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NEXT COMPUTERS    NeXT Cube

What a mythical and powerful computer!! When Steve Jobs left Apple, he decided to create the best computer possible ! The result is the NeXT.

This prodigious computer impressed a lot of people when it was presented! Its technical features, its object oriented operating system and its graphical interface, even its black case were very far from the standards (remember how many black-cased computers there were in 1988: not many)! And NeXTStep is always considered as a reference.

It was sold with a lot of great programs and a very powerful 400 dpi laser printer. Some technical features were a bit strange (grayscale display, no floppy drive, no hard disk), but were modified in the next generation with the NeXT Station and the NeXT Cube 040.

NeXT also released later the NeXTdimension for the Cube. It is a board based on an intel860, wich offers a true 32bit Postcript color display and video sampling features. You could buy the NeXTdimension board alone or a NeXTcube upgraded with it, sometimes refered as "color Cube".

Unfortunately, this computer was too expensive and had little commercial success, few years later, it was abandoned, but the later successors of this computer are still in use in some places, as servers! The NeXT was used as the world's first web server, and was also the platform for the first web browser!

Notice that the architecture of this computer (68030, 68882 & DSP 56001) is the same setup used in the Atari Falcon which was presented (a bit late) in 1992!

Thanks to Computers Forever1970..80..90 for most of the info.