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NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation
- kjs3 7y agoI have an HP 16702B logic analyzer (wonderful thing), which is really an HP 712 class workstation embedded in a stack of logic analyzer boards. Wonder if this will run on it.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoThe question is what it is running now? A minified HP-UX booting a single App, or something else entirely?
- racingmars 7y agoIt runs HP-UX, and the logic analyzer software is an X11 application. The HP-UX install on the system even starts up a VNC server, running the logic analyzer app, so you can use it over the network!
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoInteresting! Now i want one.
- kjs3 7y agoYes, you do. Just don't drive up the price on second-hand cards for the rest of us. :-)
- kjs3 7y agoYup, it's pretty much a full HP/UX 10.xx install. Which is nice, because you can get access to the LA data and do things like write perl scripts to analyze it.
- bluedino 7y agoSomeone just posted a picture of Doom on one of those (running HP-UX, thought) the other day on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/erob81/not_x86_contest_hp_16700_parisc_150mhz_running/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/erob81...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- supernintendo 7y agoThere's a certain mythical quality to old technology. The original NeXT Computer was launched the year before I was born and to this day I have yet to come across (in real life) any of the computers produced by NeXT during their eight year run in the hardware industry. A more foundational (and perhaps elusive) machine that evokes this feeling is the Xerox Alto, a computer I have also never seen in person but have a certain fondness for after watching videos of it [0]. If you ever research NeXT on the Internet you'll find articles and threads about how the company "failed" [1]. One might make the argument that NeXT's acquisition by Apple is something that almost every tech startup in 2020 could only dream of. But even more important is how the creative and technical ideas realized by the company would go on to leave a permanent imprint on computing, with NeXTSTEP being the catalyst. Thank you and anyone else helping to preserve that history. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H79_kKzmFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H79_kKzmFs [1] https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=762640 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=762640
- Aloha 7y agoI have seen the Alto - even used one at a museum, what's amazing is how not slow it feels.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoThey were rare even in their day. I was visiting lots of customer sites at the time and I only ever came across one, at a bank in London.
- qubex 7y agoI had the unique fortune of having one at home when I was in my very early adolescence (born 1981) because apparently my mother had one on loan from the institution she worked for as a statistician. It was perhaps one of the most influential pieces of technology in my life (along with my later BeBox running BeOS). The machine was truly unique and the look and feel of the GUI still represents an almost global maximum in my aesthetic sensibilities. The programming model undergirds my expectations of what a ‘modern’ development environment should be like. A truly formative, almost ineffably mythical, experience.
- 7y ago
- trimboffle 7y agoI wonder what would have happened if Steve Jobs priced Next products at the level that normal people could buy them.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoI wonder what would have happened if Xerox priced Altos products at a level normal people could afford them.
- simonh 7y agoNeXT would have gone bust almost immediately.
- trimboffle 7y agoWhy?
- simonh 7y agoBecause they would have been operating at a loss. Unless they could magic down the cost of manufacturing their products, there's no way to magic down the price they had to charge customers.
- icedchai 7y agoNeXT operated at a loss for most of its life anyway, eventually got out of the hardware business entirely. See https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo-that-never-happened/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo...
- GeekyBear 7y agoJust the cost of that much RAM alone priced it out of the home market. At introduction, a Xerox Alto would cost $100,000 to build in today's dollars according to Wikipedia, so prices were trending down at the time, but were still enormous.
- 7y ago
- jasoneckert 7y agoWe had a fleet of HP 712s running NeXTSTEP and the Objective-C developer tools at the University of Waterloo in the 1990s. The hardware + NeXT licenses were less than half the cost of the NeXT hardware and ran much faster. Plus, it ran much faster on PA-RISC than on NeXTSTEP/486.
- egdod 7y ago>a lot going on[0] I actually lol’d at quitting one’s job because the company does work for the US government. If you feel that strongly, why is acceptable to keep living here and paying taxes? [0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5an4/why-i-quit-github https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5an4/why-i-quit-github
- pedrow 7y agoIt's not as cool as running on vintage hardware but for anyone interested in seeing what NeXTstep was like, it can be run in a VM. I followed the instructions here[0] for VirtualBox. [0]: http://stuffjasondoes.com/2018/07/25/installing-nextstep-os-openstep-on-virtualbox-in-2018/ http://stuffjasondoes.com/2018/07/25/installing-nextstep-os-...
- sigzero 7y agoThanks for that. I might try that. It's been a loooong time since I have used NeXTSTEP.
- rcarmo 7y agoI loved "my" NeXT Cube when I was in my late college years. I've tried various flavors of GnuStep over the years and settled on Elementary for my Linux boxes largely because it is as "simple" as macOS, but the stark (almost brutalist) look of the NeXT and the way menus worked are something I miss.
- cpach 7y agoI didn’t know one could download NeXTSTEP from the Internet Archive. That’s great! https://archive.org/details/NextSTEP_3.3_RISC_Sun_SPARC-HP_PARISC https://archive.org/details/NextSTEP_3.3_RISC_Sun_SPARC-HP_P...
- doublerabbit 7y agoJust the GUI is what makes me nostalgic. I've never used Nextstep but something about the GUI in those screen shots just brings awe. I click the start menu on Windows 10 and presented with a bloated view of cortana among other junk. I click the systems icon in Gnome and it's almost the same. It's as it made sense, simple and kind to the user.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoI think it is still one of Linux Desktop's largest mis-steps that GNUStep/WindowMaker was not embraced as the One True DE. Now it is basically a dead project.
- badsectoracula 7y agoFWIW Window Maker (which is a completely separate project from GNUstep) is still under active development, it just doesn't get frequent releases. But the trunk has a bunch of new features and bugfixes (i even contributed a couple myself :-P). Also there was a site redesign recently, if that means anything :-P. I'm not sure why the releases are so infrequent though as it has been almost three years since the last one.
- linguae 7y agoI also think that the lack of community interest in GNUstep was a missed opportunity. More of my thoughts on the matter can be found at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/some-thoughts-about-gnustep.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2019/06/some-thoughts-a.... With that being said, GNUstep is still being worked on. It’s currently roughly compatible with Mac OS X Tiger’s version of Cocoa. While this is far behind macOS Catalina, I’ll be honest and say that Mac OS X Tiger with some security updates can hold its own against modern operating systems. There’s even a fork of Firefox called TenFourFox that’s available for PowerPC Macs running Tiger. What I personally believe is that GNUstep needs a suite of compelling applications in order for it to be more strongly considered. There are a lot of GTK and GNOME applications, and there is also a compelling collection of QT and KDE applications, but where is there a GNUstep web browser, office suite, image editor, photo library manager, etc.? GNUstep is less compelling in a world of GTK and QT apps. But if more GNUstep applications were written, then that may convince other developers to put in the work necessary to create a desktop distribution based around GNUstep and it’s applications. I was impressed by the now-defunct Étoilé project which attempted to revamp GNUstep in many ways. Anyway, I still think GNUstep has some potential, and there’s a window of opportunity for the project to gain more support, especially in an era of increased disappointment over Windows 10 and macOS.
- kazinator 7y agoIn the mid 1990's, I ported Quake to a HP/715 running HP-UX 9 or 10 (can't remember which). Though obviously not using any of the x86 assembly routines, the frame rate was playable.