I was a science grad student at Stanford and had some undergrad digital electronics labs and digital breadboarding summer jobs. So I read about build-it-yourself computer club that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Auditorium. I think I read it in some mimeographed computer newsletter the Stanford Math Library received which was a predecessor to Byte Magazine. Getting to SLAC by bicycle was nasty because it was up a challenging hill.
People demoed their projects there, often Rasberry-PI-type contraptions that did this and that. I remember one group managed to get their hands on a cast-off mini-computer and would code it through front panel dip-switches to make music and light designs. A bare mini-computer in those days cost a couple of annual salaries.
Well the two Steves were demoing and almost-turnkey micro-computer board. You had to add a power supply, television and keyboard. And it was in a wooden case. Plastic computer cases were another year or two in the future. I thought a turnkey PC was boring. All the fun was soldering together your own contraption in my view then.
Several other groups were selling turnkey computer boards too. One was called CroMemCo named after a Stanford dorm. which they operated from. Apple didnt really distinguish itself until the next product the Apple II which was a "designed" product, not a boring metal case.
I had a post-graduate Stanford job 11 years later. And had been a certified Mac Developer using ObjectPascal and all that stuff in the meantime.
Steve was targeting the NeXT for the academic world, so I got an invite. Steve rented the fanciest auditorium in San Francisco- Symphony Hall (though NeXT was just off the Stanford campus). No one had seen the NeXT computer yet. Most PCs up until then were some kind of off-white plastic slabs. When the NeXT was unveiled it was a dark-gray magnesium cube. (The Borg were still three years in the future.) The presentation began in a darkened auditorium. Then a computer screen started talking. It displayed something that looked like a Mac screen. PC multi-media was still crude then, so audience erupted at the high quality computer speech. The speech said something about how the new NeXT woud supercede all previous PCs. Then the light came on with NeXT cube unveiled and Steve launching into a product speech. Besides the high multimedia capabilities of the NeXT hardware, Steve also promoted the NeXTSTeP operating system and software-development kit. It was object-oriented top to bottom, pretty rare then, save for a few things at Xerox. This was supposed to make writing educational applications a "piece of cake".
The NeXT never really panned out at universities becasue it was expensive and slow. I became a certified Objectve-C developer for them too. I remember the first models taking forever to compile code, because it swapped files onto a an optical disk. The NeXT became a hit a financial services firms due its advanced software. Eventually the hardware itself was discontinued and they just sold the OS and SDKs, which Apple purchases to get into the 32-bit world.
