NeXT was a computer and/or (depending on what point in time you're looking at) software company founded in the mid 80's by Steve Jobs after he left Apple and eventually bought by the same Apple in the late 90's. Many people will more or less jokingly tell you that it was actually NeXT who bought Apple, since Steve soon became the man in charge again and NeXT technologies became the main ingredient in OS X. So part of the fun with NeXT computers and software is seeing a surprisingly close ancestor to OS X.

The other part of the fun is of course that NeXT was a Jobs company all the way through. It's always interesting to see what comes out of projects he's in charge of.

One day in December of 2005 someone handed me a link to a page where a whole truckload of complete and fully working NeXT computers were being sold off. While my urge to get one or five of them was (perhaps surprisingly) small, Martin immediately jumped at the chance and broguht home his very own NeXTStation Turbo Color, complete with enormous 21-inch colour monitor a few days later.

Like I mentioned above, the ties between NeXT and OS X are surprisingly close. APIs have more or less just evolved a few steps, drag and drop support is very similar (dragging files to a terminal window to insert their path and filename works in both OSs) and some programs even feature identical or at least extremely similar icons.

Oh, but it has two honest-to-God all-standard mouse buttons on its picturesquely square mouse.

I had no real idea of what to expect from a 21 inch colour monitor this old, and finding out it only refreshed at 68 Hz made me even more hesitant. The resolution's 1120 by 832 and everything's wonderfully sharp and pleasant to look at. All material I've found only states the 68 Hz refresh rate, but the screen's a lot calmer and less flickery than most 75 Hz displays I've seen. It felt like I was looking at a 90+ Hz refresh rate, at least. Maybe there's just something about monitor technology that I don't know.