lack one foot cube packed quite a punch. For $6500.00 you got a machine powered by a Motorola 68030 32-bit microprocessor running at 25 MHz, a 68882 math coprocessor, and 8Mb of RAM standard. The cube was connected to a 17-inch very high resolution monochrome monitor providing an excellent display. Mass storage on the machine was handled by a magneto-optical drive. The drive accepted 3 - inch removable cartridges that hold 256Mb each. These drives operated on the same principal as compact disks utilizing laser technology. As well, the cube had a digital signal processing (DSP) chip enabling the machine to produce compact disk quality music in addition to sending and receiving voice mail.NeXT ran a version of UNIX called Mach as the operating system. UNIX, a multi-user, multitasking operating system, was originally developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s to run on large time-sharing systems. The rather user-unfriendly command syntax of UNIX was hidden by NeXT's windowing user interface called the Workspace Manager. The Workspace interface used a desktop metaphor like that on the Macintosh; however its implementation was not at all similar to the Mac.There was also quite a bit of software bundled with NeXT's cube. In addition to the Mach operating system, the machine came with a C compiler, a text database, electronic mail, a word processor, a file manager, plus Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the complete works of Shakespeare.Despite its innovations, the NeXT cube never took-off. NeXT got out of the hardware business and the software side of the business was bought by Apple in the mid-90s.Through most of the nineties, hardware continued to make significant advances with the IBM PC-compatibles effectively owning the business market. The graphical user interface offered by the Macintosh was emulated by the Microsoft Windows operating system. This basically eliminated any advantage that the Mac...
