More Than Lip Service

Here’s Steve Jobs demoing his NeXT Computer running the OS NextStep from the early 90’s. He calls it “Interpersonal Computing”.

What’s amazing to me is how 20 years on most of this demo holds up. There are things the NextStep OS was doing then that Windows and Linux still don’t do today.

Of course MacOSX inherited most of those features when it grew out of NextStep in the late 90’s.

The graphics power, the inter-app services, the rich-media, the text handling, the networking concepts – history has justified Steve and the NeXT team. He saw in the 80’s that higher-powered chips would allow workstation-like tasks and multimedia on every personal computer, and set about building the system to take UNIX power to the people.

It’s not in this video, but there’s cool video online with Steve circa 1999 talking about how using his Next box, he put his home directory ‘in the cloud’ in the early 90’s.

He explains how every machine he uses has access to his networked home directory, and because of this setup, he has not done a single backup nor lost a single bit of personal data in over 10 years.