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Brad Weed's avatar

Design folks at Microsoft (all six or 10 of us) were so jealous of the gray scales available on NeXT. Sure there was no color, but the first toolbar icons at Microsoft were all gray scale anyway. But we only had black, white, a light gray, and a dark gray to work with. There was some religion around not using color in icons that ChrisP challenged when he ran Word. Not that that you could do much with the remaining 12 colors in the Windows palette anyway! We did our best.

The stacked menu bar on the left of the screen was also attractive to me. It read easier to me being left justified. I did endless mocks and VB prototypes of the ubiquitous "File, Edit, View, ..." in stacked form a la NeXT. I guess the Start menu kind of ended up there.

Tandy kept a NeXT running in a UI research lab in Building 17 and I would sneak in there to play with the NeXT. The application I remember being most impressive was Mathematica. Wolfram was committed to NeXT and their early work showed. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/VerticalMarkets/HigherEducation/HigherEducationSW/MathematicaForEducation/files/page595_2.pdf

Coming from a UNIX world working on SGI workstations at Wavefront, a love for svelte UI, and sophisticated industrial design, I was in love with NeXT.

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Mike Slade's avatar

It’s true that the original 1988 NeXTCube did indeed retail for $10,000. However the sleek 1990 NeXTStation pizza box you refer to in this post started at $4,999. Still expensive, but not crazy and very competitive with Sun workstations.

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