1. Represents the ULTIMATE in power I was never able to afford when I was just a little boy. Sometimes I pretend it's a supercomputer from NASA, or a mini-Cray. I wish it had cryogenic cooling to further the daydream effect. (the only downside, is that NOBODY who comes to my house knows/cares about NeXT, that is why I am so glad I have you all)
2. The DESIGN! Wow, the first time I noticed there was NO power cord going to the monitor, and ALL the power/video/mouse/sound/keyboard was going through a single cable I was blown away. Not to mention the mouse plugs into the keyboard, this is so efficient and future-looking! Love the black CUBE and SLABs in what was a sea of 1980's beige. Love the 4 Modular slots in the CUBE! OH and a 120mm fan?! Wow, I thought those recently became popular just a couple years ago, when extreme cooling was demanding more power, talk about ahead of the time.
3. Unix core... Everyone loves to use a UNIX terminal emulator, bash shell, etc. Not much more to add...
4. High resolution color, 16bit audio! This is at a time when I was playing kings quest on an ega system with system beeps.
5. CD-Rom! I believe they had the first CD-rom in a PC (I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong).
6. SCSI, talk about high performance, scalability and future-proofing. Use NeXT fans can beef up our 20yr old systems with 7200rpm drives, CD-RWs, SCSI-IDE-CF cards, you name it!
I literally could go on forever, but I want to save some features for the rest of you! Would love to hear why you LOVE NeXT!
I have to admit, I think the design of these NeXT machines is even more compelling than Apple's designs - certainly of the period, but also current designs...
sdinet - I see you're selling a cube, I guess that you're not selling your last piece of NeXT kit.
I am still awaiting the monitor and keyboard for the NeXT slab I bought -- they are due to arrive on Friday!!! I can't wait to play around with my "new" nextstation... I have to start to look around for a bigger SCSI drive, however - as I can' t even fit the development tools on the 105mb one it comes with (surprised the OS can fit in such a space!)
I'm not sure if I can use an NFS mounted directory to install the dev tools to and run them from, until I can find a drive that will work with my machine.
rp
I am a NeXT fan for life, and have many cubes, mostly I refurbish them to working order then sell them to people who will hopefully treasure them. I like to sell FULLY working and FULLY loaded NeXT machines which are ready to plug-n-play, and I always include an adapter to work on a VGA monitor with all color systems for this very reason.
My goal is to get a NICE turbo cube with dimension board in NEWish condition and set it up on a display piece.
I love the NeXT community and am here if you need any help, also I do get quite a bit of hardware so let me know if you need anything.
Great to know.. email me ("ron.pepin" at gmail dot com) with your contact information...
Just curious: Are you currently using Mac OS X as a primary OS/development environment?
rp
I agree. I love NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. The operating system & the hardware was way ahead of it's time. Even though I use Solaris/Mac OSX daily, I still prefer the GUI of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. I guess that's why I find it hard to shutdown all my systems. :wink: Sure you can run both virtually, but to me, it's not quite the same. I've been pretty tied up w/ work the last two weeks & haven't had really any time to do much, but last weekend I got a special request for something for a m68k system. So, I spent a couple of hours using my Turbo Color Slab. I loved it. It reminded me of all the hours I spent in front of the system when I first got it. As long as my hardware keeps running, they'll be used. :lol:
I actually fell in love with NeXTs while researching GUIs. I just HAD to have one. I saved up for months and bought my first system 5 years ago (!!! I can't believe it had been that long) when I was 16. I love the GUI with a passion. I'm also a 68k whore, so that was a plus :)