- This episode of "Krazy
Ken's Tech Misadventures"
is sponsored by Linode.
Guys, I bought a NeXTcube.
And now what?
Well, I can tell you what.
Here's a little bit of
what you can expect.
Oh, we can set the skill level,
wimpy, normal, excellent,
wow, we can set the skill level to wow!
That's an eight on the Boink-O-Meter!
Here we go, I gotcha, wow.
Whoa.
We know this is a one foot cube,
but in the Steve Jobs movie he said
one dimension of the cube
was a millimeter less.
Tape measure.
What?
(beeping)
(upbeat electronic music)
Hey guys, how you all doin'?
Really, that's just great,
you know, I'm doing
pretty great today, too,
because there's a fricking
NeXTcube in the lair.
This thing is pretty valuable.
I picked this up at the Vintage
Computer Festival Midwest,
and while I was carrying
it out to my vehicle,
I got some pretty awesome
looks, we'll just say that.
If you wanna see that, check
out that episode, it was great.
So, the NeXTcube, there is a
lot of history behind this.
I'll break it down a little bit,
this is what we're gonna be doing.
We'll be exploring the hardware,
we'll take a look at some of the history,
we're gonna bust this thing open,
take a look at what's on the inside,
and then we'll boot it up.
I do have the mouse.
I do have the keyboard.
I do have the MegaPixel 17 inch display,
whoops, as well,
so we will have some fun with this thing.
The NeXTcube.
So, Steve Jobs founded
NeXT after he left Apple,
we'll just say left.
And this was one of their
earlier products, the NeXTcube.
There was a version of this computer
that visually looks similar that came out
a little bit before this one,
and it was called the NeXT Computer.
But this version, the NeXTcube,
launched September 18th, 1990,
and I believe the
configuration with the cube
and the monitor and keyboard
and mouse was $10,000,
there was an education discount,
because this was, I guess, targeted more
for like research and
universities and stuff like that,
but yeah, the regular
configuration was $10,000.
Steve Jobs really admired the cube design.
So he made a magnesium one foot cube.
Now the interesting thing
is in the Steve Jobs movie,
there was talk that one measurement,
one dimension of the cube
was a millimeter shorter than the others,
so we will measure just to
see if that's true or not.
But yes, it's a magnesium cube
with a 68040 processor
inside of it at 25 megahertz.
And you can see this
little logo on the front,
even the logo resembled a cube.
The logo was designed by Paul Rand.
The whole visual identity
was designed by Paul Rand for NeXT,
and that was a $100,000 gig
that Jobs hired him for.
And I think it looks great,
that nice 20 degree rotation
right there, beautiful.
So, the whole thing is really beautiful,
but my favorite part
of the whole NeXT story
is what it became.
macOS, all the Mac stuff which
eventually evolved into iOS,
there's so many things
that you see in macOS
that actually are rooted back
in the NeXTstep operating system,
the Unix-based OS that
ran on this hardware.
Here's one thing that kind of confused me,
and I read through the product brochure
to try to figure it out.
I'm not sure what secrets
are sealed inside of here.
This is the 250 megabyte
optical media drive.
One of the big features of NeXT was
read write erasable portable
optical media at 250 megabytes,
and you could throw that
in here and it would work.
One of the configurations
I saw in the brochures,
you can also have a floppy drive,
but that looks too big
to be a floppy drive,
so I don't know if this
was configured differently,
but it's sealed off,
maybe we'll find out more
once we crack it open.
Let's flip this baby around, it is dense.
It's kind of heavy.
Also I don't have much
upper body strength.
Got the NeXTcube name
with the NeXTcube logo,
power, and then our board.
Three expansion slots,
you could throw more stuff
in this thing if you wanted to,
but this board, this
board represents a lot.
The miniaturization, the
manufacturing processes
that went into making this board
so powerful with all
these small components
so close together, was unheard of,
virtually unheard of at the time.
I've never seen another
computer with components
this close together on this board.
Maybe there was something out there
that I've never heard of,
I'm willing to debate that,
but when you take a look at this board
and keep in mind we're
talking 1988, I think,
is when the manufacturing process
where this thing was made,
just take a look at the components
and how close together they are.
Yes, there is exhaust there,
I noticed even on the bottom,
I don't really wanna put
this on its face too much,
there's like a lot of ventilation,
and there's fans in here,
I think there's one fan.
What do you say we do this?
Bust out our little hex thing here,
our little Allen wrench all in one device.
I don't know what size this is,
but yeah, we'll pop this thing in here
and crack this baby open, huh?
I've never opened one of these before,
this is gonna be really fascinating.
My frickin' tool is stuck.
Whoa, dude.
I kind of also broke a rule,
I probably should go crisscross
applesauce, but I didn't.
There we go, my frickin' Allen key
did not wanna move anywhere.
Another fun thing is the
modern internet as we know it,
the World Wide Web, was
built on a NeXT system.
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN,
he built web server software on NeXT.
So,
NeXT helped pioneer a lot of shit,
stuff you're using right now to watch me.
Okay, I didn't break anything,
it's just, it's been really stubborn.
I mean, this thing was
probably sitting somewhere
for decades without being used or cleaned.
The back is in pretty
good condition, though.
It's really, oh boy,
it's starting to fall,
it's starting to fall, okay,
all right, we got you, boy.
Okay, let's carefully remove that.
Okay, yep, there's the
fan I was talking about.
So I'm guessing...
Oh, that was easy.
Just comes off like that.
Here's the back panel, piece of cake.
Okay, I'm gonna carefully set you...
Oh, hang on.
I'm trying to read the date.
It looks like it says, August 21st,
19 something, it's kinda scrambly.
So we do have a hard drive in here.
Hiding up there, power supply, board.
So the expansion slots in
here were called NeXTbus,
that's the technology you could use
to shove in other boards
and expand the system,
and there was also something
called a dimension board
where you can use the system with color.
32 bit color.
Way back in this day,
that was frickin' amazing.
This particular system
only does black and white,
but still pretty cool.
Let's see, can we just
carefully pop this out?
Doesn't look like it's screwed in.
Oh yeah, it's moving, there we go.
Okay, got some ribbon
cables here, hang on.
They have little handles on
'em so you can just take,
oh yeah, take the little connectors off.
I don't know if I fully
trust this bigger one though.
Hang on a sec.
This one is being a little stubborn.
I'm trying to be very careful.
There we go, I'm just trying
to juggle it back and forth,
oh, there we go, there we
go, we got her, we got her.
Ladies and gentlemen, the motherboard.
Here we go, I gotcha, wow.
Whoa.
This thing is spotless, did they design it
in such a way where
dust doesn't get on it?
Look at that.
That's really pristine.
Look at that back right there.
That looks really clean too, holy cow.
Copyright 1990, NeXT
Incorporated, made in USA.
Dude, this is the coolest motherboard
I've ever looked at, that is wicked.
I'm kind of hogging it
all to myself, though.
That's not fair, okay.
Let's take a closer look at this.
I know we take this stuff
for granted nowadays,
but keep in mind, this particular board
was manufactured in 1990,
and look at how small everything is
and how everything is
just so close together.
There lies the Motorola
68040 at 25 megahertz.
We have the RAM here,
look at how many frickin' slots we have,
I didn't know there
were that many in here,
we could really max this puppy out, crap.
NeXT Computer Incorporated,
revision 2.5 looks like there.
And we have our clock battery.
All the IO is over there,
we'll take a look at that in a bit
once I get this thing back together.
And this is the NeXTbus slot.
It looks a lot like new bus.
I'm not sure what the
differences really are,
but just from a quick glance shape-wise,
it looks pretty much the same.
They actually made a really
good video about this,
Steve Jobs showed it during
his presentation in 1988.
It's a really cool video
that details the process
of making this board, I highly
recommend checking that out.
Here's the little handles
I was talking about
on the flex cables there.
Those are kind of nice, big power supply
seems to just go all the way back there.
NeXT part number 983.
So I'm guessing this whole giant thing
is that optical drive,
and then up here hiding in the
void is our hard drive there.
I forgot how much space it
is, but we can check the specs
when we boot the whole thing up
after getting it back together.
Let's get this guy back in there.
Okay.
I should probably be doing
this from the other side
so I can see where the cables go.
Sorry I'm blocking your view.
First one went in no problem,
this next one is being
kind of a bitch.
It smells great in here.
Let's try that again.
There we go.
It was just a little stubborn.
There we go, I believe
that is all the way in,
it won't go down any further,
so I'm guessing that is it.
If we turn it on and it doesn't
work, we probably know why.
Okay, let's slide it in.
And there we are.
This was for their printer,
it probably served some
other purposes, too.
SCSI.
I don't remember the exact
name of this interface.
Ethernet.
This one I can tell you about.
Jobs was huge on having CD
quality audio in the system.
So, DSP, digital signal processor.
This thing could produce CD quality sound,
so that would be 44,100
samples per second,
16 bits per sample.
Again, way back then,
producing CD quality sound
on a computer digitally,
that's really phenomenal.
So that's the DSP connection.
And down here is for the monitor
which we will look at soon,
I do, again, have that MegaPixel monitor.
This powered the monitor,
it drove the video signal,
and it also drove audio.
The keyboard and mouse
could also be plugged into
the monitor, and it would
all just act like a hub
and go through here, so really
you only have to plug in
the power and plug in the
monitor and you're good to go.
You can plug other stuff into the monitor
and it just all daisy chains
and hubs right into here.
Kinda like with Apple Display Connector,
like what you saw on the G4 Cube,
this was kind of the infancy to that,
where it was just all
done with the one port.
Okay, let's get the rear panel back on.
Here's the date I was
talking about earlier.
The ink looks like it got
a little scrambled there.
Oops.
Positive, negative, gotta
plug it in the right way.
All right, fan power is back in place.
Now we won't forget to do
crisscross applesauce, right?
Let's start with this corner.
I feel like it's not flush.
This part's not going
down flush, interesting.
There we go, I pushed a little harder
and I think the board went
in like a millimeter more,
and now it looks flush.
So let's crisscross applesauce now.
Now it's going in, that's a happy screw.
Happy screws are good screws, that's good.
You don't wanna make 'em mad
otherwise they start stripping.
(Ken humming)
There we go, all back together.
Now let's take a look at the
monitor, the other peripherals,
let's hook it all together
and boot this sucker up.
And here we are with
the MegaPixel Display.
This thing looks pretty fricking cool,
it's got like this thin design,
it's not magnesium like
the cube is, it is plastic.
But, you know, the monitor's
already heavy enough
with the CRT in here.
The stand kinda, this kind of reminds me
of where the iMacs
eventually went with that
curved foot design, and
it just holds in place.
When you tilt it,
it'll just hold the position that it's in,
just holds in place just like that.
And it even frickin' has wheels, dude,
these things are frickin' wheels,
you can just like,
moving through, oh, shit,
hang on, oh, my table.
I found out what's wrong with my table,
one of the pegs that
helps it stay elevated
must have a bad spring, and
it's just not cooperating.
But yeah, you could, there
goes the table again,
yeah, you can move it on little wheels,
it's so frickin' cool, stupid table.
I'm just relying on friction at this point
to hold it in place.
Anyway, that is the MegaPixel Display
in terms of its like design
and some of the features,
but there is more.
If we take a look at the front,
you can see we do have
that beautiful NeXT logo,
and I believe that's the microphone,
we can experiment with that later.
And on the back,
MegaPixel Display.
And then here's the ports,
again, we can use it like a hub,
we just have that one
single monitor connector
that powers the monitor,
drives the video signal,
drives the audio, but it also
controls the peripherals,
so we can plug in keyboard,
mouse, headphones,
just all conveniently into the monitor.
So on that note, let's do that.
Let's plug it all together.
All right, the family is all together now.
The cube has to be very
close to the monitor
because while we don't
have a very long cable,
so that's kind of why they're here
and I'm just kind of shoved in the corner,
but I'm used to that.
And don't worry, I didn't forget,
I'll save it for later, we
will still measure this thing.
I wanna see if the one
millimeter thing is true or not.
Okay, first, let us connect
the magical cable which does video,
audio, and pretty much everything.
Okay.
Okay, that is all good to go.
Now we have this mouse.
Kind of box shaped.
Two buttons, one for the
click, one for menus,
you could summon the menus
wherever you right click.
Ball, NeXT Incorporated, Palo Altal,
Palo Alto, Palo Alto, California.
Sometimes I twist my tongue
on that, that is weird.
But other tongue twisters don't fool me,
like unique New York or Irish wristwatch,
doesn't hurt me, but then Palo Alto, just.
I've never said that wrong before
and I just screwed it up now.
It's because you're
watching me, that's why.
Okay, so we have the mouse
connected to the keyboard.
Here is our lovely keyboard
with a power button, volume,
brightness, it's all built in.
Kind of like what we
have on Mac keyboards.
And I will plug the
keyboard into the monitor.
Oh, this is a mess, wow,
I am so disorganized
right now, I'm so sorry.
What, oh my, what?
How the shit, what?
Hang on a second.
The frickin' mouse cord
like got threaded through
the frickin' springy cable.
So we have everything together,
we just need a power cord.
Luckily I just have these C13 5-15p
US standard whatever the code is,
power cords just lying around everywhere.
Okay.
Ladies and gentlemen,
you're about to witness
the booting of a NeXTcube
from 1990 connected to
the pix, what's it called?
MegaPixel Display, I
forgot for a moment, okay.
Power button right on
the keyboard, here we go.
(computer whirring)
So far, so good.
It seems a little bit louder
than I remember hearing it
before, but I'm normally not behind it.
Okay, so the monitor is going right now,
yes, it is strobing right now,
I will address that as
much as I can in a moment.
And let's boot it up.
We're gonna boot SCSI disk
number one, or is it zero?
Anyway, BSD is the abbreviation for that.
It's not Berkeley software development,
it's like boot SCSI disk,
whatever the frick it is.
And here we go.
Just listen to that beaut.
(computer scratching)
Again, this is sounding
weirder than before.
Whoa.
I don't remember it making
those sounds earlier.
But there we are, NeXTstep is
all booted up with the dock.
Yes, just like the Mac Dock
that you use all the time
on your Macintosh computer,
well, take a look at
the dock on this thing,
you wonder where it came
from, it came from this.
There is a lot to explore
with the software here,
there was a lot of revolutionary stuff
that was in this operating system,
especially in regards to
object oriented programming.
And a lot of the stuff we
use on our Mac nowadays
came from this system
because Apple acquired
NeXT and Steve Jobs when
the Mac operating system
had to be rewritten into Mac OS X.
The core of that stuff was in
the NeXTstep operating system.
At that particular time
it was called OpenStep,
but at this time, it's called NeXTstep,
and there's a lot of cool stuff in here.
There's only one thing to
do, and that's explore it.
Okay, so you know that thing I said before
about fixing the refresh rate?
I lied.
I looked this up and
it's a 68 hertz monitor.
I've never seen that before.
So that's kind of hard
to sync up with a camera.
So we're just gonna have
to do a little bit of
post-production magic.
(fingers snapping)
Okay, hopefully that is
okay for your eyeballs.
It's not always gonna work,
but it's gonna work enough.
Yeah, but according to the brochure,
like I talked about
earlier, it is a 68040.
16 to 64 megabytes of main memory.
400 megabyte to 2.8 gigabyte hard drive.
And you could have a floppy drive in here
which was extended density,
so that's 2.8 megabytes
as opposed to the 1.44, it's 2.88.
Okay, so let's take a look
at what's going on here.
Oh, I don't wanna log
out, don't wanna do that.
So like I was talking about
earlier, we have the dock here
just like we have the dock in Mac OS X.
This is the Workspace Manager,
which I guess you could say
is kind of like the Finder.
And even if you go to info panels
and look at the about information
of certain applications,
you may see similar names
like Bertrand Serlet,
remember him from Apple, yeah?
He was at NeXT, too.
I'm gonna open up another about panel.
Take a look at the mouse cursor.
Did you see that quick?
It's our old friend the beach ball,
but it's in black and white,
that's where the dreaded
Mac beach ball came from,
isn't it exciting?
And man, you gotta watch
those old presentations
of Steve Jobs introducing the NeXT system,
especially when things didn't go so well.
- [Steve] It ain't running.
Come on, come on, come on, come on.
Come on, dammit, okay, good.
- [Ken] Oh yes, those
pieces of history are great.
So here's the quick demonstration here,
so like, let's say I'm in
the editing program here,
and you'll notice our menus
are a separate window.
There's no menu bar, that's
more of a Macintosh thing,
but we can go through our menus here.
File, Open, Save, Edit,
Copy, Paste, all that stuff
like you'd get in the menu bar
except it's more in a column format.
But the other thing is too,
you can just peel these off
so if you want the Edit menu always open,
there you go, you have
the Edit menu with you.
So I'm gonna do lorem
ipsum dolor sit amet,
and then conversion, oh,
I gotta do it in all caps.
Conversion technology.
Ah, that is the first time
I triggered the caps lock
on this keyboard, it's very interesting,
there's no caps lock button.
In fact, it's called Alpha Lock,
and the way to trigger
it is Command + Shift,
and you'll see there's some
other commands in green
on the keyboard as well,
that is pretty cool.
Okay, so now we have
that, we can Select All,
go to our Format menu, Font, Font Panel.
Again, this looks pretty familiar, right?
That's something we still
have in macOS today.
The double arrows in the scroll bar there,
that's something we also have in macOS,
I'm guessing, I'm not 100% sure,
I think other operating systems
maybe have done that in the past.
But none that I can think
of off the top my head,
but anyway, the two arrows
there for the scrolling,
that made it into Mac OS X.
And you probably noticed when
I drag this window around,
it drags the contents around,
so we do have opaque window movement.
Systems at this time,
especially consumer systems,
would have to redraw that stuff
and it would take forever,
but yeah, we're talking 1988, 1990,
just opaque window movement, no problem.
So here's another cool thing.
Let's say I wanted to find a word,
I can go to the Services menu,
this is also a thing we have in Mac OS X.
And I can say something
like Define in Webster,
just like you can do in the Mac.
- [Steve] We can pick a word like success
and go use Services again
to look it up in Webster's.
And here's the word success.
- [Ken] And there we are,
we have the whole dictionary
built in, digital Webster.
Here's another fun thing
I'd like to share with you.
So you know the classic
iconic Mac funk sound,
like when you press a
wrong key it goes bunk?
Well, you probably already
know where I'm going with this.
That is
(computer beeping)
right there.
NeXTstep had that.
And here's another thing,
I noticed there's like
an input gain slider, but I
can't get it to go anywhere,
so I'm guessing the little grill
on the front of this monitor,
even though it looks like a
microphone, maybe it isn't,
or maybe it's just not working,
I don't have it configured
right, I'm not sure.
It looks like it would be a microphone,
but it's not letting me
adjust the input gain,
so I guess I can't record any sound.
But the speaker does
work and it sounds like
the speaker is built into the monitor.
In terms of development,
we actually had some
demos on here as well,
and we can take a look at that stuff.
And some of this stuff can be used
to show off the capabilities for NeXT.
But before I continue that,
while we're on the topic
of developing software,
do you know how you can
develop your own software
or do anything else that
requires cloud computing?
You can use Linode.
Hey, Linode provides virtual servers
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you can use Linode for either of those.
It's a do it yourself solution
if you like to get into the nitty gritty
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But if you want easy, which
pretty much I would do,
there's plenty of one click apps
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heck, even Minecraft, we
used to play Minecraft
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If you've ever started with those
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services that only allowed
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which by the way, are lame,
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Oh, and because you're here
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Or if you don't like typing in codes,
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You'll be glad you did.
All right, let's get back to NeXTstep.
This benchmark could take a while,
so I'm not gonna sit here
the whole frickin' time
'cause I do have a bit of a life
and I would like to continue it.
Oh, this is going faster than
I remember it going last time,
maybe I just
cranked it too hard last time.
But yeah, there's a lot
of math going on here
when it comes to rendering the Mandelbrot.
Or we can play chess.
If you've opened up the
chess app on your Mac,
this will probably look familiar.
There's some of these that
I have not even opened ever,
but I'm gonna do one I
am kind of familiar with,
BoinkOut, where you bounce this like
eyeball thing around,
yeah, it's a little freaky.
I don't know why it has to be an eyeball.
Oh, I lost.
Oh, now it's like the Amiga ball.
Oh, okay.
If I do Command + I, I can
get the info, BoinkOut.
Oh, we can set the skill level,
wimpy, normal, excellent.
Wow, we can set the skill level to wow,
that's an eight on the Boink-O-Meter!
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, oh, oh, oh wow, okay,
they weren't kidding,
that's like really fast.
Start game.
Dude, I can't even move
the mouse that fast,
give me a break.
Holy shit, what the?
Oh, screw this, I'm out of here.
Okay, let's go to the Developer
folder, and we have demos.
Oh, do we not have the developer tools,
because that would be sad if we didn't.
Search the word interface.
That doesn't make me very confident.
Oh man, that's a bummer,
we don't have Interface
Builder on here, seriously?
But yes, Interface Builder,
kinda like what we use on the Mac now,
it's part of Xcode now, but
that's what was used back then
to just connect objects together
and have them run and just run at runtime
without having to compile
stuff, like that was huge.
- Every application on a NeXT computer
is built using Interface Builder.
- What just took me two
or three minutes to do
would probably take me an
hour or so to do manually.
- [Presenter] And while
the NeXT implementation
required only five pages
of Objective C code,
the Sun implementation,
which never truly advanced
beyond the prototype stage,
required 16 pages of C code.
- [Ken] Object oriented
programming was getting kicked off
on this system, it was starting to bloom.
And it made its way into macOS.
- [Steve] I'm gonna build a
very trivial little application
just to show you how we do this.
And we will then make a connection
between that slider and the text field
by dragging a line,
and a panel will pop up
and it'll go interrogate that text object
and show me all the messages
that text object can understand.
We'll just say, run,
and these objects will run themselves.
And now when we drag the slider,
we'll get values from zero to 100.
What we found a long time ago was
the line of code that a
developer can write the fastest,
the line of code that a developer
can maintain the cheapest,
and the line of code that
never breaks for the user
is the line of code the
developer never had to write.
(audience laughing and applauding)
- All right, and Back
Space, just from the name
I can kind of imagine
what this is gonna do,
yep, it's gonna turn our
Workspace Manager background
into something.
We have stars going back there.
That's pretty cool, I'm kind of getting
an old Windows screensaver vibe now.
What's up with Draw?
We can draw some stuff.
Doesn't look like the most
extensive tool palette.
Fax cover sheet, oh yeah, that
was kind of another feature
of NeXT, you could fax
right from the system
without having to print
and then bring the paper
over to a fax machine, you can actually
fax right from the system.
I don't know how I'm
gonna be able to really
draw anything with a mouse,
oh, rounded corners, hell yeah.
Steve Jobs and Bill
Atkinson, look at this stuff.
That's probably some square
root math going on right there,
that doesn't just happen,
that's some math going on.
Ah, text items.
Something that Bill Atkinson
did not want in MacPaint,
because he didn't want it
to feel like a glorified
word processor, if I
understand the story correctly,
I think that's how that went.
But yeah, keyboard shortcuts
I use nowadays in macOS,
Command + A to select all,
Command + T to set the font,
all that stuff is in here.
So it's all so similar, and I
can do Command + P to print.
I don't have a printer
hooked up, but again,
I could fax it right from there.
Command + H to hide if I
wanna hide an application.
I got my dock, I can drag it around.
A lot of stuff that we use today.
Oh, there's some admin
tools in here, hello.
I have never gone inside this folder.
NeXT admin, okay, so that's
NeXT admin, NeXT apps.
That's the built in stuff,
Grab for screenshots.
That's another thing we have in macOS.
It just got replaced, though,
with an app simply called Screenshot.
Mail, Preferences, Preview,
that's another one we have in macOS.
And the cool thing is I
can just keep opening these
applications and they
can just stay down here
in this bottom part of the dock
and I can just Command + H and hide them,
because the multitasking is all good,
I can keep multitasking with all
these different things going on.
And nothing crashes, nothing slows down,
I can open up the Librarian, TextEdit,
the Terminal, the Mail application.
It's a good multitasking
network-ready system
built on top of Unix, it just works.
And remember, this particular
hardware is from 1990.
And this is NeXTstep,
I believe, version 3.x,
it's one of the 3.x releases.
And the mailbox always came with this,
hey look, I got a message from
Steve Jobs, I'm famous now!
Yes, NeXTstep, you got that welcome email
from Steve Jobs, which is great.
The object is the advantage, there you go,
there's that keyword again, objects,
the whole system was about objects
and object oriented programming.
Oh yeah, sometimes I forget about that,
I was like, "Where's the scroll bar?"
It's on the left side, that
was always bizarre, I thought.
It's on the left, and
there's his signature.
Wow, I feel special, I
got an email from Steve.
All right, so I know you
want me to measure the cube,
heck, I wanna measure it too,
because I've never done that before.
So that's a quick look at NeXTstep itself,
I highly encourage you to
take a look at the other video
I did that actually shows
the system in color,
'cause I virtualized it.
So that's another good demo.
Watching the manufacturing video
and the Steve Jobs
presentations of the cube,
watch that stuff, it's so frickin' cool.
To shut this thing down, we just quit,
we quit the Workspace Manager,
and that brings us to an
option that lets us log out,
well, it's not quit, I
guess they actually do,
I was in a different program, I'm sorry,
the quit button turns into log out
when you're in the Workspace Manager,
and you could just log out
from here if you hit Return,
or you say Power Off and it
will shut down the system.
Now for the moment I have
all been waiting for.
What are the true
dimensions of the NeXTcube?
So to reiterate, Steve Jobs
was really fond of the cube design
and he wanted this thing
to be perfect, beautiful,
magnesium, 90 degree corners and shit.
Just a perfect cube,
that's what he wanted.
But an interesting thing came up.
We know this is a one foot cube,
but in the Steve Jobs movie, he said
it was either a millimeter shorter
or a millimeter more narrow,
one dimension of the cube
was a millimeter less.
And the reason was that if you
make it slightly imperfect,
it will be perceived as perfect
or something like that,
it's been a long time.
But ever since I saw the
movie, I've been curious,
is it true, and now we actually have
a NeXTcube in the lair here,
and we can test it for ourselves.
Is one part of it a millimeter less
than all of the other dimensions?
Well, let's find out with
our handy dandy tape measure.
Okay, so we're gonna
measure this side here.
Okay, yep.
It looks like it is
about a 1/2 a millimeter
shorter from the 12 inch
tick mark, but you know,
that could just be an anomaly
or the way I'm holding it,
so I wanna measure it the other way, too.
Oh yeah, now that's about...
What?
Well I'll be darned, hang on a sec,
let me look at that one more time.
Yeah, it's about a 1/2 a millimeter short
of the 12 inch tick mark with the height,
but when I measure the
depth, hang on a sec.
Son of a bitch.
That is crazy.
It is a millimeter
shorter than it is deeper.
'Cause this came out to be, again,
this being on the end,
something could make it
a little bit different, it ended up being
not a perfect 12 inches here,
but it could be just the
way I'm using the tool
or the tool itself, but it looks like it's
a 1/2 a millimeter short of 12.
And this one is one
millimeter over, so yeah,
it's about a millimeter
to one and a 1/2 millimeters different.
Let's look at the width.
Same deal.
Yeah, it's about a millimeter
or a millimeter and a 1/2 shorter,
give or take, than it is deeper or wider.
That is insane.
That's crazy.
Son of a bitch.
That is really frickin' cool.
Anyone else that has a NeXTcube, check it.
Another joke in the movie was that
Steve Jobs would measure it with a ruler
and then measure that
ruler with another ruler,
so this isn't the most precise test,
I guess the best way to do
it would to use a caliper,
but I looked up calipers of
that size and they're expensive.
But I'm also not a tool
expert, so I wanna see,
if you guys, if any of you
have a NeXTcube, measure it.
I'm curious to see if
you had the same results,
that is crazy, it is like
a millimeter to a millimeter
and a 1/2 shorter.
That is so fun.
Holy cow.
The NeXTcube, guys.
Even decades later, still a really,
really fascinating machine.
If you have any other
suggestions for what I could
use it for in a future episode,
drop a line down below.
This was a lot of fun.
Thanks for sticking with me,
catch the crazy, and pass it on.
(upbeat electronic music)
