The
NeXT Cube was a revolutionary computer from
Steve Jobs's
NeXT company. Unveiled in October of 1988, encased in the 12"x12"x12"
magnesium cube was a computer with some of the most advanced hardware and software ever seen. The black cube, with matching black keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer, was visually striking and was the first major personal computer to break out of the
beige box rut.
It had a 25 Mhz Motorola 68040 CPU with integrated MMU and FPU, one of the most powerful CPUs of the time. Apple only started using the 68040 in their computers in 1991, almost two years later. The first model came equiped with 8 MB of RAM; a second model released soon after came equiped with 16 MB. Perhaps most interestingly, the computer had a second microprocessor on board -- a Motorola 56001 DSP. The DSP was capable of processing speech, music, acting as a modem (much like the WinModems of today) and other signal processing tasks. Unfortunately, most developers of the time were slow to recognize the potential and take advantage of the DSP.
The MegaPixel display came standard and a 400dpi laser printer was optional. The MegaPixel was a 17" grayscale monitor that had a resolution of 1120x832 at 92 dpi. The NeXT Cube used 2 bits per pixel, giving a palette of black, white, and two shades of gray. The original model, much like the iMac, was floppy-less, instead having a 256 MB rewritable optical drive, long before CD-R drives were even available. The second model added a 2.88 MB floppy, backwards compatible with standard 1.44 MB drives. All models contained a standard SCSI hard drive.
Other notable features were built-in ethernet, sound, serial and printer ports, plus an I/O port connected directly to the DSP. Three NeXTbus slots allowed for expansion cards such as the NeXTdimension board, giving 32-bit-per-pixel color/video.
The machine ran the NEXTSTEP operating system, built on the Mach microkernel and BSD 4.3, with lots of innovations like Display Postscript and an Objective C based development environment.
NeXT released their NeXTStation and NeXTStation Color computers in 1990, to provide a low(er) cost alternative to the cube.