 It was designed around the Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 floating-point coprocessor, with a clock speed of .Its NeXTSTEP operating system is based on the Mach and BSD-derived Unix, with a proprietary GUI using a Display PostScript-based back end.The enclosure consists of a 1-foot () die-cast magnesium cube-shaped black case, which led to the machine being informally referred to as "The Cube".