"Steve Jobs' New Machine for the '90s: the NeXT Computer" (BYTE magazine)

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)

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.

Fun Facts about the original Cube:

* A single cable connects the Cube to its monitor (with speakers and microphone). A single cable connects the monitor to the keyboard. And a single cable connects the keyboard to the mouse.

* Neither the Cube nor its monitor have any buttons, switches, or controls. The only way to turn the machine on is by pressing the Power key on the keyboard (which is connected to the monitor). It's basically a giant laptop split into 4 parts.

* Likewise, there's no way to turn the monitor off while the system is running. However, the OS will automatically lower its brightness after a period of inactivity.

* Startup takes a long time. Pressing the power key while the system is booting up will interrupt the boot sequence and begin the shutdown sequence.

* The keyboard has no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is engaged by pressing Command+Shift which will light up matching LEDs on both Shift keys. The Control key is where it's meant to be, next to the "A".

* The keyboard has no row of function keys. The Escape key is located next to the "1" key, where the tilde would be. But if you press Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde character, you will still get a tilde character.

* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.

The caps lock key just has to be the most useless waste of space on a standard qwerty keyboard. I don't think I have ever used it unless you count the times when you accidentally PRESS IT. Woops.

Standard function these days under Gnome (Ubuntu, at least).

Ask any Emacs users. :-)