[user2342]

> By the end of the 80s, there were really only four major computer lines in the US. You had PCs (and their clones, of which there were many), Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. For a short while there was also NeXT, but even with its big promises, great innovations and charismatic leader it didn’t survive as a hardware platform.

I rather see NeXT as a competitor in the market for Unix Workstations (Sun, HP, SGI, ...) and not as a competitor to the four mentioned (consumer) lines.

[mrkstu]

It was targeted at Universities, as a foothold customer, since it ended up too expensive for even prosumers.

It ended up mostly finding uptake in custom apps in the Fortune 500 (and kept it toe-hold in universities) while it lasted as a hardware platform, and then in its OS only incarnation.

[rbanffy]

And, yet, every Mac these days runs a direct descendant of NeXT's OS.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

We had an entire lab full of NeXT cubes at Purdue that nobody really knew what to use them for. I think they ended up giving them away after a couple of years.

[guenthert]

It certainly was. Also in the late 80s, Apple IIGS (a.k.a. Woz dream machine) was fairly successful on the US market, albeit obsolete and discontinued by the time the Falcon was introduced.