6 ms·

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 wit

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
    Maybe the next four words of the title provide the required clarification? “Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine”
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      Though those last four words were left out of the HN submission's title. Which may not be in accordance with the submission guidelines.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube.... > 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”. But the OP is not that. IIRC, there were two distinct versions of NeXTSTEP: a 68k version for their custom hardware, and a x86 version for PCs. The OP is setting up VM for the latter (which given its age does not seem like a trivial thing, either). So if you must have an FPGA version, it would be equally equivalent to have one that simulates a mid-90s IBM clone.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      NeXTSTEP also supported SPARC and PA-RISC.
      - a-dub 5y ago
        along with intel. they had sweet 4 way fat binaries that had code for all 4 architectures.
  - ragingrobot 5y ago
    > 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? That would be acceptable, as you built a machine that functioned exactly like the original, running the OS on bare metal - not on unrelated hardware under emulation. That would fit my idea of "building" the machine as well.
  - moftz 5y ago
    An FPGA would be hardware emulation rather than QEMU which is software emulation. For older systems, am FPGA can get you a lot closer to how an older hardware worked by mimicking the actual timing characteristics or by just straight copying the gates into RTL. It all depends on the goal, you may just want to run the software at the same speed like for games or you might want to just see how fast a softcore Z80 can run VisiCalc. With the development of systems like the RC2014, FPGAs and newer microcontrollers or SoCs have made their way into peripheral cards to allow easy connections to modern day interfaces like SD Cards, Wifi, and even HDMI. It takes almost no effort to connect an ESP8266 to the serial port of an ancient computer and send AT commands to access websites and network fileshares.
- _moof 5y ago
  I've got a NeXTstation, AKA "pizza box," the black m68k workstation hardware. There's really nothing special about it electrically other than an onboard DSP. It's a pretty standard 68040-based computer. The case though... gorgeous. Hard to imagine recreating that. Agreed though, the headline is a little odd. I was expecting something akin to that guy who designed and fabbed a new logic board for an SE/30. That would've been a feat, especially since those Motorola processors are so hard to come by now.
  - andi999 5y ago
    Wasn't the casing out of magnesia... I always thought if I get one I will be worried it will go down in a blaze on new years eve if somebody touches it with a sparkler. (I have somehow very specific counter factual worries, since I do not own one)
    - mumblemumble 5y ago
      It was a magnesium alloy that turned out to be devilishly difficult to get going in practice. See this article that adolph linked in another comment: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
      - BoxOfRain 5y ago
        Out of all the things I expected to see today, a very detailed description of the conditions required to set an NeXT cube on fire was pretty near the bottom of the list.
      - jandrese 5y ago
        > "This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!" LOL
    - _moof 5y ago
      It is, yes. Don't take it outside on holidays :)
- foobiekr 5y ago
  The NeXT physical design - well except the terrible mouse abd keyboard - was absolutely glorious. Just wonderful. Nextstep was also glorious. I supported a lab full of cubes and slabs. But under the covers, the hardware other than the terrible magnetic optical drive was boring. There was only minimal hardware distinctiveness. The built in Motorola DSP was nice..ish, but the real revolution before and after NeXT was graphics. The non-NextDimension-equipped cubes were utterly pedestrian compared to things like the Amiga (before) and the SGI machines. Not long after the slabs shipped Apple shipped a Mac ii with a TI DSP on a card for accelerated 3D. I’m a huge next fan but it was all the experience - excruciatingly terrible for the MO cubes to glorious for the color turbo slabs - which defined NeXT.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Well, even the pedestrian NextCube had a "megapixel" display -- 1024x1024 graphics. Even in monochrome, that was pretty impressive for the day. The icons actually looked like what they represented, not abstractions.
    - spamizbad 5y ago
      Maybe at the Cube's (albeit still very expensive) price-point. But by 1990 SGI had VGX(T) graphics on the market, which could do 24bit color at 1280x1024. It could also clock to early HGTV signals for overlays.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      It's a nit, but I think the megapixel display was 1120x832.
      - lizknope 5y ago
        You are correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display The original MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (just shy of a true Megapixel at 931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz
cat199 5y ago
here's a 3d print next case for raspberry pi: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/25vy/next-cube-raspberry-pi-case-free https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/25vy/next-cube-rasp... enjoy :)
jsjohnst 5y ago
> but when I read "build your own..." I'm thinking the actual hardware, or compatible. I definitely thought the same thing being it was an Adafruit post and disappointed both times to see it was just a basic howto on running the OS in a VM. Still very useful knowledge if someone wants to play, but kinda can't help think they worded it that way to draw folks in. I was really hoping it was some FPGA or maybe even an MCU running an emulator, but alas, QEMU / Virtualbox is what they used.
swiley 5y ago
Especially with m68k machines. I thought you could still get those chips in DIP packaging.
- _moof 5y ago
  Not the ones in NeXT hardware, unfortunately. The '040 only came in PGA and QFP. And although you can still find LC, EC, and Z variants without much difficulty, finding the version that includes both an MMU and an FPU requires meeting strange men in empty parking garages.

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
  Maybe the next four words of the title provide the required clarification? “Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine”
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Though those last four words were left out of the HN submission's title. Which may not be in accordance with the submission guidelines.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube.... > 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”. But the OP is not that. IIRC, there were two distinct versions of NeXTSTEP: a 68k version for their custom hardware, and a x86 version for PCs. The OP is setting up VM for the latter (which given its age does not seem like a trivial thing, either). So if you must have an FPGA version, it would be equally equivalent to have one that simulates a mid-90s IBM clone.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    NeXTSTEP also supported SPARC and PA-RISC.
    - a-dub 5y ago
      along with intel. they had sweet 4 way fat binaries that had code for all 4 architectures.
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  > 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? That would be acceptable, as you built a machine that functioned exactly like the original, running the OS on bare metal - not on unrelated hardware under emulation. That would fit my idea of "building" the machine as well.
- moftz 5y ago
  An FPGA would be hardware emulation rather than QEMU which is software emulation. For older systems, am FPGA can get you a lot closer to how an older hardware worked by mimicking the actual timing characteristics or by just straight copying the gates into RTL. It all depends on the goal, you may just want to run the software at the same speed like for games or you might want to just see how fast a softcore Z80 can run VisiCalc. With the development of systems like the RC2014, FPGAs and newer microcontrollers or SoCs have made their way into peripheral cards to allow easy connections to modern day interfaces like SD Cards, Wifi, and even HDMI. It takes almost no effort to connect an ESP8266 to the serial port of an ancient computer and send AT commands to access websites and network fileshares.
_moof 5y ago
I've got a NeXTstation, AKA "pizza box," the black m68k workstation hardware. There's really nothing special about it electrically other than an onboard DSP. It's a pretty standard 68040-based computer. The case though... gorgeous. Hard to imagine recreating that. Agreed though, the headline is a little odd. I was expecting something akin to that guy who designed and fabbed a new logic board for an SE/30. That would've been a feat, especially since those Motorola processors are so hard to come by now.
- andi999 5y ago
  Wasn't the casing out of magnesia... I always thought if I get one I will be worried it will go down in a blaze on new years eve if somebody touches it with a sparkler. (I have somehow very specific counter factual worries, since I do not own one)
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    It was a magnesium alloy that turned out to be devilishly difficult to get going in practice. See this article that adolph linked in another comment: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      Out of all the things I expected to see today, a very detailed description of the conditions required to set an NeXT cube on fire was pretty near the bottom of the list.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      > "This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!" LOL
  - _moof 5y ago
    It is, yes. Don't take it outside on holidays :)
foobiekr 5y ago
The NeXT physical design - well except the terrible mouse abd keyboard - was absolutely glorious. Just wonderful. Nextstep was also glorious. I supported a lab full of cubes and slabs. But under the covers, the hardware other than the terrible magnetic optical drive was boring. There was only minimal hardware distinctiveness. The built in Motorola DSP was nice..ish, but the real revolution before and after NeXT was graphics. The non-NextDimension-equipped cubes were utterly pedestrian compared to things like the Amiga (before) and the SGI machines. Not long after the slabs shipped Apple shipped a Mac ii with a TI DSP on a card for accelerated 3D. I’m a huge next fan but it was all the experience - excruciatingly terrible for the MO cubes to glorious for the color turbo slabs - which defined NeXT.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Well, even the pedestrian NextCube had a "megapixel" display -- 1024x1024 graphics. Even in monochrome, that was pretty impressive for the day. The icons actually looked like what they represented, not abstractions.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    Maybe at the Cube's (albeit still very expensive) price-point. But by 1990 SGI had VGX(T) graphics on the market, which could do 24bit color at 1280x1024. It could also clock to early HGTV signals for overlays.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    It's a nit, but I think the megapixel display was 1120x832.
    - lizknope 5y ago
      You are correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display The original MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (just shy of a true Megapixel at 931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz

cat199 5y ago

here's a 3d print next case for raspberry pi: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/25vy/next-cube-raspberry-pi-case-free https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/25vy/next-cube-rasp... enjoy :)

jsjohnst 5y ago

> but when I read "build your own..." I'm thinking the actual hardware, or compatible. I definitely thought the same thing being it was an Adafruit post and disappointed both times to see it was just a basic howto on running the OS in a VM. Still very useful knowledge if someone wants to play, but kinda can't help think they worded it that way to draw folks in. I was really hoping it was some FPGA or maybe even an MCU running an emulator, but alas, QEMU / Virtualbox is what they used.

swiley 5y ago

Especially with m68k machines. I thought you could still get those chips in DIP packaging.

_moof 5y ago
Not the ones in NeXT hardware, unfortunately. The '040 only came in PGA and QFP. And although you can still find LC, EC, and Z variants without much difficulty, finding the version that includes both an MMU and an FPU requires meeting strange men in empty parking garages.