today at 4:20 AM
I'm 27. Posts like this fill me with a weird kind of... melancholy? Sadness? A feeling of having missed out?
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. But man, I came into the workforce just in time for the idea of "working with people in person" to die. And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
today at 5:41 AM
For what itâs worth, Iâm about a decade older and have had similar feelings.
Iâve 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 couldâve 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.
today at 8:27 AM
Iâm 38 and I worked for an IoT startup a decade ago until the CEO couldnât pay us anymore (unbeknownst to us, he was emptying his bank account for it salaries instead of telling us months prior to start looking elsewhere).
Iâve mentioned in comments here and elsewhere that I wish I couldâve worked at Bell Labs or Xerox PARCâŠwhat a time that mustâve been. Alas. At least my side projects keep me busy; they donât pay the bills yet but theyâre the best chance I got to work on something meaningful and (eventually) get paid to do so.
today at 8:37 AM
>And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.
It is fun. It's popular to say office environment sucks and remote work is superior. and similar statements about long hours causing burnout instead of a 40/hr limit for better "work/life balance". But those depend on the personality AND the type of work they're doing.
If you're a cog-in-the-wheel code monkey working on JIRA tickets to move a "APPLY COUPON" field a few pixels on a pet food online store, that's going to push one to prefer remote working. On the other hand, if you're working on cutting edge stuff, that can push one to prefer working onsite.
The most fun I had working was 80 hours a week at the office back in the 1990s because I was working with the new thing called the World Wide Web. Fun to hash out ideas quickly with people in the room. No Zoom video conferencing needed. If you want to show them something, they just walk over and look at your screen. No screensharing needed.
The most burnout was working 40/hrs a week creating migration plans to upgrade database servers. I was remote but wasn't happy. The work was mind numbingly boring.
The personality and type-of-work being a huge factor is why a Andrew Karpathy (who's already a multimillionaire) publicly let it be known he wanted to be hired by a frontier lab. And he got his wish when Anthropic recently hired him. So why would a person who's already set for life because of previous stints at OpenAI & Tesla not just retire and relax in a hammock on a tropical island?!? Because he wants to get back in the game to work on the latest AI innovations as an insider instead of being an outsider using AI on a $200 month plan.
Unfortunately, 90% of devs probably never get to experience what working in an office for fun feels like.
today at 6:11 AM
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)
today at 7:51 AM
I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just donât 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.
today at 7:59 AM
> I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day
While I'd like to think so I can't see myself romanticising the open plan cattle pen we're in now.
I do romanticise when I had my own cube and desk, still loud but nothing compared to the cattle pen we're in now with long floor wide benches, having your opposite neighbour's face in your field of view all day and everyone yelling on zoom calls from all directions.
today at 8:35 AM
I work in a room that's 15X20 mostly by myself. At the rent my company is paying it's about $650/month.
A SW guy in the bay area costs $15,000 a month. And the MBA's won't spring for even 50 square feet of space for them? Which would be what $300/month?
I think you guys should just up and riot.
today at 6:46 AM
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.
today at 4:43 AM
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.
today at 4:59 AM
Yeah. These days when the work machine actually stayed at work. Or that you had meetings with everybody in the room without in front of a laptop or mobile screen.
today at 4:38 AM
It was. I think it could still be for some things.
today at 7:14 AM
It was.
today at 8:34 AM
> The following year a fully automated factory was constructed to produce the NeXTcube computer.
They left out that it was in Fremont, California, providing jobs (lol) for Americans â something that Apple famously stopped doing on their path to becoming obscenely rich: https://www.cultofmac.com/news/a-brief-history-of-steve-jobs...
today at 7:28 AM
Because I was born right around the time the first NeXT Computer was announced in late â88, I wasnât cognizant of the rise and fall of the NeXT platform, but I did come to appreciate the projects that were based on it, like the early WWW.
As a matter of fact, the first time I even heard of NeXT was a decade later in around â98, when PC Magazine or Computer Shopper (I canât remember exactly which one) made a brief and snarky mention of the NeXT Cube in a retrospective blurb as a novel yet highly incompatible computer system, no doubt penned by John C Dvorak (RIP) who always had it out for Steve Jobs. It stuck with me, because the image of the NeXT they used looked like no other computer I was familiar with at the time and I was head over heels for it. I even tried procuring one for many years but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Frog did an outstanding job on the design language for the NeXT hardware. They then went on to help design the look of the Packard Bell PCs from the early to mid 90s too.
These are really cool photos and, honestly, Iâd love to travel back to this past even briefly, just to experience it in person if I could.
today at 8:15 AM
> 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.
today at 8:00 AM
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.
today at 8:30 AM
I was listening to a podcast about Jobs in his role at Next and was surprised how terrible and disfunctional he was as a CEO, at least in the initial phases. I still find it incredible that the company managed to actually make something valuable in the end and have enough runway for him to figure out how to do the job properly. Like seriously, how did he even manage to retain any talent at all at the company, I still find it incredible.
today at 4:24 AM
I've always liked NeXTSTEP's distinctive user interface. I wish we had a version that ran on modern hardware, similar to what https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace is trying to achieve.
Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.
today at 8:42 AM
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.
today at 6:50 AM
I have a toy recreating the visuals: https://github.com/mkmik/nextstop
(It's vobecoded in the original sense of the word)
today at 5:21 AM
today at 4:01 AM
> By 1991 only 50,000 NeXTcubes had been sold. One of these, however, was used by Tim Berners Lee to create the first web browser and server.
Is it even possible to overstate the impact that Jobs has had on the world?
today at 7:32 AM
> 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.
today at 8:16 AM
Doesnât that understate it? Isnât a sales guy still important, to figure out what to build and to actually get it in the hands of users? Or are we to believe that he just founded NeXT with zero idea of what he wanted the company to make, and the engineers just so happened to make it?
today at 8:23 AM
[dead]
today at 5:43 AM
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.
today at 5:07 AM
I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.
I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.
I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.
today at 8:22 AM
Not a lot would happen because it doesn't have a DHCP client. You would need to open HostManager manually set up the interface.
today at 5:20 AM
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.
today at 5:33 AM
That seems reasonable.. "secure through age" is effectively "security through obscurity", which is stunningly effective most of the time... yet, I'll take a hard pass. I will let it rest in peace. Note that your point is well taken. I have an arbitrarily large collection of legacy compute that I have acquired over the years, and it all stays offline because I don't have the time or energy to deal with any fallout of plugging it in. I'm sure everything would be fine. The NeXT box, the old BBS servers, the CP/M crap I can never find time to dork around with.. maybe one day if I am able to retire I'll spin up the inefficient hoard and enjoy it. But until then, I can't risk the distraction. I miss when it was a hobby and not a career.
today at 6:07 AM
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.
today at 5:13 AM
I should note that it runs "a patchy server" on boot.
today at 6:24 AM
When I was a student at the Technical University of Denmark in the early 1990s, I remember a NeXT computer being prominently displayed in the Polytechnic Bookstore on campus. It was an absolute dream machine at the time, not least because of all the amazing software that came bundled with it.
today at 5:09 AM
the logo paul rand designed for NeXT is just so timeless, it's great
today at 6:06 AM
this is very cool: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/vv758zk7405
I'm curious about: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rw840qg3512 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/catalog/rd259yj2574
(jogging club?)
today at 6:13 AM
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.
today at 6:50 AM
Many were almost certainly staged. At the time, people were not generally allowed to be casually snapping photos in work environments.
today at 5:01 AM
Just look at these offices compared to the drab monstrosities we have today, even at the supposedly cool and trendy tech companies...
today at 4:13 AM
The high water mark of my computer usage was my final year of college when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable note-taking/sketching device and connected it to a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet.
I was very hopeful when Rhapsody was announced, but quite disappointed by Mac OS X Public Beta managed to slow my PowerMac G4/400MHz at my day job down to almost the same speed as my 25MHz NeXT Cube (always was bummed I couldn't manage to justify a Turbo 33MHz machine). It took the better part of a decade for things to catch up, though my favourite version was Snow Leopard.
Still quite disappointed that MacWorld couldn't be bothered to print my letter calling out David Pogue for claiming that Steve Jobs was using an IBM ThinkPad running Windows (it of course had OPENSTEP installed, being one of the few models on the supported hardware list).
Really enjoyed using Altsys Virtuoso 2.0 and programming in Display PostScript and seeing the results on-screen in real-time --- it was more-or-less ported to Windows and Mac OS as FreeHand v4 (and a version of it was announced/advertised for Windows NT, not sure if it ever shipped) --- still resort to Macromedia Freehand when I have something which warrants having a nice pen tool/complex BĂ©zier curve manipulation.
Glenn Reid's TouchType.app was just magical for textual logo design, and was a great example of how tightly focused small apps could be on that platform --- poste.app was simultaneously an app and a service and worth looking up for folks interested in such. Mac users should be sure to check out Services such as: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordservice/id899972312?mt=12
And of course, Doom was fun even in 2-bit greyscale --- that's where it was originally developed and what the map editor ran on: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
Lots of information at:
but I rather wish that there was an analogue for NeXT to the Mac's https://folklore.org/
today at 4:51 AM
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/
today at 6:32 AM
Glad to hear from another NeXT & NCR 3125 pen computing enthusiast! Yes, it did feel like there were a lot more ânew platformsâ for early adopters to bet on and advocate for when so much was unsettled back âthenâ â 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 âin-personâ that has been as altered as in-person offices were. Not lost or gone, but yes, different. Keep connecting, though â these are the âgood olâ days,â arenât they?
today at 4:43 AM
Those are some really good photos. I always love to look back at photos in workplaces. I took a ton myself and there's something really cool about capturing the workspaces in time.
today at 6:22 AM
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...
today at 4:41 AM
"Traffic control and bot detection..." Doesn't let me load the page.