What I kept thinking as I watched that video is it's difficult to get over how gargantuan that monitor looks! I know I used to work on computers with monitors that size, but it's been a while. :)

Yeah, it is neat that modern features we take as commonplace were working then. The one thing that's felt limiting is I have at time tried to send people videos through e-mail as attachments, and you can tell it wasn't designed for that. The one or two times I've done it, I've had to either send very short videos, or chop them up with a video editor before sending; a chore.

I was thinking in the part where he was moving windows with images around, that the Atari Transputer Workstation was doing the same thing in 1989. I remember reading an article that mentioned this when reviewing a computer show in Germany, where the ATW was demo'd.

I got to use a NeXTStation once, because a friend worked at a university computer store, which was selling them, and they had one on display. The thing that impressed me was that everything updated dynamically in the UI. I don't remember exactly how I saw this, but I think what happened was I was looking at a file directory, I brought up a "file info." dialog on a file, and then did something like change the file name in the directory itself, and then saw the name change in the "info." dialog, without me having to close and reopen it.

That was the one and only time I used one of these.

The feature in the NeXTStation that got a lot of buzz was the 56001 DSP chip. I've seen software that uses this operate on an Atari Falcon, which has the same chiip, and the way I often see it used is as a kind of "universal coprocessor" that speeds up calculations on large data sets, taking the load off the CPU. It could be what the NeXT software was using to dynamically move around those color images, and do the filtering in the image editing software Jobs was using.

Here's a sample, if anyone's interested.

"Electric Night" on the Atari Falcon

What's nice is at the end, it explains what hardware was used for each part of the demo, and the size of the load.

I only knew one student in college who had a NeXT, which figures, since they were pretty expensive. I thought they were neat, powerful machines, but I had trouble working up the desire to get one. One reason, of course, was the price, but another was I was just interested in doing other things that a less expensive computer could do much more cheaply.

Based on what I saw in college, it seemed like NeXT took the idea of a professional workstation, which I'd used frequently in one computer lab or another, and added very nicely designed ease-of-use features to it.

@Hank G - Re. attachments - I didn't get the point of the voice clips, either. I thought most people would rather type their messages; less hassle, but maybe that was there for people who didn't like to type.

Re. drag and drop - I didn't get his point about "dragging and dropping between applications that know nothing about each other." I thought that's what cutting and pasting on the early Macintoshes was all about; being able to copy something out of MacPaint, and paste it into MacWrite, and vice-versa. As I recall, that worked for non-Apple app's, as well. So, I thought Apple had already figured that out.

I've had the thought that maybe NeXT was using a proprietary e-mail format, because in the demos I've seen, Jobs was always putting pretty rich content in them, even in this video. I recall him saying he pasted some PostScript content into an e-mail (not as an attachment).

The reason I say this is I'm pretty sure NextStep was doing this stuff before MIME was a standard. Maybe they were using a standard from somewhere else(?) I remember there was some other, advanced document system around at the time. I don't know what it was called, though.