Nosce te ipsum

Slashdot featured a really interesting little piece of history over the weekend that few have probably seen before. The video was from the archives of NeXT (who's operating system ultimately became the modern day Mac OS X) featuring a demonstration given by Steve Jobs showing off what the NeXT OS was capable of. As he goes over features like multimedia email with voice annotations, advanced object linking and embedding, innovative digital imagine capabilities and object oriented programming, it occurs to you that even today some of these things seem pretty damn cool to your average user but then you stop to consider that this video is from what, 1994-1995? Think about what hardware speed and power was like back then.

It is utterly amazing to see just how far into the future those guys were thinking with amazingly limited hardware. Interestingly, even ten years later if you bought yourself a brand new PC - out of the box, it couldn't do half the things this NeXT station is doing in this 10 year old video (the graphics, multimedia email) not to mention how clunky even modern MS Windows looks compared to this OS (which thankfully is also being continued as Openstep).

Thankfully we have visionaries like these -- without them, where else would everyone get all their good ideas from?