So, my little coffee detox experiment ended yesterday morning. In a moment of weakness I purchased a 20 oz. cup of Pike’s Place brewed to perfection by a local barista. Consequently, I slept less than soundly last night and might seem a little loopy this morning.
I had some questions about Steve Jobs so I looked up his Wikipedia article – I forgot how young he had achieved his first success. He and Gates really were contemporaries in that sense. He was only 21 when he and Woz founded Apple Computers. Anyway, I’d also forgotten his involvement with NeXT Computer.
I remember how unimpressive the second generation of Macs were compared to the first. The first real PC I could call entirely my own was a Macintosh II, the first instance of the Macintosh II series. I remember the day my dad brought it home; I think I was in seventh grade. It had 1 MB of RAM (I later upgraded to 4 MB), a 20 MB internal hard drive, and color video with a color monitor! I know!!!
When I told my friends they didn’t talk to me for a week.
It also came with an external 20 MB SCSI drive. The thing was awesome. I still tell my friends about it. The AST 2000 was about the size of a laptop and sounded like a Prius when it was running.
Anyway, the story goes that when Jobs left Apple Computers he had two other projects to keep himself busy. In 1983 George and Marcia Lucas began divorce proceedings. In 1986, in an effort to raise capital for the settlement, George Lucas sold off the the computer graphics division of his Lucasfilm production company. The $5 million raised by the sale was provided by a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the name of – wait for it – Steve Jobs. This little computer graphics company was later renamed Pixar.
The other project was a new computer company, appropriately named NeXT Computer. The NeXT was not a device for the masses. It was a high-end purpose-built performance computer. It was really expensive. There was very little software for it. But, it was way ahead of its time in a lot of ways. It had a built in network connectivity, a DSP chip, and its operating system looks like what we would today call a flavor of Linux.
The computer was amazing, but its exposure was almost entirely limited to the academic and research communities. One notable exception to this was its use in the development of some early and popular 2.5D first person shooter video games like Doom and Quake.
Right around the time I got that Macintosh II – I was probably 15 years old – my parents sent me on a tour of the CalTech campus, probably in the hopes that I would one day attend that school. On this tour we were taken through a computer lab – in a glass walled room I was a table upon which sat two all black personal computers – even the monitors were black. There was no such thing back then. This was before case modding. Everything, every PC clone, every Mac, every other PC from would be start up computer makers, was that beige puke color pioneered by IBM’s original PC back in 1981. So a computer with a black case really stood out.
And I knew what it was right away. My dad had told me about the NeXT. No hard drive. Magneto-optical removable storage media. Built in networking. And the $5,500 price tag. The year was 1991. And right around this time, in Switzerland, a guy named Tim was working on his own personal project using a NeXT computer.
There Are Those That Call Him, “Sir Tim”
Sorry, I think this guy still deserves special recognition. And so it was that on August 6, 1991 an American physicist at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire by the name of Tim Berners-Lee powered up the world’s first website on his NeXT.
QuantumTom 