In the 'you never fucking know' category of Google searches, Rico was looking for word of an old school chum, Nick Baran, and ran across an article Nick had co-authored quite awhile back. The weird part? It's about Steve Job's 'new machine for the 90s', the NeXT computer:NeXT asserts that the cube, having been designed to meet the computing needs of the next decade, is "the machine for the nineties." A bold statement, to be sure, but the cube goes a long way to bolster that claim: It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax, and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power.Rico says Zelig has nothing on him; CMU is where he went to college (with Ted Kaehler, later of Xerox PARC), and the NeXT machine formed the basis for Jobs' transition back into Apple, and the release (years later) of the Macintosh Cube, an example of which Rico still owns (though you can buy it from him by going to his eBid auction, thank you very much).
Targeted initially for the higher-education market, NeXT built the cube with the feedback of an academic advisory council that consisted of researchers and professors from schools such as Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Michigan.
But Rico says check the specs on this 'antique' machine:
25MHz 68030 processor
Optical drive
8MB of RAM
Windowing Unix
and all for 'only' $6500
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