hello I'm Gavin Clark and I'm here with
the National Museum of computing at
Bletchley Park
we have been tweeting and taking your
questions on social with the hashtag
asked en MOOC and we've been posting
furiously as well while the one of our
posts was Steve Jobs invested 12 million
dollars in his next computer company
that ultimately failed but his next cube
guaranteed its place in history by
becoming the system that CERN's Tim
berners-lee used to create the world
wide web most most people today and they
probably won't know where next cube is
so we have one at the Museum it's worth
finding out what on it what an X cube is
and maybe wide TBL did use that system
I'm here with Andrew Herbert who's one
of the expert guides and who works at
the Museum and who's also full of
microsoft research cambridge employee
Andrew why is the next cube why do
timber and stelae use this in particular
not a more famous brand of time such a
Dell this even was today so it's kind of
it was a bit early to be using a Dell so
the landscape at that time was dominated
by and what we called workstations made
by companies like some and prime and HP
remember berners-lee was at CERN the
nuclear research establishment so all
the people around him were doing
scientific research and that needs quite
powerful computers doing simulations and
so forth a typical workstation therefore
was a box the size of a sort of under
counter fridge and then on your desk you
had a big graphical screen and a
keyboard and a mouse over time the
processor boxes shrank and the next cube
was indeed a cube about a foot cute that
could actually sit on your desk they
hadn't shrunk to the size yet of being
inside the screen and these behind
resolution screens so that you could
display quite fancy graphics which you
might well want to do if you're trying
to you know display graphs of what's
going on in in nuclear reactions and so
forth
the in some ways the the next cue was
the end of that line of development it
was a very nice box so it was seen as
quite exciting technology from a
hardware point of view and jobs invested
a lot in the hardware the earlier
machines all ran versions of UNIX that
have kind of been inherited from the
pdp-11 and Beck's world and jobs is what
jobs kind of came up with a lot of
object orientation in the programming
languages he provided in the way the
graphical user interface could be
programmed and that was all very new and
exciting at that point you know people
have seen what Xerox PARC had done with
things I only helped out and so forth so
if you're a science lab at that time and
well-funded surveys and you wanted a
state of the art workstation You
certainly have a next cue on your desk
and that's the background to your help
team ended up using an X cube to do his
only work on the web there were personal
computers around at that time and the
IBM PC and the various derivatives of
that by companies like Dell and so forth
but at that point they didn't have the
horsepower to do the numerical
calculations that a scientist might want
the screens weren't high resolution
graphics of the kind that scientists and
engineers needed and frankly and they
weren't quite as reliable they were seen
as things were doing email and
spreadsheets and so therefore
accountants and Clark's obviously all
that changed now our pcs have apples
that's so full IMAX
they do the job that the old
workstations used to do any some sense
the legacies is still there because
though next failed Steve took a lot of
the ideas and technology with him
including the operating system into
Apple Mac OS is a derivative of the next
operating system and if you go to a
scientific workshop today you'll find an
awful lot
this have a MacBook or Mac workstation
home because again it's a powerful
computer and it's got very good graphics
and underneath it is Unix which is the
popular operating system for doing
scientific work yeah so it was it was
the new the range is called finger
there's a science hardcore science geeks
at the time gone from the mainstream of
history but it's go still lives on in in
Mac OS today yeah and we find site you
can kind of look at it as in some ways
being the stepping stone from the
workstations of the 1980s and 90s to the
the kind of high-end personal computers
particularly the Apple Mac range that we
have today
you