What's Next: Is Steve Jobs' new computer as good as it is cracked up to be?
By Lindsay Van Gelder
Connoisseur,  October,1989

Until now, the typical personal computer looked like a clunky TV set plopped on an overstuffed pizza box, and it came in variations of one color only: washday drab.

All of that has changed with the introduction of Steve Jobs' NeXT machine, a chic, sleek, basic-black, postmodern Porsche of a PC that would seem at home in Darth Vader's loft„and that also happens to incorporate some of the most advanced technology around. Unfortunately, production of the NeXT has been plagued by the kind of delays and grandiose midstream strategy changes normally associated with, say, the building of new subway lines. By the time you read these words, you might be able to buy it in a computer store„assuming you have the cash.

Steve Jobs is the boy genius who cofounded Apple Computer Inc. in a garage, conceptualized the spectacularly successful Macintosh, and then lost control of the I company to the very executives he had | hired to streamline its transition into the corporate big time. With the NeXT, Jobs decided to do things differently and keep the company relatively small.

The machine was more than two years in the design stage. When it finally was officially introduced, last October, Jobs decreed that the marketing of the NeXT would follow a similar slow curve: as units became available, they would be sold only through universities, to students, staff, and professors. How might you get a NeXT if you were not an academic ? Simple, said Jobs "Enroll. "

Jobs's marketing strategy was not so strange as it sounds. Like most cutting edge products, the NeXT needed to iron out plenty of technological kinks. By targeting academe during his growing-pains period. Jobs got to be a big fish in a small pond. Most important, the particular small pond where he chose to play top tuna is open to innovation„unlike corporate America, which primarily wants its new computers to he compatible with its old computers. Virtually no business software existed for the NeXT, and Jobs hoped that academics would he so eager to play with a new techno-toy and so greedy about the results that in the process they would develop new software. A similar strategy had worked for the Macintosh five years earlier, although the Mac was never limited to academe.

In fact, Steve Jobs has taken over the marketing of his computer himself. According to the Wall Street Journal he feared that enthusiasm for the computer was flagging„perhaps, suggested Michael Allen, a software developer, because "there wasn't enough sales activity." Despite the fact that NeXT has not yet delivered a bug-free machine to its customers, this June Canon invested $100 million in the company for exclusive rights to the Asian market. The deal is a testimony to Jobs's entrepreneurship and would suggest that the company, valued now at $6OO million, is destined to succeed.

Unfortunately for Jobs, even the barebones prototype of the NeXT was released too late for it to he sold to students for the 1988-89 academic year. As of this summer, a completed operating system still was not in place, so it seems unlikely that the NeXT will make much of a dent on campus this year, either. While academe impatiently waited, Jobs apparently decided not to put all his chips into one basket. The Businessland chain of computer stores cut a deal for exclusive commercial distribution of the NeXT. Academics can still buy direct from the company, hut the rest of us no longer need to enroll. At press time, Businessland was displaying NeXT prototypes at its stores, much like coming attractions, and swearing that the real thing will he on the shelves by fall.

Why is everyone hanging about anxiously for a computer that does not even run Lotus 1-2-3? Because the NeXT is an innovator's dream machine. Probably its most radical feature is what it does not have„a floppy-disk drive. Instead it stores information on a brand-new device„a removable, laser-based optical disk, not unlike a compact disc, that holds more than 177 times as much as the largest capacity floppy on the market.

To help fill up all this electronic elbow room, the NeXT comes with its own "digital library": Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the complete Shakespeare, as well as word-processing and math programs and the operating system and other programs necessary to run the computer and develop new software. There is room left over to write a few hundred books and store them on-line.

Aside from marking an advance in hardware, the optical disk represents a new way of looking at personal computing. Right now most computer users keep their files on a hard disk that is part of one computer. The optical disk makes it irrelevant whether you are using your own machine or someone else's; your entire universe can be contained on a disk smaller than six inches square and toted anywhere.

The catch is that each optical disk costs fifty dollars compared to only a few dollars per floppy. Since software is traditionally sold on floppies and then copied from floppy drive to hard drive, the high price will unquestionably drive up the cost of new programs. At least, that was the initial reaction to the machine.

"I thought it was really stupid at first to have no floppy, hut the more I think about it, the more it makes sense in the long run," says W. E. Peterson, executive vice president of WordPerfect Corporation, which makes the world's bestselling word processing program. He says the company hopes to develop a version of WordPerfect to run on the NeXT. "Once the cost of the optical disks comes down to the thirty- or forty-dollar range, it seems especially attractive. You could put the manual right on there and save a lot on shipping costs. Right now we're shipping a lot of very hefty manuals around the country."

It is also possible that some third-party company will manufacture a cheap outboard floppy-disk drive that hooks up the NeXT„in which case, Jobs will have his cake and make his point about outmoded technology, too.

Another NeXT breakthrough is the use of a version of UNIX, the standard operating system used by scientists and engineers on university mainframes. UNIX is immensely fast and powerful but difficult to learn and remember„far more powerful and even less friendly (if possible) than DOS, the operating system of the IBM PC and clones. But NeXT has done more than build a computer powerful enough to take advantage of UN IX in the first place; it has created NextStep, a Macintosh-like "graphical interface" that sits on the screen between you and UNIX like one of those instantaneous translators at the UN. Old UNIX hands can continue to churn

out arcane commands, but the average person can chug along with windows, buttons, and menus and will not even have to know what an operating system is. Programmers love NextStep, too, since it makes it much easier to write new software. In fact, NextStep is so hot that it has been licensed by IBM for its future PCs.

Thanks to a chip known as a digital signal processor (DSP), the NeXT also has sound and music capabilities that go way beyond those of anything else on the market. Although virtually no software has been written yet to take advantage of the DSP, the computer is capable of producing CD-quality stereo output. But music performance is only one application of what undoubtedly will become an all purpose communications tool. Given the "digital library" concept and the right software, a student studying World War 11 could, for example, call up Churchill's "blood, sweat, and tears" speech and listen to it in the prime minister's own voice.

But what most people drool over is just the look of the thing. Why, you ask, did nobody think before now to build a matte black computer? Why did it take generations to get beyond white refrigerators, sheets, toilet paper, and Jockey shorts

Small design niceties abound. Unlike most computers, which require you to do a boardinghouse reach around and behind them to turn them on and off, the NeXT conveniently houses its switch on the keyboard, along with the controls for monitor brightness and sound volume. That means that the central processing unit of the NeXT„a one-foot-square magnesium cube does n('t have to go on your desk hut can he put on a shelf, out of the way. While most computers have enough cords and wires slithering out of their nether parts to turn your desk into a viper pit, the NeXT requires one power cable.

The real zinger is the price $6,500 for the computer' plus $2,000 for the accompanying laser printer, if you have an academic affiliation. For a work station as powerful as the NeXT, it is arguably a bargain, hut even without the printer it still costs about $5,000 more than a Macintosh Plus or an IBM clone. The price seems especially stratospheric for what remains a big chunk of the NeXT's intended audience: college students. For the Businessland buyer the computer will cost $9,995; the printer, $3,495.

"It's an extremely elegant machine that ought to sell well to professors and to departments," predicts the Wolfram Research software engineer Theodore Gray, who helped design Mathematica, the math program that comes with the NeXT. "But try telling some liberal-arts freshman that this is where his next four years' beer money ought to go.".

For the immediate future, the machine also has some hidden costs for nonstudent academics. "When you read the license, it implies a sort of partnership with NeXT," according to Michael Krugman, executive director of information technology for Boston University. "You are contractually committed to support it yourself in terms of training and repairs. The machine is a beta test," he adds, using the industry term for not-quite-finished software. But he plans to buy some NeXTs anyway: "The question is simply when."

Despite the delays, the NeXT may be arriving right on time„at least cosmically speaking, says Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, a California-based research group that specializes in assessing the impact of new information technologies. "The computer revolution is only ten years old," he explains. "We're just beginning to warm up to the main event. It ordinarily takes about thirty years for any new technological idea to get embedded in this culture, because attitudes change a lot more slowly than technology. Radio was just rehashed wireless for the first ten years. Movies were just filmed plays for the first ten years, before they got the idea of filming something you couldn't see on a stage.

"Computers So far have just been copies of old technologies„paper and file-cabinet simulators. It's time for someone to begin to think of something new to do with them. The NeXT has already changed our worldview of computing."

Lindsay Van Gelder writes for publications as diverse as Lotus, PC, Mirabella, Rolling Stone, and European Travel and Life.