All Items

NeXTcube

Year First Appeared

1990

Creator

Steve Jobs, Avie Tevanian, Bud Tribble
The NeXTcube was a high-end workstation computer manufactured by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple in 1985. Released in 1990 as the successor to the original NeXT Computer, it housed a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 processor, a magneto-optical drive, and the Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system inside a 1-foot black magnesium cube. NeXTSTEP's object-oriented development environment was decades ahead of its peers and made the machine a favorite among researchers and engineers, despite NeXT selling only around 50,000 units before exiting the hardware business in 1993.

Importance in Internet Culture

The NeXTcube is, quite literally, the machine the World Wide Web was built on. In late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXTcube at CERN to write WorldWideWeb (the first web browser) and the first HTTP server, httpd. The same machine served as the world's first web server, returning the first web page over the internet in December 1990. Berners-Lee chose the NeXTcube specifically because NeXTSTEP's Interface Builder and object-oriented frameworks let him develop a working browser-editor in a matter of weeks — a timeline that would have been impossible on contemporary PCs or workstations. Beyond the Web, NeXTSTEP became the technical foundation for Mac OS X (and therefore iOS) after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, making the NeXTcube the rare artifact that seeded both the modern web and the modern Apple platform.

Interesting Fact

The original NeXTcube at CERN that served the first web pages is still preserved with a handwritten label affixed to it by Berners-Lee or a colleague that reads: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The label was meant to keep well-meaning staff from unplugging the world's only web server. The NeXTcube also shipped with the complete works of Shakespeare, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and a Merriam-Webster dictionary preloaded — Jobs' insistence that a workstation should ship as a knowledge tool, not just a computer.