Tuesday, July 31, 2012

In praise of... #Olympics, the NeXTcube & Steve #Jobs

I just criticized Danny Boyle for missing the golden opportunity of including Alan Turing in the Olympic opening ceremony. However, he deserves praise for the accuracy with which Sir Tim Berners-Lee was presented. As the loop above shows Berners-Lee is using a NeXTcube computer, just like the one on which he famously programmed the world's first web server at CERN. 
    The NeXTcube was in 1990 a powerful workstation created by NeXT  Inc., the company that Steve Jobs formed in 1985 after he was forced out of Apple. The NeXTcube featured an object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP, which unlike the hardware, was highly influential. In fact Jobs was brought back into Apple when it acquired NeXT for the operating system, which is still at the core of OS X and iOS. All this history is described in more detail in several chapters in The Universal Machine.

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