For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.

I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.

I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.

I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.

Brains are weird.

If you expand your career scope to hardware and embedded software, your odds of having to be at a facility, or some customer site, and thus be by other people, rise substantially. I've had a number of jobs where it'd be quite impractical to be remote. e.g. actually building equipment in labs and installing it in machines, aircraft, etc. There are tons of examples. The obvious downside is that the options need to be near your home, or you move. Hence the various "hubs" that pop up for various expertise (SV obviously, but e.g. if you like aviation, Wichita is a good choice)

I don't know. I was watching a video about Bill Atkinson the other day (the guy behind the original Mac UI) and he worked from home because it was the only way he could get things done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoia

Why not go work with people in person?

I did high level IT and general org management for 8 years without a single opportunity to see the office or people in person, before covid. Doesn't make it easy to manage a global team for sure.

Working with people in person died proportionally with corporate laptops featuring wireless telecom. Not because of the mobility, but more because of the collapse of the otherwise natural modes and boundaries.

It was. I think it could still be for some things.

It was.

> At some level I know I'm seeing these pictures through rose-colored glasses, and these early-ish tech folks had plenty of gripes about office life.

Specifically, their gripes were that their boss was extremely abusive. Read "Steve Jobs in Exile" about the NeXT days. After that, you may no longer feel that you missed out.

LOL be happy you still have a job. Many of us don't. Brave new world

I've been working on an attempt at a modern OpenStep/Cocoa inspired GUI called Merenda [1], but built with modern GPU based stack. The original theme was an Aqua clone but without using any images for the buttons! I used the NextSTEP OpenStep specification as part of the original specs. The workspace ideas were fascinating.

The GUI library aspect is progressing well, but getting a desktop environment going is challenging even with AI. Still I want to capture things like the document workspaces and such. Lately Ive been tempted with making a postscript like display server based on GPU accelerated vector primitives.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/merenda

Just get a modern Mac and remove half the RAM. That should get you the same experience. The visual design was first class, but I remember when I went from NeXTStep to NEWS to X11 and was very relieved to not have to have my mouse spin for minutes at a time.

I have a toy recreating the visuals: https://github.com/mkmik/nextstop

(It's vobecoded in the original sense of the word)

He's responsible for the iPhone, and effortless touch screen pocket computing has been culturally and psychologically catastrophic.

That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.

But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.

The video game series Doom and Quake were developed by id Software using NeXT computers.

Thus the FPS genre in gaming was pioneered on these pioneering machines.

Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP. The platform was often held as the trendsetter when other companies started to emulate the success of NeXT's object-oriented system. Sun Microsystems partnered with NeXT, for the NeXTSTEP Solaris but lost interest, but it later created Java as a direct competitor to NeXTSTEP.

Apple used NeXT's software technologies as the foundation for Rhapsody, Mac OS X (later macOS), and the operating systems that followed.

> Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?

Yes, very easily. He didn't actually make anything, he was a sales guy. It was the engineers who worked around him (Woz in the Apple days, others after) who deserve credit, not Jobs himself.

> the rise and fall of the NeXT platform

In a very real sense, the NeXT platform never fell. It just changed its name to Mac OS X. Apple still ships Chess.app and TextEdit.app which can be launched from Dock.app, and you might see a spinning beachball cursor while it loads.

While it was kind of interesting, very few people really could use it, my graduation thesis was porting a particle visualisation framework from Objective-C, NeXTSTEP into C++, Windows, because the department was getting rid of their Cubes.

This was one or two years before Apple's deal, when no one had big hopes for NeXT's future.

I dunno man, as someone who’s worked directly with him and seen him in the flesh many times, it’s painfully obvious why Steve Jobs was an amazing (and flawed) human being that had people flocking around him. To act like someone has to be perfect in order to be admirable, that we don’t all have our thorns and warts, is in my opinion, a disingenuous take on the human condition. He did a lot of shitty things, like all of us if we go digging through our respective closets, but the man was truly a rare type of entrepreneur who even today completely stands out from the typical tech CEOs of Silicon Valley (many of which are also douchey, amoral, island-affiliated people, yet people still want to work for them). If this isn’t obvious to you why, my only guess is that you haven’t seen as many sides of him, or you’re not being honest about what it means to be human.

I think there wouldn't be too many exploits casually flying around the net for this kind of thing ;) but it'd be an interesting experiment. I once wrote a CTF challenge for a retro-themed challenge. That was fun and it took most of the participants still the better half of a day to pop it, simply because the system is so obscure by today's standards!

Not a lot would happen if you plugged it into the internet, unless you happened across a bot that had some exploit for a 40 year old OS at the ready and thought it was worth the time. NeXTSTEP is well into the "secure through age" part of the bathtub curve.

Not a lot would happen, but we're still pushing the boundaries of the platform.

Not a lot would happen because it doesn't have a DHCP client. You would need to open HostManager manually set up the interface.

I used a NeXT mono slab for 8-10 months while working at a NeXT reseller in the mid 1990s. It was a fantastic experience.

I should note that it runs "a patchy server" on boot.

Perot was an early investor in NeXT but later lamented, according to the book Steve Jobs in Exile, "I gave Steve too much dang money."

Jobs was also wary, because Perot's intended use for NeXT computers was military.

WillAdams is a legend himself. Worth reading how Will and his brother Stephan made their journey in tech. And yes, we need a folklore.org for NeXT.

"As Black entrepreneurs with Berkeley educations, the Adams brothers experienced a complex combination of both structural discrimination and privilege as they started Adamation."

https://computerhistory.org/blog/meet-the-adams-brothers/

Glad to hear from another NeXT & NCR 3125 pen computing enthusiast! Yes, it did feel like there were a lot more “new platforms” for early adopters to bet on and advocate for when so much was unsettled back “then” — but then again, none of that pen interface tech (Go and Windows for Pen Computing) worked as well as things finally work today...

As a NeXTStep user group leader, the usergroup scene is something else “in-person” that has been as altered as in-person offices were. Not lost or gone, but yes, different. Keep connecting, though — these are the “good ol’ days,” aren’t they?

In '93 I was (among other things) the Vice President of DaNG (Dallas area NeXT Group). At one of our meetings we had a couple of kids come in and show off this FPS they were working on... I thought it was great they were building games for NeXTStep, but was surprised to hear they wrote it in C++ instead of Objective-C. They said they did C++ 'cause that made it easier to port to DOS.

Looks like it. I was working at a startup in Sunnyvale in the early 2000s and a some of us would meet before work for a run at the bay trail. Wouldn't be too unusual to do that at lunch hour either.

That said, these photos look a bit staged.

If you like that collection of photos at Stanford by Doug Menuez, he also published a coffee-table book at https://menuez.com/fearless-genius

He also had access to the Apple Newton team and produced https://beyondword.com/products/defying-gravity-31949 , which is also part of their collection at https://archives.stanford.edu/catalog/photo451_aspace_ref192...

Same