5 ms·

"(probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)" That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long. NeXTSTEP wa

"(probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)" That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long. NeXTSTEP was quite nice with a 16MB 25MHz 68040, and a decent hard drive, as seen in the NeXTStation from 1990. Even the price was competitive if you didn't mind the 2-bit greyscale monitor. NeXTSTEP 3.3, running in color on a Pentium Pro (or better), or even better a 1994 HP PA-RISC workstation, was SWEET.

bodyfour 15y ago
> That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long. And rightly so. But given that the hardware was built (at great expense!) specifically to run that OS, I think it's fair to consider their performance together. Certainly the gap between "the hardware the OS needs" and "what is readily available" shrunk as time went on. The slabs with more RAM were substantially better than the cubes had been. I think calling NeXTstep with 16MB "quite nice" is still being generous though - my recollections of 16MB NeXTstep was "swaps less". With 32MB it started to get pretty reasonable but, gosh, that was $1000+ of RAM back then. I knew people who ran NeXTstep on Intel but they tended to turn into early linux adopters. X11+fvwm (or, later, AfterStep) was more responsive on their hardware. By the time NeXTSTEP 3.3 came out (and NeXT basically left the OS game, instead focusing on OpenStep and WebObjects) the performance gap was a lot smaller, at least if you could afford a really nice computer. When it reemerged as a product 5 years later as OS/X 10.0 that gap had evaporated. Suddenly it was living in its moment, 12 years after its debut. And hell, now the OS that I used to curse for its unreasonable hardware demands comfortably runs on my cell phone. Technology is funny that way.

5 ms·

"(probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)" That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long. NeXTSTEP wa

by jonhendry 15y ago

bodyfour 15y ago
> That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long. And rightly so. But given that the hardware was built (at great expense!) specifically to run that OS, I think it's fair to consider their performance together. Certainly the gap between "the hardware the OS needs" and "what is readily available" shrunk as time went on. The slabs with more RAM were substantially better than the cubes had been. I think calling NeXTstep with 16MB "quite nice" is still being generous though - my recollections of 16MB NeXTstep was "swaps less". With 32MB it started to get pretty reasonable but, gosh, that was $1000+ of RAM back then. I knew people who ran NeXTstep on Intel but they tended to turn into early linux adopters. X11+fvwm (or, later, AfterStep) was more responsive on their hardware. By the time NeXTSTEP 3.3 came out (and NeXT basically left the OS game, instead focusing on OpenStep and WebObjects) the performance gap was a lot smaller, at least if you could afford a really nice computer. When it reemerged as a product 5 years later as OS/X 10.0 that gap had evaporated. Suddenly it was living in its moment, 12 years after its debut. And hell, now the OS that I used to curse for its unreasonable hardware demands comfortably runs on my cell phone. Technology is funny that way.