My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it.
It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.
I'd like to suggest having your dad and an Ars Technica journalist sit down for an interview. Get archive.org and Ars together to archive the footage and release a nice video edit in the article.
> NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor)
Thor! I remember reading a little bit about it, and finding it incredibly exciting, but finding anything from NeXT's projects that never quite went public has been really hard.
Just in case you're counting replies, yes! Bring your dad too, it'd be an honor for a ton of people who haven't met anyone from that age, let alone had a parent with stories like that :)
There's an old video on Youtube called 'The Machine to build the Machines' which goes in-depth on their automated assembly line for mainboards. Could be a nice intro.
It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful, too.