The remaining slots can take the NeXT Dimension board (with its Intel i960 RISC CPU
My first job was VAX sydadmin for Intel P7 component engineering division. The P7 GDP (General Data Processor) was one of 4 components, which included a mainframe-style I/O channel processor, that was intended to revolutionize micro-computer systems with cache/core support for protection of SW objects, SMP, and fault-tolerance. The system was going to bring mini/mainframe power with advanced SW support a la Xerox PARC to industrial control (e.g., power stations, medical applications) and workstations. The system business that was spun-out to conquer these domains (BiiN) failed, but the GDP, stripped of its advanced system pretensions and targeted by a solid port of the GNU C compiler, became the i960 and the heart of laserprinters everywhere. The P7 wanted to be in a new workstation like the NeXT but it's application domain was defined by Siemens AG, was centered in Ada, and the design got lost a quagmire over what an microprocessor architecture should be. The P7 project had a sister component engineering project, called the 80386, which ended up being a somewhat better design cut. I left the P7 project near its culmination to do Sun sysadmin for an Intel/CMU supercomputer project lost in the annals of history called iWarp.
Regarding the Jobs NeXT presentation, so many details stand out as prescient:
• Jobs built on Englebart's Mother of All Demos for his patter.
• The seeds of the Cebtris Macs are apparent.
• His demos presage Pixar with the physics modeling.
• Little did he know that a scientist at CERN would take his interface builder demo to heart to create a little invention called the World Wide Web.
• Jobs presented his system as an inexpensive HW miracle loaded with free tools to enable a new cosmopolitan vehicle for education, math, science, and music. But what stands out today is the "licensing". He's working two sides of a street, appealing to the artist and the largesse of a commonwealth, but serving wall st. The JFK speech snippets and Apollo 11 are rife with the horrific cost of the Cold War on the world, and an expanding military industrial complex.
• He presented as simple a device which was going to make everything more complex.
• WRT storage, he doesn't speak about where all the data people are generating is going to live and who will own it.
• Touches like the GUI windows that can be moved offscreen counterpoint the "megapixel display". What's clear in retrospect is a lot is far from enough, and all he's imagined is the Finder, not what comes after it. Google is waiting in the wings.
• He introduces "the Dock". The interface builder is still alive in the form of right-clicking the Finder window toolbar and dragging its controls around. Everything else later became xcode for iOS.
I guess we could say that Steve Jobs always had a bad habit of crippling his computers with respect to storage and then overcharging customers for a solution
Reliable conventional wisdom, but my view is that even back at this demo, Jobs was keenly aware that the utility of data is in its movement between people, and the only story he had for this at that time was drives with cartridges and email. The internet was obvious enough as the future. What his audience couldn't see was that they were going to become colonized by their need to keep their data but lack of personal ownership of the means to share it. I think he was not able to grok this conundrum and the harsh reality of privatization may have created a rift in his ideals that hardened him as a man.
Lastly, the demo finished with Jobs pitting a human violin player against a computer. It's supposed to be a duo, but the pure mechanical strength of the computer and its overwhelming capacity to make noise leads to an apparent contest between the musician and the AI that 40 years later is threatening every artistic enterprise.
An entire generation of the "creative class" is now living in terror that they are going to be automated out of the economy, while there is no longer any society except the economy.
Do not look to Apple for guidance on these trends: it's their job to eat your lunch at every turn.
I haven’t played such a game in 20 years or so. I do enjoy more productive games like Scrabble (good way to pass the time on long flights) and Chess.