NeXT Station

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 NeXT Dimension for the Cube. It is a board based on an Intel 860, which offers a true 32bit Postscript color display and video sampling features. You could buy the NeXT Dimension board alone or a NeXTcube upgraded with it, sometimes referred 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!

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!

The NeXT Station was a light version of the NeXTcube.

The magnetic-optical drive has been replaced by a hard disk, as NeXTcube users found this drive too slow compared to "modern" hard disks available then.

The thin design of the case didn't make it possible to keep the NeXTbus slots.

There were several models, including a NeXT Station (25 MHz), a ColorStation with color display (4096 colors, 25 MHz) and a ColorStation Turbo (33 MHz).