NeXTs (both slabs and cubes) were installed in all Watson Lab offices in the
early-to-mid 1990s, as well as in many of Columbia's public labs and in the
CU Libraries. The entire population of NeXTs was tied in to our central
identify, file, and mail systems and administered centrally by just a
handful of people.
NeXT workstation (slab); image: [1]
NeXT Cube; image: [2]
NeXT slab at Columbia[4]
Left: The NeXT workstation, 1991, "slab" model (as in the
film 2001 Space Odyssey; there was also a "cube" model). Barely
visible in the right-hand image is the Columbia signon graphic. The NeXT
was one of the early attempts (but by no means the first) to put a friendly
GUI face on UNIX to make it more accessible to the masses (or, conversely,
to put a real operating system behind a GUI rather than the disaster that
was Windows). The company was founded by Steve Jobs during his absence from
Apple; this workstation was to be the "next" hot item after the Macintosh: a
Macintosh-like system that emobodied concepts such as memory protection,
multiprocessing, multiple users, and security that were absent from the
pre-OSX Mac. It was marketed heavily to universities, who snapped it up in
vast quantities, but not vast enough to keep the company afloat. As I
recall, we bought hundreds of NeXTs and put them everywhere. If you walked
into one of the public NeXT areas you could log in to any one of them as if
you were logging into the central Cunix system, and have access to all your
own files.
Although the NeXT was not particularly fast, it had a lightning-fast
PostScript[5] interpreter because its display was,
in fact, Display PostScript (not X). This made the NeXT the ultimate
PostScript previewer.
Initially NeXTs were monochrome, but color models soon followed.
Unfortunately, NeXTs were not built to last; the disks and monitors began to
give out after several years; as far as I know, none survive at Columbia.
