13 ms·

Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine

214 points by marcodiego 5y ago

Grumbledour 5y ago
I did this a few days ago and was really surprised by the copying and untaring not having progress bars. I know this thing is old, but as it is heralded so often as a really great system, this little detail struck me as really user unfriendly and I would have not expected to find something like this there. I have to admit, setting this up was kind of a pain in general and I am not sure if it is worth the trouble. Maybe someone can give some examples while it might be? I personally wanted to take a look at Lotus Improv, but could after setting it all up not find a version for intel. I guess there never was one?
- spitfire 5y ago
  There never was a lotus improv for non NeXT hardware. Lotus killed NeXT improv basically lay immediately after it came out. What happened was lighthouse design came in and built an exact clone of improv called quantrix. The manuals were interchangeable - I’m actually learning them now. I bought a boxed copy of improv and quantrix manuals. It is /excellent/ we really have a lot of excellent ideas in our computing past. If you want a copy of the lighthouse apps (they gave away licenses when sun bought them in 1996 or so. ) check out next computers.org They have a file section.
  - tssva 5y ago
    Do you mean a NeXTSTEP version for non NeXT hardware because there was a Windows version?
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      He means for next os.
    - spitfire 5y ago
      So this gets complicated so Improv 1.0 is available on m68k next hw. Improv 2.0 was only available for windows x86. Lighthouse design quantrix for nextstep is available on m68k, x86, hp-parisc and sun hardware. Then there’s an offshoot of lighthouse design quantrix which is quantrix modeller written in Java and available for windows and Mac. It costs $2500/year. I’m learning improv on m68k and quantrix(the manuals interchange freely) on m68k/x86.
  - Grumbledour 5y ago
    Thanks! It's great to hear quantrix is this similar to improv. I will take a look at it!
- mnd999 5y ago
  Lotus Improv was available for Windows (3.x) as well if that’s your main interest. Might be easier to get running, if you can find it.
  - FullyFunctional 5y ago
    I have it along with manuals and the update. I used it for years for various personal finance tracking (runs in a Windows XP VM on macOS). This is Lotus Improv, nothing to do with Quantix.
    - mnd999 5y ago
      I got curious and tried it on wine last night. Seems like it’s not compatible sadly.
      - FullyFunctional 5y ago
        Yeah I know. I've filed two requests with details, but I haven't tried to solve it myself.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
I actually followed this guide the other day. Pretty neat to be able to run NeXTSTEP and play around with all the old apps. Be warned though, as the article says, the mouse is very difficult to use/control due to the drivers and differences between modern mice and the mice of the time.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Ive been meaning to try out the MAME version that the MAME devs added a few years ago. Not sure the speed is there but that could have changed, have not followed it too closely. Think they also added SGI Iris so you can say 'hey I know this'.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
The link title should probably be capitalized the way the company spelt it (NeXT), because otherwise I see this in the article list and I’ve no clue what the article is about (“Next” reads simply as a titlecased adverb).
- tnzk 5y ago
  I thought it's the article about yet another JavaScript framework indeed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    You know, thinking about it seriously, I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment, as reasonable as it seems on the surface. I do think the Web Platform makes a pretty bad (foundation for a) UI toolkit, at least judging from the results. I think the amount of awkwardness in JavaScript is just plain unreasonable. I’m also disappointed by how badly the practices of the modern Web accomodate, well, viewing static text and images retrieved over the Internet. Various JavaScript libraries and approaches seem to pass by so fast I get dizzy if I look. (The last point would probably disappear were I to fully immerse myself in Web programming, but I just don’t like it enough for that.) And yet. It seems that the people making all these frameworks and producing unjustifiably heavy blobs of JavaScript in order to display a photo... Are gradually encountering and solving, in a practical context and with real-world feedback, a lot of genuinely difficult problems—problems which often have only been considered in an academic context, and then not with an overabundance of results. It’s not that they go out looking for difficult problems to solve—unlike academics. They frequently don’t even realize the difficulty or the existence of the problem at first. It’s just that they start with a reasonably complete solution for a small problem area, go right to the boundary, and push. Pretty soon the boundary reaches things that were previously only attacked with Grand Generalized Solutions, found hard, and left unsolved. Yet they need them solved, so they push further. The flood of frameworks and best practices occurs because they are iterating. This process produces warts. I mean, of course it produces warts. It cannot help but produce warts. In a setting that also prizes backwards compatibility, some of those warts survive long enough to become functionally immortal, and so the survivors accumulate even if most warts are eliminated very quickly. Eventually we reach a point where we can only look back at a five-meg Opera executable and weep. This process also means that some of the new best practices are practically indistinguishable from the old ones. However, that is not in itself a condemnation: a lot of people changing their minds can very well happen a function at a time, a default at a time, even a function name at a time. Some of those changes—maybe even most of those changes—are still noise and passing fads. But they are fads of a specific kind—they are generally not sticky: because iterating is the (social) norm, whole industries and schools of thought don’t get founded around a single supposedly universal solution, and giant edifices of millions of lines and man-centuries of effort don’t get erected around a suboptimal approach (see: XML). As fads go, I’d say these are pretty mild. So what are some of the hard problems the Web people are solving or found themselves having solved? Native code generation for dynamic languages. (Tracing JITs pretty much won, from what I can see, yet it seems that nobody expected that, not even the Self people that did much of the foundational work in an academic context before.) Ergonomics of a fully asynchronous programming environment, up to and including system calls. (Again, cooperative concurrency seems to have pretty much won here, yet it wasn’t that long ago that the BeOS approach of preemption and shared memory seemed a plausible solution for responsive UIs. While people were already doing cooperative threads when the 6502 was the new hotness, my machine has IndexedDB but neither scheduler activations nor transactional memory.) Model that can represent most of the meaningful organizational semantics in most of the documents. (The problem isn’t inventing a model, the problem is obtaining enough data to converge on the right one. HTML5 is a resounding success in this respect; from what I can see most of the other document preparation or processing systems either had the document author code a bespoke structure, fell back to presentation details, forced everyone to adjust their documents to match the limitations by administrative mandate, were basically unusable, or all of the above.) Declarative, non-Turing-complete styling that’s still flexible enough to make following the semantic model above feasible and even pleasant. (I like XSLT and dislike most templating, but CSS selectors feel so much more carefully designed than XPath. I suspect having to do efficient and even incremental implementations from the start has something to do with it. I still want a neat mathematical model, like maybe tree transducers, to tell me what I should and shouldn’t include in a styling language.) Practical, interactive reflowable text layout that can do modestly non-trivial typesetting. (TeX can do some things better but basically can’t do cutouts at all without hardcoding sizes, and it’s a language powerful enough you can basically only execute it. Roff does much less. Everything else either requires babysitting by a human when changing layout widths or would make a typographer from half a millenium ago cringe.) Resolution independence including on pretty low-resolution devices without fuzziness or glitches and with support for zooming in while preserving in the layout. (The CSS “pixel” is a hack but the approaches in native app ecosystems are absolutely infested with much worse hacks. I wonder how many people on Earth understand the rounding code in a major browser.) Understandable, even intuitive GUI conventions for (extremely) untrusted applications. (It starts with powerboxes but ends with very subtle tricks like a timer on the “Open” button. Still no petnames for some reason.) Applications that work offline yet can be used immediately without a user-visible installation step. (Turns out you just had to make the online case the default one and get it wrong a couple of times, and you can give people enough of a framework that they are able to make the major effort required to get it working if they have the motivation.) Graphical user interfaces that are general enough to do almost anything yet are not a maze of twisty little assignments and repaint calls. (I’ve been watching the progress in FRP since about 2010, and while the Web variations are all pretty kludgey, they’re still a damn sight better than everything I’ve seen atop a native UI toolkit. I get the impression XAML might be a contender but haven’t been able to find a description of how it deals with the difficult stuff; it’s also purely presentational from what I understand.) Each of these purported solutions has flaws and can be disputed, and I’m sure people can point me to prior work that’s more principled or does some aspects better (please do!). My point is that all of the questions are very difficult, mostly unrelated to the Web’s natural monopoly position, and yet for every one of them the Web ecosystem approach of dumb but dauntless iteration has done the state of the art a lot of good.
technothrasher 5y ago
Back in about 2000 I managed to get my hands on twelve free NeXTcubes that a tech company was throwing out. I was over eager with my generosity handing them out to the local geek community, and before I realized what I'd done, I didn't have one left for myself. Always regretted that, as they're very cool machines even just sitting on the shelf. I do still have stacks of NeXTStep CDs sitting in a closet though. I used one of the Intel version ones a couple years ago to install a copy on VirtualBox like this guide is showing. Fun to screw around with it, brought back fond memories of my days in school using an original NeXTstation.
- lastofthemojito 5y ago
  I let a NeXT cube through my hands too, and regret it as well. In high school I guess I was the teacher's pet in my electronics class, and we regularly got old computers and parts as donations. I helped the teacher get a classroom's worth of PCs up and running as a network so he let me have the oddball donated NeXT cube that was just gathering dust. Then in college I traded it to another geek for an Xbox and a bunch of games. Seemed like an even enough trade at the time although now I wouldn't mind having that lovely magnesium cube around.
adolph 5y ago
The second cube continued to burn, its sides falling into the slag pile that had consumed the first. "You know, we could make it flare up by throwing some water on it," one of the Livermore engineers suggested. It seemed like a good idea to us, so he pulled out a garden hose with a trigger nozzle and doused the fire with a few quick spurts. The water instantly turned to steam. Thick clouds of white smoke bellowed forwards, out of the chamber. We were covered with a fine white powder. https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
- Cycl0ps 5y ago
  I enjoyed that, thanks for sharing
  - adolph 5y ago
    Glad to remember it and see others enjoying the old stories. I, like others, read "Build Your Own NeXT" with an eye opened for "casting magnesium!" rather than "run a VM with a time-honored OS." Given the recent anniversary, maybe it would be apt to add a vintage looking sticker with red inked "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"? https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
ragingrobot 5y ago
While it's neat to be able to run the actual OS, the title as provided from the blog is a bit misleading. Adafruit also did something similar a few days ago with Solaris. I may be the only one as I see no one else has commented so, but when I read "build your own..." I'm thinking the actual hardware, or compatible. They should call these articles something like "Run XXX OS and software on your existing machine."
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  In this particular case it seems reasonably fair, because this is recreating what NeXT had become by the end. While they did continue shipping units for a couple years after the pivot, NeXT's focus on building hardware didn't even last half the period between the company's founding and its acquisition by Apple. Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I don't know that there was anything particularly special bout the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the interesting bit.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    > Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I don't know that there was anything particularly special bout the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the interesting bit. A modern computer running the whole thing in emulation is not the same though. Whereas for example an FPGA implementation, that’s in line with my idea of “build your own NeXT”. Even though someone might say, that’s emulation too. And they’d be correct in a way. But like, do you see what I mean?
    - ido 5y ago
      Would you consider an "IBM compatible" PC from the late NeXT era that can natively run NeXTSTEP/i486 authentic? Seeing as that's the (one of) the kind of computer that NeXT sold the OS for.
    - nuclearnice1 5y ago
lupinglade 5y ago
A beautiful OS that is far more enjoyable to use than todays inconsistent, schizophrenic UIs.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  Apple failed miserably by not only not choosing the NeXT interface (which was a joy to work with), they kept the outline of the Classic Mac OS interface while getting rid of the good stuff (spatial Finder, etc.).
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?
    - bitwize 5y ago
      It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just like real objects. Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of human psychology in such a deep way to make computers easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting worse with the iOS-ization of everything).
      - handrous 5y ago
        iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with folders having a kind of visual physicality—tapping a folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with dimension and location. The down-side was that they were limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers, you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when using folders, now—iOS6 and earlier was the only OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after some light config of the a11y features). 7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff. The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.
SeanLuke 5y ago
> Notice the .app extension? Did you ever wonder why programs are called apps now? Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed. Programs were called "applications" long before NeXTSTEP existed, but not "apps". "Apps" was mainstreamed primarily by the iPhone and its App Store ecosystem. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=apps,applications https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
  - rleigh 5y ago
    It was mainstream long before that. It was in common use with the Digital Research GEM desktop in the mid '80s (which used a .app suffix for applications), but was not particularly unique to GEM.
    - CharlesW 5y ago
      For the file extension. I did a quick search and all of the GEM ads and articles I could find call them "applications", "software applications", and even "executables".
  - bitwize 5y ago
    People called applications apps long before the iPhone or NeXT. The term "killer app" was coined in the early 1980s to mean an application that was so must-have it would sell computers on its own. Typically this was a spreadsheet; VisiCalc was the Apple II's killer app, and Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for the IBM PC.
    - SeanLuke 5y ago
      Actually the first use of the term "killer application" (not even "killer app" yet) in print was 1988, in PC Week. See Wikipedia. NeXT's first computers were 1987. "App" however dates from at least 1981. https://www.osnews.com/story/24882/the-history-of-app-and-the-demise-of-the-programmer/ https://www.osnews.com/story/24882/the-history-of-app-and-th...
MegaDeKay 5y ago
I'd like to give this a try on qemu. Anybody happen to know why this wouldn't work?
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Early qemu versions had problems with the NeXTstep PS/2 mouse drivers. I created some patches for ancient qemu versions (0.8 and 0.9 in 2005...) to emulate a Microsoft bus mouse, which worked well with NeXTstep (https://github.com/michaelengel/qemuNextSTEPpatches https://github.com/michaelengel/qemuNextSTEPpatches). I haven't tried running NeXTstep in qemu recently, but I suspect it might simply work today. The Previous emulator for "real" black 68k-based hardware that is mentioned briefly in the article is actually much more fun and also allows you to run 68k-only software such as Lotus Improv - http://previous.unixdude.net http://previous.unixdude.net
a-dub 5y ago
i bought one of these used back when i was in high school. at the time mono 040 slabs could be had for a few hundred dollars. without a doubt, the coolest thing about it was the hardware. oversized flat screen monitors, 2.88mb disk drives, onboard mc56k dsp. the audio output hardware only operated at 22khz when in stereo, if i recall correctly... however, the presence of the mc56k dsp made realtime resampling of any stream possible without burdening the mc68040 cpu. perhaps the most interesting component of the next hardware was the "geekport" which was some oddball connector, like a db-19 or something that was a mix of ttl digital lines and analog in/out attached to a/d and d/a that were convenient to the dsp.
- MegaDeKay 5y ago
  I think with the geekport that you might be getting mixed up with the BeBox. "The BeBox aimed to be the ultimate multimedia workstation. It had dual PowerPC CPUs and tons of I/O options including four MIDI ports, multiple sound ports, and the "GeekPort", a 37-pin connector that had power plus digital and analog I/O with a built-in ADC and DAC. Less than 2000 BeBoxes were sold so it's very rare to see one today." https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtualbox https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtu...
  - a-dub 5y ago
    you may be right on the name, but the next also had a "weird dsp port"
    - a-dub 5y ago
      so apparently it was a db-15. i think the dac lived in the monitor, and devices that connected were things like modems and voicemail units. line level audio could be noisy so i wonder if it was just 8 bits of data (or more) and a few control pins that were attached directly to the m56k... i think the native width was 24 bits...
musicale 5y ago
This looks very similar to the vm installation guide at https://openstep.bfx.re https://openstep.bfx.re except that it uses VirtualBox rather than Parallels.
itomato 5y ago
Previous on M1 is setting new records in NXBench. Rob Blessin at Blackhole can probably help you with black hardware if you're into that. (NeXT non-ADB keyboards are a pleasure to use for a while). There are also some of us who are still building and running native X86 boxes to run Openstep natively.
- _moof 5y ago
  The keyboards really are nice to type on. Though for the life of me I can't figure out why, on a UNIX system, they put the pipe character in such a weird place. It's above the keypad. If you (the general you, not you specifically, since you probably already know this) get your hands on a NeXT keyboard and want to use it with a modern system, Adafruit has a guide here for building a USB adapter with an Arduino: https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-micro https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-mi...
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    Both the mouse and keyboard were banes of my existence as a lab owner. They failed constantly.
    - _moof 5y ago
      Bleh, sorry to hear that. Never had any trouble with mine. Maybe you had too many college students? :)
      - foobiekr 5y ago
        :-) well, it was a college lab. I had three big problems with the NeXT systems. One was the MO; that was dire and terrible and they should never have shipped it. This was very rapidly fixed by adding HDs to every system as soon as we realized what boat anchors the MO-only systems were. The second was the poor HW quality of the mice and keyboards. They simply broke a lot more frequently than the PCs, Suns (even the cheap pink/grey ones that I've forgotten the name of), SGIs and Dec systems. The last was that we were an AFS university and the NeXT systems, if you accidentally browsed the AFS top level directory, would hang the browser for at least 30 minutes. Super unpleasant if you needed to head to class since a locking screen saver did not kick in even after the browser recovered. As a side effect, we'd have students yanking the power cord which itself was not always something that the HD slabs recovered from. That said, I loved them, everything about them, and there has never been anything like that. The Sun-vs-NeXT thing was night and day.
quijoteuniv 5y ago
Any use for this now? I would not mind however to have a VM of a single computer i used since 1990 (mind you i skipped windows from 98 til 10) so it would mostly VM for mac & linux)
dhosek 5y ago
Back in 1989, I slept on Tom Rokicki's couch while I attended that year's TUG meeting at Stanford and I got to play with the NeXT that Tom was given to develop TeX for NeXT.¹ It was an amazing machine, especially given the era. The optical disk was slow by modern standards but seemed quite responsive back then and the system was just mind-blowing. 1. I'm not sure if this was pre- or post-release of NeXTTeX
ulzeraj 5y ago
Thats cool but please don't take me wrong when I say VMs are no fun. Perhaps some hardware exists that is so bog simple but yet relatively performant and is available from the shelves could run this on bare metal. I heard a few years ago that Intel Atoms are basically supercharged 486s.
- projektfu 5y ago
  I’d say they’re more like P5 pentiums. In-order, pipelined, superscalar, with the full set of IA-32 instructions and most of the extensions.
simonjgreen 5y ago
Could the title of this entry be altered to include the full article title including the extremely relevant "[...] with a virtual machine" so as to be less misleading and click-baity?
- eric__cartman 5y ago
  yeah, I was expecting some hardware hacking of some sort, not setting up a regular virtual machine in a PC. At least they documented the process of building an ADB to USB adapter for the keyboard/mouse.
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    Take care, though. The original NeXT keyboard and mouse were not using ADB, but a proprietary (and a bit strange) protocol. The keyboard and mouse controller were actually contained in the monitor (for mono systems) or soundbox (for color systems), the NeXT communicated with the processor in the soundbox using a high speed serial protocol that also transmitted audio data. Only the later Turbo Cubes and Stations used ADB.
- dang 5y ago
  Yes indeed.
neilv 5y ago
The NeXTstep UI has a bunch of neat things about it. I didn't use it much (way too expensive for a PC, and not considered an engineering workstation), but I did get to play with one in a computer lab a short while. And later I used a bunch of open source window management and utilities on Linux that mimicked aspects of OpenStep. The NeXTstep look was very legible and understandable, and stylish at the time. Compare to Mac of the time, or the later Win95. (Today you might be bothered by the wide non-autohide scrollbars with the stipple, the font aliasing, or the particular shade of gray. But you might find it more accessible than ad hoc brochure looks in a lot of UX.) On the scrollbars, note that the buttons for the two arrows are right next to each other, rather than at each end, which made a lot of sense if the user is actually clicking on the buttons to navigate, and might want to change direction. The hierarchical assemblies of lists in the UI seemed to come from Smalltalk browsers. The desktop icons weren't just to represent programs that were running, like'd see on X at the time, or later in Windows 95, but are more like both launchers and navigation (and could be other things), and dockable. More like the dock in current Mac OS X, etc. (I thought of NeXTstep when I made my XMonad window manager setup, where I made commands that navigate to a particular kind of window, starting the program if needed, and a modifier key can be held down to create additional instances of some kind of window.) Note that the Mac's trash can became a more environmentally conscious recycling bin. I'm sure some people who used the NeXT heavily could point out many other points of interest.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  the programming demos were pretty shocking, the IDE was years ahead of anything mainstream and the system well modularized to provide actual RAD
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Although clearly a marketing demo, it is nice to watch. "NeXT vs Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg
    - neilv 5y ago
voidfunc 5y ago
Not nearly as cool without the NeXT Cube, but that's a bit harder to get.
EricRiese 5y ago
I appreciate how the hardware pictured is an Intel "NeXT" Unit of Computing.
thought_alarm 5y ago
If you set up this VM, there's a tiff image of a young Scott Forestall hiding in the AppKit framework resources. See if you can find it.
ttul 5y ago
In 1995, my university had an entire lab of NeXT stations and almost nobody ever used them. Everything about NeXT was amazing, from the hardware specs to the user interface design and forward-thinking industrial design.
thought_alarm 5y ago
It's worth it to install the developer tools. A few observations: This is running a mix of older NextStep apps and newer OpenStep apps. For example, there are two text editors: Edit.app, and TextEdit.app. Edit.app is the original NextStep editor circa 1989, and TextEdit is the OpenStep reimplementation circa 1995. You can tell if it's a newer OpenStep app because it draws Windows-style focus rings around the buttons and controls. OpenStep became Cocoa, so OpenStep code looks very familiar to anyone who's done Objective-C development for Mac or iOS. NextStep code, on the other hand, looks very foreign to modern eyes (There are no NS classes. It's basically just plain C and AppKit classes like Window, Button, View, etc.) The TextEdit source code is included in the developer examples folder, written by Ali Ozer. Apple would continue to include the latest TextEdit source code with Xcode up until about OS X 10.9, if I remember. This version of TextEdit is cross platform, so there's plenty of #ifdef WIN32 code. There's no NSDocumentController, so there's boilerplate in the app controller, like checking if documents need to be saved before quitting, that a modern implementation would no longer need to worry about. If you're old enough to remember using Xcode 3, prior to the Xcode 4 redesign, you probably found that IDE quite strange and difficult to master (I miss Xcode 3, myself). Xcode 3 was a descendent of the NeXT Project Builder circa 1996. Playing around with the older, and much simpler, Project Builder makes it easier to understand why Xcode 3 worked the way it did.
geomark 5y ago
At the company I once worked for I used a NeXTcube to demo a co-processor board built from VHSIC Phase II chips. The cube's size and form factor allowed for a nice sized board to be plugged into the backplane. And the graphics of the NeXT were pretty advanced for the time. The co-processor board ran a missile tracking algorithm on canned data and the NeXT painted a nice real-time graphic of the tracking. It made for a really cool demo. Steve Jobs actually paid a visit. When he saw the demo he said "That isn't what we had in mind." We thought he was kind of thick, that he didn't get it that when you have a cool product then users are gonna user and figure out all kinds of different things to do with it. Later it became clear that he was all about controlling the user experience, so seeing what we did was very contrary to his way of thinking.
- mulmen 5y ago
  What an interesting anecdote. What Jobs did was incredible and I absolutely believe he was a visionary. But I hadn’t really considered the trade-off. That he would almost require tunnel vision to do what he did. A kind of product design near(far?)-sightedness. In hindsight this is obvious and probably true of most of us but your anecdote is a great example.
whartung 5y ago
I bought a NeXTStation through the University program back in '92. That was the low end model, 8MB RAM, 120MB disk. The disk was too small for the development tools, but it was quickly swapped out for a 400MB and I bumped it up to 20MB. 25Mhz '040, SCSI, 10BaseT (!!), plus the crazy framebuffer based printer that used a video interface. (I have one of those too.) It's at my friend house now, he just managed to revive it after assorted false starts over the past few months. I have yet to actually see it running myself. In hindsight, one of the things that made the NeXT, or more specifically, NeXTSTEP amazing, was what it could do given the hardware of the day. The stand out was Display PostScript. What an absolute marvel of the time. That it could actually perform. Here was a system with a full boat windowing and GUI system, built on the full PS rendering model (INCLUDING the alpha channel), in real time, with a few MB of memory and a 25MHz '040. When you dragged a window. You dragged the window. The entire thing, not just a frame. That was a big deal. I remember the heresy of people posting "rich" news poss to USENET using the whatever the news application was called in the day. This was before there was a MIME standard, just making stuff up everyday. I think it would be a marvel to have the original source code ported, straight up, "bugs and all" to modern hardware. Specifically thinking having NS ported to an off the shelf Raspberry Pi. I don't know if we have anything like that today. Creeping features have exploded...everything on a modern *NIX system. I don't think you can run XClock in 8MB of RAM today. If NS was usable (I won't say it was fast, my memory doesn't go back that far, and after seeing several vintage machines, none of them were "fast", we just didn't know any better), just imagine how usable it would be on something even as small as a modern Raspberry Pi. But it was a great machine. It handled my USENET and email feed over my 2400 baud Hayes Smartmodem with aplomb.
- mpweiher 5y ago
  > Specifically thinking having NS ported to an off the shelf Raspberry Pi. Not original NS, but GNUstep runs on the Raspi. Install scripts here: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build > If NS was usable (I won't say it was fast, NS was definitely more than "usable", it seemed very snappy at the time. GNUstep runs very nicely on the Raspi.
  - 5y ago
RobBlessinBHI 5y ago
Hello Hacker Community: I'm not sure exactly what I've stumbled into actually pointed at but I'm still reselling NeXT Hardware after 28 years. My first day working for Alembic Systems selling NeXT Hardware, software and 3rd party products, NeXT shut down their hardware production line and layed off 400 people. So it began ..... what a long strange trip its been . I see my reputation proceeds me and I have a good one there and love my job. I am a one man shop these days for the most part and well you can see hundreds of NeXT projects I've worked on at youtube.com/robblessin , I'm compmuterpowwow on eBay and blackholeinc.com is my perpetual disaster of a website. When I started the website it was basically a very tiny web , as Sir Tim Berners Lee is one of my customers, I repaired his NeXT cube https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/08/10/steve-jobs-computer-cameos-at-the-london-olympics/?sh=1ced25cb631e https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/08/10/s... , a lot of war stories fairly sure between NeXT, Alembic and incarnations of leading to Black hole , we actually sold stuff on the Web when most people had no clue what it was lol. I we inadvertently invented spam , when we had the bright idea to send demos of the solid Thinking Modeler using NeXT mail to the University of Wisconsin and it replicated itself a whopping 3mb file bringing their 300 baud network down , oops . Not what we intended to have happen , however when the someone with a NeXT actually completed the download and figured out what it was they thought it was cool. Everything before then involved paper cuts stuffing envelopes with brochures, we evolved and set up a website with downloadable software links http://www.blackholeinc.com/catalog/index.shtml http://www.blackholeinc.com/catalog/index.shtml . I saw acomment below on the original optical drives , they were and are crap , I've had them actually catch fire from the laser igniting the dust lol , then they turned the cooling fan around not sure if it was an improvement. It is possible to repair them now .... the hardware improved and NeXT was the first company to distribute software on CDrom hence the Sony 1X drive , first computers with CD Quality sound card and 56001 DSP , you can even boot them up as a Mac running up to version 8.1 . When I Tunes crashed fortunately I had the web objects software they needed to update it ..... Sorry to crash the party with a rant but I'm mainly at NeXTcomputers.org or NeXT Computer Enthusiasts and have a lot of cool vintage hardware not just NeXT . Apologies for the rant. Best regards Rob Blessin

214 points by marcodiego 5y ago

I did this a few days ago and was really surprised by the copying and untaring not having progress bars. I know this thing is old, but as it is heralded so often as a really great system, this little detail struck me as really user unfriendly and I would have not expected to find something like this there. I have to admit, setting this up was kind of a pain in general and I am not sure if it is worth the trouble. Maybe someone can give some examples while it might be? I personally wanted to take a look at Lotus Improv, but could after setting it all up not find a version for intel. I guess there never was one?

spitfire 5y ago
There never was a lotus improv for non NeXT hardware. Lotus killed NeXT improv basically lay immediately after it came out. What happened was lighthouse design came in and built an exact clone of improv called quantrix. The manuals were interchangeable - I’m actually learning them now. I bought a boxed copy of improv and quantrix manuals. It is /excellent/ we really have a lot of excellent ideas in our computing past. If you want a copy of the lighthouse apps (they gave away licenses when sun bought them in 1996 or so. ) check out next computers.org They have a file section.
- tssva 5y ago
  Do you mean a NeXTSTEP version for non NeXT hardware because there was a Windows version?
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    He means for next os.
  - spitfire 5y ago
    So this gets complicated so Improv 1.0 is available on m68k next hw. Improv 2.0 was only available for windows x86. Lighthouse design quantrix for nextstep is available on m68k, x86, hp-parisc and sun hardware. Then there’s an offshoot of lighthouse design quantrix which is quantrix modeller written in Java and available for windows and Mac. It costs $2500/year. I’m learning improv on m68k and quantrix(the manuals interchange freely) on m68k/x86.
- Grumbledour 5y ago
  Thanks! It's great to hear quantrix is this similar to improv. I will take a look at it!
mnd999 5y ago
Lotus Improv was available for Windows (3.x) as well if that’s your main interest. Might be easier to get running, if you can find it.
- FullyFunctional 5y ago
  I have it along with manuals and the update. I used it for years for various personal finance tracking (runs in a Windows XP VM on macOS). This is Lotus Improv, nothing to do with Quantix.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    I got curious and tried it on wine last night. Seems like it’s not compatible sadly.
    - FullyFunctional 5y ago
      Yeah I know. I've filed two requests with details, but I haven't tried to solve it myself.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

I actually followed this guide the other day. Pretty neat to be able to run NeXTSTEP and play around with all the old apps. Be warned though, as the article says, the mouse is very difficult to use/control due to the drivers and differences between modern mice and the mice of the time.

sumtechguy 5y ago
Ive been meaning to try out the MAME version that the MAME devs added a few years ago. Not sure the speed is there but that could have changed, have not followed it too closely. Think they also added SGI Iris so you can say 'hey I know this'.

mananaysiempre 5y ago

The link title should probably be capitalized the way the company spelt it (NeXT), because otherwise I see this in the article list and I’ve no clue what the article is about (“Next” reads simply as a titlecased adverb).

tnzk 5y ago
I thought it's the article about yet another JavaScript framework indeed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  You know, thinking about it seriously, I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment, as reasonable as it seems on the surface. I do think the Web Platform makes a pretty bad (foundation for a) UI toolkit, at least judging from the results. I think the amount of awkwardness in JavaScript is just plain unreasonable. I’m also disappointed by how badly the practices of the modern Web accomodate, well, viewing static text and images retrieved over the Internet. Various JavaScript libraries and approaches seem to pass by so fast I get dizzy if I look. (The last point would probably disappear were I to fully immerse myself in Web programming, but I just don’t like it enough for that.) And yet. It seems that the people making all these frameworks and producing unjustifiably heavy blobs of JavaScript in order to display a photo... Are gradually encountering and solving, in a practical context and with real-world feedback, a lot of genuinely difficult problems—problems which often have only been considered in an academic context, and then not with an overabundance of results. It’s not that they go out looking for difficult problems to solve—unlike academics. They frequently don’t even realize the difficulty or the existence of the problem at first. It’s just that they start with a reasonably complete solution for a small problem area, go right to the boundary, and push. Pretty soon the boundary reaches things that were previously only attacked with Grand Generalized Solutions, found hard, and left unsolved. Yet they need them solved, so they push further. The flood of frameworks and best practices occurs because they are iterating. This process produces warts. I mean, of course it produces warts. It cannot help but produce warts. In a setting that also prizes backwards compatibility, some of those warts survive long enough to become functionally immortal, and so the survivors accumulate even if most warts are eliminated very quickly. Eventually we reach a point where we can only look back at a five-meg Opera executable and weep. This process also means that some of the new best practices are practically indistinguishable from the old ones. However, that is not in itself a condemnation: a lot of people changing their minds can very well happen a function at a time, a default at a time, even a function name at a time. Some of those changes—maybe even most of those changes—are still noise and passing fads. But they are fads of a specific kind—they are generally not sticky: because iterating is the (social) norm, whole industries and schools of thought don’t get founded around a single supposedly universal solution, and giant edifices of millions of lines and man-centuries of effort don’t get erected around a suboptimal approach (see: XML). As fads go, I’d say these are pretty mild. So what are some of the hard problems the Web people are solving or found themselves having solved? Native code generation for dynamic languages. (Tracing JITs pretty much won, from what I can see, yet it seems that nobody expected that, not even the Self people that did much of the foundational work in an academic context before.) Ergonomics of a fully asynchronous programming environment, up to and including system calls. (Again, cooperative concurrency seems to have pretty much won here, yet it wasn’t that long ago that the BeOS approach of preemption and shared memory seemed a plausible solution for responsive UIs. While people were already doing cooperative threads when the 6502 was the new hotness, my machine has IndexedDB but neither scheduler activations nor transactional memory.) Model that can represent most of the meaningful organizational semantics in most of the documents. (The problem isn’t inventing a model, the problem is obtaining enough data to converge on the right one. HTML5 is a resounding success in this respect; from what I can see most of the other document preparation or processing systems either had the document author code a bespoke structure, fell back to presentation details, forced everyone to adjust their documents to match the limitations by administrative mandate, were basically unusable, or all of the above.) Declarative, non-Turing-complete styling that’s still flexible enough to make following the semantic model above feasible and even pleasant. (I like XSLT and dislike most templating, but CSS selectors feel so much more carefully designed than XPath. I suspect having to do efficient and even incremental implementations from the start has something to do with it. I still want a neat mathematical model, like maybe tree transducers, to tell me what I should and shouldn’t include in a styling language.) Practical, interactive reflowable text layout that can do modestly non-trivial typesetting. (TeX can do some things better but basically can’t do cutouts at all without hardcoding sizes, and it’s a language powerful enough you can basically only execute it. Roff does much less. Everything else either requires babysitting by a human when changing layout widths or would make a typographer from half a millenium ago cringe.) Resolution independence including on pretty low-resolution devices without fuzziness or glitches and with support for zooming in while preserving in the layout. (The CSS “pixel” is a hack but the approaches in native app ecosystems are absolutely infested with much worse hacks. I wonder how many people on Earth understand the rounding code in a major browser.) Understandable, even intuitive GUI conventions for (extremely) untrusted applications. (It starts with powerboxes but ends with very subtle tricks like a timer on the “Open” button. Still no petnames for some reason.) Applications that work offline yet can be used immediately without a user-visible installation step. (Turns out you just had to make the online case the default one and get it wrong a couple of times, and you can give people enough of a framework that they are able to make the major effort required to get it working if they have the motivation.) Graphical user interfaces that are general enough to do almost anything yet are not a maze of twisty little assignments and repaint calls. (I’ve been watching the progress in FRP since about 2010, and while the Web variations are all pretty kludgey, they’re still a damn sight better than everything I’ve seen atop a native UI toolkit. I get the impression XAML might be a contender but haven’t been able to find a description of how it deals with the difficult stuff; it’s also purely presentational from what I understand.) Each of these purported solutions has flaws and can be disputed, and I’m sure people can point me to prior work that’s more principled or does some aspects better (please do!). My point is that all of the questions are very difficult, mostly unrelated to the Web’s natural monopoly position, and yet for every one of them the Web ecosystem approach of dumb but dauntless iteration has done the state of the art a lot of good.

technothrasher 5y ago

Back in about 2000 I managed to get my hands on twelve free NeXTcubes that a tech company was throwing out. I was over eager with my generosity handing them out to the local geek community, and before I realized what I'd done, I didn't have one left for myself. Always regretted that, as they're very cool machines even just sitting on the shelf. I do still have stacks of NeXTStep CDs sitting in a closet though. I used one of the Intel version ones a couple years ago to install a copy on VirtualBox like this guide is showing. Fun to screw around with it, brought back fond memories of my days in school using an original NeXTstation.

lastofthemojito 5y ago
I let a NeXT cube through my hands too, and regret it as well. In high school I guess I was the teacher's pet in my electronics class, and we regularly got old computers and parts as donations. I helped the teacher get a classroom's worth of PCs up and running as a network so he let me have the oddball donated NeXT cube that was just gathering dust. Then in college I traded it to another geek for an Xbox and a bunch of games. Seemed like an even enough trade at the time although now I wouldn't mind having that lovely magnesium cube around.

adolph 5y ago

The second cube continued to burn, its sides falling into the slag pile that had consumed the first. "You know, we could make it flare up by throwing some water on it," one of the Livermore engineers suggested. It seemed like a good idea to us, so he pulled out a garden hose with a trigger nozzle and doused the fire with a few quick spurts. The water instantly turned to steam. Thick clouds of white smoke bellowed forwards, out of the chamber. We were covered with a fine white powder. https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html

Cycl0ps 5y ago
I enjoyed that, thanks for sharing
- adolph 5y ago
  Glad to remember it and see others enjoying the old stories. I, like others, read "Build Your Own NeXT" with an eye opened for "casting magnesium!" rather than "run a VM with a time-honored OS." Given the recent anniversary, maybe it would be apt to add a vintage looking sticker with red inked "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"? https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...

ragingrobot 5y ago

While it's neat to be able to run the actual OS, the title as provided from the blog is a bit misleading. Adafruit also did something similar a few days ago with Solaris. I may be the only one as I see no one else has commented so, but when I read "build your own..." I'm thinking the actual hardware, or compatible. They should call these articles something like "Run XXX OS and software on your existing machine."

mumblemumble 5y ago
In this particular case it seems reasonably fair, because this is recreating what NeXT had become by the end. While they did continue shipping units for a couple years after the pivot, NeXT's focus on building hardware didn't even last half the period between the company's founding and its acquisition by Apple. Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I don't know that there was anything particularly special bout the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the interesting bit.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I don't know that there was anything particularly special bout the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the interesting bit. A modern computer running the whole thing in emulation is not the same though. Whereas for example an FPGA implementation, that’s in line with my idea of “build your own NeXT”. Even though someone might say, that’s emulation too. And they’d be correct in a way. But like, do you see what I mean?
  - ido 5y ago
    Would you consider an "IBM compatible" PC from the late NeXT era that can natively run NeXTSTEP/i486 authentic? Seeing as that's the (one of) the kind of computer that NeXT sold the OS for.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago

lupinglade 5y ago

A beautiful OS that is far more enjoyable to use than todays inconsistent, schizophrenic UIs.

flenserboy 5y ago
Apple failed miserably by not only not choosing the NeXT interface (which was a joy to work with), they kept the outline of the Classic Mac OS interface while getting rid of the good stuff (spatial Finder, etc.).
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just like real objects. Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of human psychology in such a deep way to make computers easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting worse with the iOS-ization of everything).
    - handrous 5y ago
      iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with folders having a kind of visual physicality—tapping a folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with dimension and location. The down-side was that they were limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers, you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when using folders, now—iOS6 and earlier was the only OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after some light config of the a11y features). 7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff. The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.

SeanLuke 5y ago

> Notice the .app extension? Did you ever wonder why programs are called apps now? Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed.

CharlesW 5y ago
> Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed. Programs were called "applications" long before NeXTSTEP existed, but not "apps". "Apps" was mainstreamed primarily by the iPhone and its App Store ecosystem. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=apps,applications https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
- rleigh 5y ago
  It was mainstream long before that. It was in common use with the Digital Research GEM desktop in the mid '80s (which used a .app suffix for applications), but was not particularly unique to GEM.
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    For the file extension. I did a quick search and all of the GEM ads and articles I could find call them "applications", "software applications", and even "executables".
- bitwize 5y ago
  People called applications apps long before the iPhone or NeXT. The term "killer app" was coined in the early 1980s to mean an application that was so must-have it would sell computers on its own. Typically this was a spreadsheet; VisiCalc was the Apple II's killer app, and Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for the IBM PC.
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    Actually the first use of the term "killer application" (not even "killer app" yet) in print was 1988, in PC Week. See Wikipedia. NeXT's first computers were 1987. "App" however dates from at least 1981. https://www.osnews.com/story/24882/the-history-of-app-and-the-demise-of-the-programmer/ https://www.osnews.com/story/24882/the-history-of-app-and-th...

MegaDeKay 5y ago

I'd like to give this a try on qemu. Anybody happen to know why this wouldn't work?

johndoe0815 5y ago
Early qemu versions had problems with the NeXTstep PS/2 mouse drivers. I created some patches for ancient qemu versions (0.8 and 0.9 in 2005...) to emulate a Microsoft bus mouse, which worked well with NeXTstep (https://github.com/michaelengel/qemuNextSTEPpatches https://github.com/michaelengel/qemuNextSTEPpatches). I haven't tried running NeXTstep in qemu recently, but I suspect it might simply work today. The Previous emulator for "real" black 68k-based hardware that is mentioned briefly in the article is actually much more fun and also allows you to run 68k-only software such as Lotus Improv - http://previous.unixdude.net http://previous.unixdude.net

a-dub 5y ago

i bought one of these used back when i was in high school. at the time mono 040 slabs could be had for a few hundred dollars. without a doubt, the coolest thing about it was the hardware. oversized flat screen monitors, 2.88mb disk drives, onboard mc56k dsp. the audio output hardware only operated at 22khz when in stereo, if i recall correctly... however, the presence of the mc56k dsp made realtime resampling of any stream possible without burdening the mc68040 cpu. perhaps the most interesting component of the next hardware was the "geekport" which was some oddball connector, like a db-19 or something that was a mix of ttl digital lines and analog in/out attached to a/d and d/a that were convenient to the dsp.

MegaDeKay 5y ago
I think with the geekport that you might be getting mixed up with the BeBox. "The BeBox aimed to be the ultimate multimedia workstation. It had dual PowerPC CPUs and tons of I/O options including four MIDI ports, multiple sound ports, and the "GeekPort", a 37-pin connector that had power plus digital and analog I/O with a built-in ADC and DAC. Less than 2000 BeBoxes were sold so it's very rare to see one today." https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtualbox https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtu...
- a-dub 5y ago
  you may be right on the name, but the next also had a "weird dsp port"
  - a-dub 5y ago
    so apparently it was a db-15. i think the dac lived in the monitor, and devices that connected were things like modems and voicemail units. line level audio could be noisy so i wonder if it was just 8 bits of data (or more) and a few control pins that were attached directly to the m56k... i think the native width was 24 bits...

musicale 5y ago

This looks very similar to the vm installation guide at https://openstep.bfx.re https://openstep.bfx.re except that it uses VirtualBox rather than Parallels.

itomato 5y ago

Previous on M1 is setting new records in NXBench. Rob Blessin at Blackhole can probably help you with black hardware if you're into that. (NeXT non-ADB keyboards are a pleasure to use for a while). There are also some of us who are still building and running native X86 boxes to run Openstep natively.

_moof 5y ago
The keyboards really are nice to type on. Though for the life of me I can't figure out why, on a UNIX system, they put the pipe character in such a weird place. It's above the keypad. If you (the general you, not you specifically, since you probably already know this) get your hands on a NeXT keyboard and want to use it with a modern system, Adafruit has a guide here for building a USB adapter with an Arduino: https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-micro https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-mi...
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Both the mouse and keyboard were banes of my existence as a lab owner. They failed constantly.
  - _moof 5y ago
    Bleh, sorry to hear that. Never had any trouble with mine. Maybe you had too many college students? :)
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      :-) well, it was a college lab. I had three big problems with the NeXT systems. One was the MO; that was dire and terrible and they should never have shipped it. This was very rapidly fixed by adding HDs to every system as soon as we realized what boat anchors the MO-only systems were. The second was the poor HW quality of the mice and keyboards. They simply broke a lot more frequently than the PCs, Suns (even the cheap pink/grey ones that I've forgotten the name of), SGIs and Dec systems. The last was that we were an AFS university and the NeXT systems, if you accidentally browsed the AFS top level directory, would hang the browser for at least 30 minutes. Super unpleasant if you needed to head to class since a locking screen saver did not kick in even after the browser recovered. As a side effect, we'd have students yanking the power cord which itself was not always something that the HD slabs recovered from. That said, I loved them, everything about them, and there has never been anything like that. The Sun-vs-NeXT thing was night and day.

quijoteuniv 5y ago

Any use for this now? I would not mind however to have a VM of a single computer i used since 1990 (mind you i skipped windows from 98 til 10) so it would mostly VM for mac & linux)

dhosek 5y ago

Back in 1989, I slept on Tom Rokicki's couch while I attended that year's TUG meeting at Stanford and I got to play with the NeXT that Tom was given to develop TeX for NeXT.¹ It was an amazing machine, especially given the era. The optical disk was slow by modern standards but seemed quite responsive back then and the system was just mind-blowing. 1. I'm not sure if this was pre- or post-release of NeXTTeX

ulzeraj 5y ago

Thats cool but please don't take me wrong when I say VMs are no fun. Perhaps some hardware exists that is so bog simple but yet relatively performant and is available from the shelves could run this on bare metal. I heard a few years ago that Intel Atoms are basically supercharged 486s.

projektfu 5y ago
I’d say they’re more like P5 pentiums. In-order, pipelined, superscalar, with the full set of IA-32 instructions and most of the extensions.

simonjgreen 5y ago

Could the title of this entry be altered to include the full article title including the extremely relevant "[...] with a virtual machine" so as to be less misleading and click-baity?

eric__cartman 5y ago
yeah, I was expecting some hardware hacking of some sort, not setting up a regular virtual machine in a PC. At least they documented the process of building an ADB to USB adapter for the keyboard/mouse.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Take care, though. The original NeXT keyboard and mouse were not using ADB, but a proprietary (and a bit strange) protocol. The keyboard and mouse controller were actually contained in the monitor (for mono systems) or soundbox (for color systems), the NeXT communicated with the processor in the soundbox using a high speed serial protocol that also transmitted audio data. Only the later Turbo Cubes and Stations used ADB.
dang 5y ago
Yes indeed.

neilv 5y ago

The NeXTstep UI has a bunch of neat things about it. I didn't use it much (way too expensive for a PC, and not considered an engineering workstation), but I did get to play with one in a computer lab a short while. And later I used a bunch of open source window management and utilities on Linux that mimicked aspects of OpenStep. The NeXTstep look was very legible and understandable, and stylish at the time. Compare to Mac of the time, or the later Win95. (Today you might be bothered by the wide non-autohide scrollbars with the stipple, the font aliasing, or the particular shade of gray. But you might find it more accessible than ad hoc brochure looks in a lot of UX.) On the scrollbars, note that the buttons for the two arrows are right next to each other, rather than at each end, which made a lot of sense if the user is actually clicking on the buttons to navigate, and might want to change direction. The hierarchical assemblies of lists in the UI seemed to come from Smalltalk browsers. The desktop icons weren't just to represent programs that were running, like'd see on X at the time, or later in Windows 95, but are more like both launchers and navigation (and could be other things), and dockable. More like the dock in current Mac OS X, etc. (I thought of NeXTstep when I made my XMonad window manager setup, where I made commands that navigate to a particular kind of window, starting the program if needed, and a modifier key can be held down to create additional instances of some kind of window.) Note that the Mac's trash can became a more environmentally conscious recycling bin. I'm sure some people who used the NeXT heavily could point out many other points of interest.

agumonkey 5y ago
the programming demos were pretty shocking, the IDE was years ahead of anything mainstream and the system well modularized to provide actual RAD
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Although clearly a marketing demo, it is nice to watch. "NeXT vs Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg
  - neilv 5y ago

voidfunc 5y ago

Not nearly as cool without the NeXT Cube, but that's a bit harder to get.

EricRiese 5y ago

I appreciate how the hardware pictured is an Intel "NeXT" Unit of Computing.

thought_alarm 5y ago

If you set up this VM, there's a tiff image of a young Scott Forestall hiding in the AppKit framework resources. See if you can find it.

ttul 5y ago

In 1995, my university had an entire lab of NeXT stations and almost nobody ever used them. Everything about NeXT was amazing, from the hardware specs to the user interface design and forward-thinking industrial design.

thought_alarm 5y ago

It's worth it to install the developer tools. A few observations: This is running a mix of older NextStep apps and newer OpenStep apps. For example, there are two text editors: Edit.app, and TextEdit.app. Edit.app is the original NextStep editor circa 1989, and TextEdit is the OpenStep reimplementation circa 1995. You can tell if it's a newer OpenStep app because it draws Windows-style focus rings around the buttons and controls. OpenStep became Cocoa, so OpenStep code looks very familiar to anyone who's done Objective-C development for Mac or iOS. NextStep code, on the other hand, looks very foreign to modern eyes (There are no NS classes. It's basically just plain C and AppKit classes like Window, Button, View, etc.) The TextEdit source code is included in the developer examples folder, written by Ali Ozer. Apple would continue to include the latest TextEdit source code with Xcode up until about OS X 10.9, if I remember. This version of TextEdit is cross platform, so there's plenty of #ifdef WIN32 code. There's no NSDocumentController, so there's boilerplate in the app controller, like checking if documents need to be saved before quitting, that a modern implementation would no longer need to worry about. If you're old enough to remember using Xcode 3, prior to the Xcode 4 redesign, you probably found that IDE quite strange and difficult to master (I miss Xcode 3, myself). Xcode 3 was a descendent of the NeXT Project Builder circa 1996. Playing around with the older, and much simpler, Project Builder makes it easier to understand why Xcode 3 worked the way it did.

geomark 5y ago

At the company I once worked for I used a NeXTcube to demo a co-processor board built from VHSIC Phase II chips. The cube's size and form factor allowed for a nice sized board to be plugged into the backplane. And the graphics of the NeXT were pretty advanced for the time. The co-processor board ran a missile tracking algorithm on canned data and the NeXT painted a nice real-time graphic of the tracking. It made for a really cool demo. Steve Jobs actually paid a visit. When he saw the demo he said "That isn't what we had in mind." We thought he was kind of thick, that he didn't get it that when you have a cool product then users are gonna user and figure out all kinds of different things to do with it. Later it became clear that he was all about controlling the user experience, so seeing what we did was very contrary to his way of thinking.

mulmen 5y ago
What an interesting anecdote. What Jobs did was incredible and I absolutely believe he was a visionary. But I hadn’t really considered the trade-off. That he would almost require tunnel vision to do what he did. A kind of product design near(far?)-sightedness. In hindsight this is obvious and probably true of most of us but your anecdote is a great example.

whartung 5y ago

I bought a NeXTStation through the University program back in '92. That was the low end model, 8MB RAM, 120MB disk. The disk was too small for the development tools, but it was quickly swapped out for a 400MB and I bumped it up to 20MB. 25Mhz '040, SCSI, 10BaseT (!!), plus the crazy framebuffer based printer that used a video interface. (I have one of those too.) It's at my friend house now, he just managed to revive it after assorted false starts over the past few months. I have yet to actually see it running myself. In hindsight, one of the things that made the NeXT, or more specifically, NeXTSTEP amazing, was what it could do given the hardware of the day. The stand out was Display PostScript. What an absolute marvel of the time. That it could actually perform. Here was a system with a full boat windowing and GUI system, built on the full PS rendering model (INCLUDING the alpha channel), in real time, with a few MB of memory and a 25MHz '040. When you dragged a window. You dragged the window. The entire thing, not just a frame. That was a big deal. I remember the heresy of people posting "rich" news poss to USENET using the whatever the news application was called in the day. This was before there was a MIME standard, just making stuff up everyday. I think it would be a marvel to have the original source code ported, straight up, "bugs and all" to modern hardware. Specifically thinking having NS ported to an off the shelf Raspberry Pi. I don't know if we have anything like that today. Creeping features have exploded...everything on a modern *NIX system. I don't think you can run XClock in 8MB of RAM today. If NS was usable (I won't say it was fast, my memory doesn't go back that far, and after seeing several vintage machines, none of them were "fast", we just didn't know any better), just imagine how usable it would be on something even as small as a modern Raspberry Pi. But it was a great machine. It handled my USENET and email feed over my 2400 baud Hayes Smartmodem with aplomb.

mpweiher 5y ago
> Specifically thinking having NS ported to an off the shelf Raspberry Pi. Not original NS, but GNUstep runs on the Raspi. Install scripts here: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build > If NS was usable (I won't say it was fast, NS was definitely more than "usable", it seemed very snappy at the time. GNUstep runs very nicely on the Raspi.
- 5y ago

RobBlessinBHI 5y ago

Hello Hacker Community: I'm not sure exactly what I've stumbled into actually pointed at but I'm still reselling NeXT Hardware after 28 years. My first day working for Alembic Systems selling NeXT Hardware, software and 3rd party products, NeXT shut down their hardware production line and layed off 400 people. So it began ..... what a long strange trip its been . I see my reputation proceeds me and I have a good one there and love my job. I am a one man shop these days for the most part and well you can see hundreds of NeXT projects I've worked on at youtube.com/robblessin , I'm compmuterpowwow on eBay and blackholeinc.com is my perpetual disaster of a website. When I started the website it was basically a very tiny web , as Sir Tim Berners Lee is one of my customers, I repaired his NeXT cube https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/08/10/steve-jobs-computer-cameos-at-the-london-olympics/?sh=1ced25cb631e https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2012/08/10/s... , a lot of war stories fairly sure between NeXT, Alembic and incarnations of leading to Black hole , we actually sold stuff on the Web when most people had no clue what it was lol. I we inadvertently invented spam , when we had the bright idea to send demos of the solid Thinking Modeler using NeXT mail to the University of Wisconsin and it replicated itself a whopping 3mb file bringing their 300 baud network down , oops . Not what we intended to have happen , however when the someone with a NeXT actually completed the download and figured out what it was they thought it was cool. Everything before then involved paper cuts stuffing envelopes with brochures, we evolved and set up a website with downloadable software links http://www.blackholeinc.com/catalog/index.shtml http://www.blackholeinc.com/catalog/index.shtml . I saw acomment below on the original optical drives , they were and are crap , I've had them actually catch fire from the laser igniting the dust lol , then they turned the cooling fan around not sure if it was an improvement. It is possible to repair them now .... the hardware improved and NeXT was the first company to distribute software on CDrom hence the Sony 1X drive , first computers with CD Quality sound card and 56001 DSP , you can even boot them up as a Mac running up to version 8.1 . When I Tunes crashed fortunately I had the web objects software they needed to update it ..... Sorry to crash the party with a rant but I'm mainly at NeXTcomputers.org or NeXT Computer Enthusiasts and have a lot of cool vintage hardware not just NeXT . Apologies for the rant. Best regards Rob Blessin