to get mentioned, I'd throw .app bundles into that list, too. The idea of moving an entire double-clickable app around as a single opaque icon (but that can be easily drilled into without special binary-parsing tools) has always appealed to me.

And couple it with fat/universal binaries, and you've really got something special. As someone who just installed their first instance of Windows x64, the difference between that world of having both "Internet Explorer" and "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" icons and a world where a complete system image from a 32-bit PowerPC can be booted seamlessly (with all apps still working) on a 64-bit Intel processor is stark indeed.