At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office (exhibits.stanford.edu)
154 pointsby Austin_Conlon9 hours ago77 comments
rogerrogerr 8 hours ago
I'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?
random3 8 hours ago
It was. I think it could still be for some things.
steele 8 hours ago
Working with people in person died proportionally with corporate laptops featuring wireless telecom. Not because of the mobility, but more because of the collapse of the otherwise natural modes and boundaries.
larusso 7 hours ago
Yeah. These days when the work machine actually stayed at work. Or that you had meetings with everybody in the room without in front of a laptop or mobile screen.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago
For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.
I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.
I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.
NetOpWibby 4 hours ago
I’m 38 and I worked for an IoT startup a decade ago until the CEO couldn’t pay us anymore (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).
I’ve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I could’ve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC…what a time that must’ve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they don’t pay the bills yet but they’re the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.
PetitPrince 3 hours ago
> (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).
This is sad and kinda foolish but it's refreshing to hear money going in this direction instead of the other. I hope this CEO has a good life at least.
FLHerne an hour ago
Bear in mind that there's a form of survivorship bias with these stories -- you only read about groundbreaking work by dedicated teams that changed the industry despite that always being the exception.
No-one writes blog posts about a boring and unproductive job they had in the 90s, and if they did it wouldn't reach the HN front page.
LVB 6 hours ago
If you expand your career scope to hardware and embedded software, your odds of having to be at a facility, or some customer site, and thus be by other people, rise substantially. I've had a number of jobs where it'd be quite impractical to be remote. e.g. actually building equipment in labs and installing it in machines, aircraft, etc. There are tons of examples. The obvious downside is that the options need to be near your home, or you move. Hence the various "hubs" that pop up for various expertise (SV obviously, but e.g. if you like aviation, Wichita is a good choice)
mrheosuper 2 hours ago
This is why i pursuit embedded system. Writing code is 1 thing, seeing it manifest in physical world is just whole another thing.
tannertech 5 hours ago
I did high level IT and general org management for 8 years without a single opportunity to see the office or people in person, before covid. Doesn't make it easy to manage a global team for sure.
bennyg 5 hours ago
It was.
ulnarkressty 5 hours ago
smugglerFlynn 4 hours ago
I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.
Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.
Brains are weird.
cube00 4 hours ago
> I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day
While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.
I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.
Gibbon1 4 hours ago
I work in a room that's 15X20 mostly by myself. At the rent my company is paying it's about $650/month.
A SW guy in the bay area costs $15,000 a month. And the MBA's won't spring for even 50 square feet of space for them? Which would be what $300/month?
I think you guys should just up and riot.
rowanG077 2 hours ago
Calling it something extremely negative like a cattle pen makes clear that you aren't even open to consider anything but the negatives.
ulfw 3 hours ago
LOL be happy you still have a job. Many of us don't. Brave new world
tonyedgecombe 2 hours ago
I don't know. I was watching a video about Bill Atkinson the other day (the guy behind the original Mac UI) and he worked from home because it was the only way he could get things done.
lapcat 2 hours ago
> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.
Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.
ecto 23 minutes ago
Why not go work with people in person?
felixding 8 hours ago
I've always liked NeXTSTEP's distinctive user interface. I wish we had a version that ran on modern hardware, similar to what https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace is trying to achieve.
Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.
ithkuil 5 hours ago
I have a toy recreating the visuals: https://github.com/mkmik/nextstop
(It's vobecoded in the original sense of the word)
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago
Just get a modern Mac and remove half the RAM. That should get you the same experience. The visual design was first class, but I remember when I went from NeXTStep to NEWS to X11 and was very relieved to not have to have my mouse spin for minutes at a time.
tonyedgecombe 2 hours ago
To some extent everything was like that unless you had bleeding edge hardware. Running an up to date version of Windows was endlessly frustrating until the Core 2 Duo came along.
jtfrench 2 hours ago
That brought me back! The Intel Core 2 Duo was the “Apple Silicon” moment before Apple Silicon.
WillAdams an hour ago
One will still be missing:
- pop-up/vertical main menu
- PANTONE colour library
- Display PostScript
I actually used similar machines running NeXT/OPENSTEP, Mac OS, and Windows shortly after graduation and the performance was smoother and more consistent in NeXTstep 3.3, though I will admit OPENSTEP 4.2 felt just a tad more sluggish, but it was far and away the more useful and capable machine, even when running the same software (e.g., Altsys Virtuoso vice Aldus Freehand, or FrameMaker or WordPerfect).
Probably helped that the Cube had 52MB RAM, the Mac 8MB, and the Windows 12MB.
elcritch an hour ago
I've been working on an attempt at a modern OpenStep/Cocoa inspired GUI called Merenda [1], but built with modern GPU based stack. The original theme was an Aqua clone but without using any images for the buttons! I used the NextSTEP OpenStep specification as part of the original specs. The workspace ideas were fascinating.
The GUI library aspect is progressing well, but getting a desktop environment going is challenging even with AI. Still I want to capture things like the document workspaces and such. Lately Ive been tempted with making a postscript like display server based on GPU accelerated vector primitives.
TheAmazingRace 5 hours ago
Because I was born right around the time the first NeXT Computer was announced in late ‘88, I wasn’t cognizant of the rise and fall of the NeXT platform, but I did come to appreciate the projects that were based on it, like the early WWW.
As a matter of fact, the first time I even heard of NeXT was a decade later in around ‘98, when PC Magazine or Computer Shopper (I can’t remember exactly which one) made a brief and snarky mention of the NeXT Cube in a retrospective blurb as a novel yet highly incompatible computer system, no doubt penned by John C Dvorak (RIP) who always had it out for Steve Jobs. It stuck with me, because the image of the NeXT they used looked like no other computer I was familiar with at the time and I was head over heels for it. I even tried procuring one for many years but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Frog did an outstanding job on the design language for the NeXT hardware. They then went on to help design the look of the Packard Bell PCs from the early to mid 90s too.
These are really cool photos and, honestly, I’d love to travel back to this past even briefly, just to experience it in person if I could.
pjmlp 4 hours ago
While it was kind of interesting, very few people really could use it, my graduation thesis was porting a particle visualisation framework from Objective-C, NeXTSTEP into C++, Windows, because the department was getting rid of their Cubes.
This was one or two years before Apple's deal, when no one had big hopes for NeXT's future.
simondotau 4 hours ago
> the rise and fall of the NeXT platform
In a very real sense, the NeXT platform never fell. It just changed its name to Mac OS X. Apple still ships Chess.app and TextEdit.app which can be launched from Dock.app, and you might see a spinning beachball cursor while it loads.
mvkel 8 hours ago
> By 1991 only 50,000 NeXTcubes had been sold. One of these, however, was used by Tim Berners Lee to create the first web browser and server.
Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?
vee-kay 7 hours ago
The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers.
Thus the FPS genre in gaming was pioneered on these pioneering machines.
Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system. Sun Microsystems partnered with NeXT, for the NeXTSTEP Solaris but lost interest, but it later created Java as a direct competitor to NeXTSTEP.
Apple used NeXT's software technologies as the foundation for Rhapsody, Mac OS X (later macOS), and the operating systems that followed.
mentos an hour ago
I believe Jensen Huang said Doom was the game that launched NVIDIA?
So NeXT -> Doom -> Nvidia -> AI
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago
> Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?
Yes, very easily. He didn't actually make anything, he was a sales guy. It was the engineers who worked around him (Woz in the Apple days, others after) who deserve credit, not Jobs himself.
spider-mario 4 hours ago
Doesn’t that understate it? Isn’t a sales guy still important, to figure out what to build and to actually get it in the hands of users? Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make, and the engineers just so happened to make it?
mft_ 3 hours ago
I think the previous poster is wrong. In typical understanding of industry roles, a ‘sales guy’ doesn’t typically work hands-on with product development. Some variations of ‘marketing’ roles do indeed work on developing new products, so this might be less inaccurate.
But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.
The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.
WillAdams an hour ago
Two notable instances:
- first iPod prototype --- Steve Jobs dropped it into an aquarium and when bubbles rose up noted, "there's space inside, it can be smaller". https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-threw-ipod-protot...
- iDVD --- he drew a button on a whiteboard and announced, "Here’s the new application. It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make." https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/how-steve-jobs-1-design-...
I'd like to think that the current behaviour of the Apple Font pallet where when collapsed into a single bar grew out of a suggestion made after discussions on comp.sys.mac.advocacy --- but he was justifiably proud when he showed it off to one visitor (per a link I can no longer find, or which is no longer up, or behind a paywall)
lapcat an hour ago
> Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make
This is literally what happened. I highly recommend the book "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT years.
Jobs had a vague idea—he wanted to make a computer for higher education—but that's about it. And after leaving Apple he had to promise not to compete with Apple.
The NeXT team traveled around to various universities and asked them what they wanted from a computer. Then they started to build it… but it became something else (vastly more expensive than the requested price point) because Jobs wanted the "perfect" computer.
> the engineers just so happened to make it?
Jobs was a micromanager, though not so much with the Apple II, which was definitely the baby of Woz. However, Jobs was constantly changing his mind and his requirements, much to the consternation of the NeXT engineers, and the indecision of Jobs played a big role in the failure of NeXT.
You may not consider NeXT a failure because it was ultimately acquired by Apple, but at that point Jobs had mostly given up on NeXT and moved his attention to Pixar. In fact Jobs infamously sold all of the Apple stock he got from the sale of NeXT, and the Apple board had to beg a reluctant Jobs to become interim CEO, because they couldn't find anyone else who wanted the job of rescuing a failing company.
To be fair, sales is crucial. For example, Jean-Louis Gassée totally botched the presentation of Be to the Apple board, making no effort, assuming it was already a done deal, whereas Jobs and NeXT nailed it.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago
He's responsible for the iPhone, and effortless touch screen pocket computing has been culturally and psychologically catastrophic.
That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.
But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.
ackbar03 4 hours ago
I was listening to a podcast about Jobs in his role at Next and was surprised how terrible and disfunctional he was as a CEO, at least in the initial phases. I still find it incredible that the company managed to actually make something valuable in the end and have enough runway for him to figure out how to do the job properly. Like seriously, how did he even manage to retain any talent at all at the company, I still find it incredible.
jtfrench an hour ago
I dunno man, as someone who’s worked directly with him and seen him in the flesh many times, it’s painfully obvious why Steve Jobs was an amazing (and flawed) human being that had people flocking around him. To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets, but the man was truly a rare type of entrepreneur who even today completely stands out from the typical tech CEOs of Silicon Valley (many of which are also douchey, amoral, island-affiliated people, yet people still want to work for them). If this isn’t obvious to you why, my only guess is that you haven’t seen as many sides of him, or you’re not being honest about what it means to be human.
mentos an hour ago
Curious if you have a minute to try to put more words to what made him amazing? I've got my ideas but curious to hear yours before I bias you.
lapcat 5 minutes ago
> To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets
IMO this is a disingenuous take on Steve Jobs. No, all of us are not as horrible to other people as Jobs, who was notorious for his abusiveness. Perhaps he calmed down a bit as he got older, but the reports from his coworkers at NeXT for example were ugly.
boie0025 7 hours ago
I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.
I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.
I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.
boie0025 7 hours ago
I should note that it runs "a patchy server" on boot.
wpm 7 hours ago
Not a lot would happen if you plugged it into the internet, unless you happened across a bot that had some exploit for a 40 year old OS at the ready and thought it was worth the time. NeXTSTEP is well into the "secure through age" part of the bathtub curve.
boie0025 7 hours ago
That seems reasonable.. "secure through age" is effectively "security through obscurity", which is stunningly effective most of the time... yet, I'll take a hard pass. I will let it rest in peace. Note that your point is well taken. I have an arbitrarily large collection of legacy compute that I have acquired over the years, and it all stays offline because I don't have the time or energy to deal with any fallout of plugging it in. I'm sure everything would be fine. The NeXT box, the old BBS servers, the CP/M crap I can never find time to dork around with.. maybe one day if I am able to retire I'll spin up the inefficient hoard and enjoy it. But until then, I can't risk the distraction. I miss when it was a hobby and not a career.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago
As long as it's not running PHP you should be fine.
shrubble 6 hours ago
I used a NeXT mono slab for 8-10 months while working at a NeXT reseller in the mid 1990s. It was a fantastic experience.
jdswain 4 hours ago
Not a lot would happen because it doesn't have a DHCP client. You would need to open HostManager manually set up the interface.
sgt 2 hours ago
> https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/cv770rd9515
Cool, look at this list titled Digital:
- Staff mass storage 6A (not sure what this means)
- Decide on ECC
- Release DMA revision A in November
- Release CPU PCB revision A in Novemberbvan an hour ago
Cool. I would have met a couple of these folks when they came over to demo the new system in Miami.
Lammy 4 hours ago
> The following year a fully automated factory was constructed to produce the NeXTcube computer.
They left out that it was in Fremont, California, providing jobs (lol) for Americans — something that Apple famously stopped doing on their path to becoming obscenely rich: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/a-brief-history-of-steve-jobs...
sgt 2 hours ago
> https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/xw253bb1954
Steve with Ross Perot here
Btw this image viewer - per page, is extremely sluggish and slow.
lapcat 2 hours ago
Perot was an early investor in NeXT but later lamented, according to the book Steve Jobs in Exile, "I gave Steve too much dang money."
Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.
WillAdams an hour ago
Some folks claimed that one of the reasons the Newton got axed was that it was the subject of a highly successful battlefield test by the Marine Corps and that doing that was a way to not be a Defense Contractor.
jensgk 6 hours ago
When I was a student at the Technical University of Denmark in the early 1990s, I remember a NeXT computer being prominently displayed in the Polytechnic Bookstore on campus. It was an absolute dream machine at the time, not least because of all the amazing software that came bundled with it.
EleKtr1X 7 hours ago
the logo paul rand designed for NeXT is just so timeless, it's great
apples_oranges 3 hours ago
I remember Next only from using their classes in Mac/iOS Development. For example NSString, where NS stands for NextStep.
WillAdams 8 hours ago
The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.
I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.
Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).
Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex Bézier curve manipulation.
Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12
And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
Lots of information at:
but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/
DanielKehoe 7 hours ago
WillAdams is a legend himself. Worth reading how Will and his brother Stephan made their journey in tech. And yes, we need a folklore.org for NeXT.
"As Black entrepreneurs with Berkeley educations, the Adams brothers experienced a complex combination of both structural discrimination and privilege as they started Adamation."
WillAdams 2 hours ago
I should have remembered to note that I am _not_ that Will Adams.
This was clear on usenet con comp.sys.next.* since I had an aol.com address.
That said, Millenium Notebook was one of my favourite apps.
rohitkhare 6 hours ago
Glad to hear from another NeXT & NCR 3125 pen computing enthusiast! Yes, it did feel like there were a lot more “new platforms” for early adopters to bet on and advocate for when so much was unsettled back “then” — but then again, none of that pen interface tech (Go and Windows for Pen Computing) worked as well as things finally work today...
As a NeXTStep user group leader, the usergroup scene is something else “in-person” that has been as altered as in-person offices were. Not lost or gone, but yes, different. Keep connecting, though — these are the “good ol’ days,” aren’t they?
OhMeadhbh 3 hours ago
In '93 I was (among other things) the Vice President of DaNG (Dallas area NeXT Group). At one of our meetings we had a couple of kids come in and show off this FPS they were working on... I thought it was great they were building games for NeXTStep, but was surprised to hear they wrote it in C++ instead of Objective-C. They said they did C++ 'cause that made it easier to port to DOS.
FrankBooth 31 minutes ago
This story contains many errors.
glimshe 7 hours ago
Just look at these offices compared to the drab monstrosities we have today, even at the supposedly cool and trendy tech companies...
WSSP 6 hours ago
this is very cool:
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/vv758zk7405
I'm curious about: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rw840qg3512 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rd259yj2574
(jogging club?)
js2 6 hours ago
Looks like it. I was working at a startup in Sunnyvale in the early 2000s and a some of us would meet before work for a run at the bay trail. Wouldn't be too unusual to do that at lunch hour either.
That said, these photos look a bit staged.
ghaff 5 hours ago
Many were almost certainly staged. At the time, people were not generally allowed to be casually snapping photos in work environments.
random3 8 hours ago
Those are some really good photos. I always love to look back at photos in workplaces. I took a ton myself and there's something really cool about capturing the workspaces in time.
rohitkhare 6 hours ago
If you like that collection of photos at Stanford by Doug Menuez, he also published a coffee-table book at https://menuez.com/fearless-genius
He also had access to the Apple Newton team and produced https://beyondword.com/products/defying-gravity-31949 , which is also part of their collection at https://archives.stanford.edu/catalog/photo451_aspace_ref192...
tintor 8 hours ago
"Traffic control and bot detection..."
Doesn't let me load the page.
BadlyDrawnBoy 33 minutes ago
Same