Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer - W3C Blog. At a sad time at which the world has just lost Steve Jobs, it is well to reflect on some of the things which he, his passion, and his creations have given us, as now the technical community should take many of these upon its collective shoulders. A big thing Steve Jobs did for the world was to insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating! The NeXT was brilliant. The NeXT had (arguably too) many things introduced at once — removable optical storage, Objective C, DSP for sound and movies, Mach kernel, unix for a PC, display Postscript, InterfaceBuilder and so on.
Yes, they never got the price down and the optical disks proved unreliable. The NeXT box when I unwrapped it (in Sept 1990) had automatically set up for me as a naive user a unix mail account, which staggered the local unix gurus who normally had to help users of new unix boxen struggle with sendmail configuration files. Programming the WorldWideWeb client was remarkably easy on the NeXT. Tim cc-by-nc-nd. Semantic Overflow. Prezi - The zooming presentation editor. Social Interaction Ontology. Dagstuhl FOAF history talk. Gandon:FabienGandon.