NeXT NeXTstation Color NeXT Computer Inc. unvieled it's revolutionary NeXT Cube, a 1-foot by 1-foot black magnesium cube, in 1988. It offered an object oriented graphical OS, a first, and ultra-high resolution graphis, as well as the use of a megneto-optical disk drive. Then in 1990, they introdued two new systems, based on the faster 25mhz Motorolla 68040 cpu and 56001 DSP and housed in a very slim pizza-box style case, though still made out of magnesium. Soon nicknamed 'the slab', these systems were less expensive than the Cube, though they lacked it's internal expansion slots. Unlike the original Cube though, one of these new systems could display 4096 colors from a pallete of 16 million colors. The Cube itself would also gain 32bit color.

With a base price of $4875 for a NeXTstation Color with 12meg of RAM and a 105meg hard disk, this was just a few hundred dollars more than a mono NeXTstation complete with 17" monitor! Add the color 17" MegaPixel monitor, with a resolution of 1120 x 832, for an additional $2995 and the Soundbox for $125, and you have a total price of $7995, including the NeXTSTEP OS. Though steep, this was still far below the top-of-the-line Cube, which priced out at $16,390, nearly $4000 of which was for the NeXTdimension 32bit video board. The target audience for the NeXT systems were universities and students, though they soon became popular in research and government agencies as well.

Among the interestesting aspects of the NeXT already mentioned, such as the magnesium cases, object oriented OS based on the Mach UNIX kernel, and ultra-high resolution graphics, one can also add the fact that the NeXTstations came with 2.88meg floppy disk drives. The Soundbox was also much more than a speaker which sat next to the machine, as it was also the interface for the sound input/output, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. A Y-cable connected both the CPU and the monitor to it's rear panel, this being the only cable coming out the rear of the CPU other than the power cord unless the system had an external SCSI device or network connection.

NeXT added the faster 33mhz 68040 cpu to both NeXTstations in 1992, dubbed Turbo's, including replacing the then-current keyboard and mouse with Macintosh compatible units which used the ADB interface. NeXT would stop manufacturing these systems in 1993 and would be bought by Apple in 1997. Macintosh OS X is based on the NeXTstep OS and the Mach UNIX kernel. It is said that NeXT manuactured roughly 50,000 computers total.

This particular NeXTstation Color has 32meg of RAM, a 1gig hard disk, the 17" Megapixel color monitor, non-adb keyboard, non-adb mouse, soundbox, and NeXTstep 3.3 User, 3.3 Developer, Enterprise Objects Framework 1.1, and the NeXTstep Patch 2 installed.

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