9 Oct
2011
9 Oct
'11
1:08 p.m.
On 10/9/2011 12:20 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
This may be apocryphal (I can't find a reliable source on this now that
I'm trying to look it up), but one thing I recall is that Jobs' original
vision for the optical drive was that the Cube would have *no* internal
storage (save maybe a small hard disk for paging) and each user would
have their own optical disk that the system would boot from, containing
the full OS, and the user's applications and files. It's an interesting
idea, in that a user could carry his whole world around with him. If
I'm recalling correctly, the original Cubes did ship in configurations
meeting that vision, but the drives were so slow and unreliable it
didn't take long for that idea to be dropped.
I have a Cube with an optical drive, never did bother trying to find
optical media for it... I wonder if it still works.
- Josh
What I do credit the Next cube for was the use of
Display Postscript,
although it wasn't the first to do that (Sun, IIRC, was).. The MO
drive was just plain silly (slooow write, specialized media).
Hmm, that sounds
like a suit made a dumb engineering decision. Oh,
sorry, that was Jobs...he has nerd immunity.
I think the MO was the single biggest thing that killed what would
have been a great line of machines.