I was in college when this came out and, yeah, it was super cool… but nobody could afford to own one at the time.
There were two form factors, the Cube and the Pizza Box.
The Cube was $8,000 in 1990 dollars.
The Pizza Box was $5,000.
If you run that through an inflation calculator that’s the equivalent of $19,279.50 for a cube or $12,049.69 for the pizza box.
Here you can take a look at the NeXTstation brochure, it is mentioning your price of $5,000 on the last page.
Do you by any chance know what around the same time the costs for a “normal” PC was? Just to get an idea about the difference.
I was rocking a $600 Amiga 500. :)
The Macintosh SE/30 was the year before at $4,400 ($4,900 with a hard drive).
PC prices were $1,000 to $2,000.
Thanks alot for the details.
Very interesting, I did not know that the Mac SE/30 and the (cheapest) NeXTstation had comparable prices.
What I knew (for here in Germany) was that PCs were expensive (compared to today), but much cheaper than the Macs and NeXTs.
If you want to play around with NeXTstep or OpenStep today, I can recommend the following starting points and tools:
- NeXT Computers forum and its download section
- Previous emulator for emulating black NeXT hardware (m68k) | Releases | Source 1 | Source 2 | Development
- VirtualBox for emulating white NeXT hardware (intel) | Video: Installing OpenStep in VirtualBox
The OS had a filesystem with an efficient database. Every search was super fast, regardless of how many files it had.
Do you mean that the filesystem itself had optimization so that searching from the command line (
find,grep) was fast?Or do you think more into the direction of the desktop apps Finder and Librarian?
At least I remember the Librarian.app was great for indexing and quickly searching through large amount of texts (from various formats).
It was amazing for its time, and got some things right even better than today in MacOS in 2023. I don’t know why Apple got rid of them. I loved using NeXTSTEP!
Brilliant article, thanks for sharing.
