Who, Me? Another Monday and what a fine one it is here in the lair of Who, Me? – the reader contributed column in which your fellow Reg-admirers admit to the moments they messed up the tech they were supposed to tame.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Miles” to told us he cut his computing teeth on the Commodore C64 and various versions of DOS – so when he arrived at University he looked past the Macs and PC clones in the computer department’s labs and honed in on the NeXT Cubes.
For those of you who’ve ignored or forgotten the Jobsian Sagas, NeXT was the company started by Steve Jobs in the time between his ejection from Apple and later triumphant return.
One of Jobs’ creations was the Cube, a workstation-class machine that legend has it was used by Tim Berners-Lee to create a little thing you have heard of called The World Wide Web.
“Running at a blistering 25 MHz, these things were quick and had an amazing GUI,” he reminisced. “But for command-line junkies, these were dreamy because you could Telnet into them from the campus dial-up service and work in the marvelous universe of a BSD Unix command line.”