[user2342]

> By the end of the 80s, there were really only four major computer lines in the US. You had PCs (and their clones, of which there were many), Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. For a short while there was also NeXT, but even with its big promises, great innovations and charismatic leader it didn’t survive as a hardware platform.

I rather see NeXT as a competitor in the market for Unix Workstations (Sun, HP, SGI, ...) and not as a competitor to the four mentioned (consumer) lines.

[mrkstu]

It was targeted at Universities, as a foothold customer, since it ended up too expensive for even prosumers.

It ended up mostly finding uptake in custom apps in the Fortune 500 (and kept it toe-hold in universities) while it lasted as a hardware platform, and then in its OS only incarnation.

[rbanffy]

And, yet, every Mac these days runs a direct descendant of NeXT's OS.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Such a shame we didn't get BeOS but Jobs and Gassee did NOT get along.

[KerrAvon]

Jobs wasn't in charge at that point; Gassee wanted too much money for too little OS. BeOS was missing a lot of features.

If BeOS had the ability to output graphics to printers at the time, we'd be in a very different world today.

[pjmlp]

Indeed, first of all Apple might not be around any longer, without the reverse acquisition played by Jobs, who knows how well BeOS inspired Mac OS would turn out.

There would be no iPod taking Apple out of red zone.

There wouldn't be FOSS devs flocking into Apple hardware as replacement to sponsor Linux OEMs instead.

And it would be yet another C++ focused desktop operating system, assuming Apple would survive the transition in this alternative reality.

[pjmlp]

Due to a serious of steps where Copland failed to deliver, Gasse wanting too much money, NeXT being acquired into what turned out to be a reverse acquisition.

[CharlesW]

And every iOS device!

[mattl]

And every HomePod, Apple Watch, iPad and Apple Vision Pro. Plus the later Apple TVs. I think even some of their newer displays have the OS in there too.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

We had an entire lab full of NeXT cubes at Purdue that nobody really knew what to use them for. I think they ended up giving them away after a couple of years.

[guenthert]

Well, I'm Glad Tim Berners-Lee knew what to do with his.

[mattl]

I do wish NeXT had a better naming system in place. The first gen cube is called the NeXT Computer, later faster ones are actually called Cube but they’re all cubes to most people.

[guenthert]

It certainly was. Also in the late 80s, Apple IIGS (a.k.a. Woz dream machine) was fairly successful on the US market, albeit obsolete and discontinued by the time the Falcon was introduced.