NeXTstation Turbo Color Computer from 1992 Running Nextstep 3.3 (2016) [video] | Hacker News Reader

NeXTstation Turbo Color Computer from 1992 Running Nextstep 3.3 (2016) [video]

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87 pointsmpweiher41 comments

If you're into NeXT or want to mess around with it you can get OpenStep 4 x86 to run in VirtualBox. You can get the ISOs here (including a crapton of other old OS's):

https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/4x

Instructions:

http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2621

I got it running but I haven't had a chance to setup the display (no color or high resolution) or install any apps yet:

https://i.imgur.com/pDfDT2v.png

You can also use the Previous emulator to emulate NeXT hardware if you want to run versions of the OS from before they ported it to x86.

http://previous.alternative-system.com

There are a few old ThinkPads which were officially supported by OpenStep, I've never tried it out before on my old machines but I do get a kick out of running WindowMaker.

And in fact Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad running OpenStep when he first returned to Apple at the very end of 1996. http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2209

I found a hardware compatibility list. Looks like it would run on most old 486/Pentium/PentiumPro PCs if it has supported video and network cards. Even supports some 3D video cards like the ATI 3D Pro Turbo.

http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/hardware/os4x_co...

I ran it on an AMD k6-3-based PC I put together back in the day. It wasn't all that particular about hardware.

The very early releases of NeXTStep on Intel had limited hardware support, but by NS 3.3 it was pretty easy to configure a PC for it.

Building a PC for it now using modern hardware, might be difficult again. I don't know.

Cool stuff: Box made of magnesium, included Illustrator and FrameMaker, familiar UI from using WindowMaker, email from Steve Jobs in the mbox file when you start up, first version of the WorldWideWeb browser by Tim Berners Lee, first ever website displayed in said browser.

Oh my, that Steve Jobs email with the audio clip. The moment I read those words, I said, "aaaaaand". Thankfully, somebody has it in all its glory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3DI3l1tYFc

Also cool, at least at the time, was Objective C, a Smalltalk-influenced C, and their custom kernel, based on Mach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

I haven't kept up in Apple-land, but I believe the NeXT stuff is still foundational to their whole range of current OSes. When it was still NeXT, they went from supporting only Motorola processors to Sun's SPARC and Intel's processors, in hopes of finding a bigger market. I understand that OS flexibility enabled Apple to be much more strategic in their processor choices.

I remember trying and finally getting the i86 version of NeXTSTEP 3.3 running. Ended up with a Digital 486 base with parts from about three other machines for supported SCSI adapter, video card, CD-ROM, and special startup incantations. When it finally booted in glorious 2bit (4-level grayscale and I'm not even being facetious), it was honestly all worth the effort.

Interface Builder was mind-blowing. It's why we have .nib (or is it .xib now) files on macOS as well as all the NS* classes. The layout constraint solver was really slick back then too.

I suspect that 'porting' the operating system, but not really supporting machines of the day didn't help.

Yeah, I loved Interface Builder. In a sense, it's responsible for me mainly focusing on back-end work. Because after building GUI apps with IB and ObjC, writing anything for Windows seemed like stone knives and bearskins.

I think the reason for modest hardware support was that at the time they were chasing the high-end custom development market that had been so receptive to their workstations. At the time I was working for financial traders. We were buying machines specifically to run our in-house software, so we were happy buying whatever was supported.

Their strategy for broader adoption was OpenStep, which was taking the great NeXT-specific stuff and making it run on Windows NT. It would have been interesting to see where that went, but as you know Apple's acquisition put an end to all that.

"I think the reason for modest hardware support"

Also they only had 250 or so employees. So not a lot of staff to track down hardware compatibility issues, and not a lot of motivation from vendors to help.

That said, they did pretty well.

It went Motorola to Intel to HP PA-RISC and Sun SPARC. You could click checkboxes in the IDE and your app would compile into a 4-way fat binary.

Some non-GUI bits for "Portable Distributed Objects" servers were apparently available on Alpha.

DOOM, the game that put first-person-shooters (now a multibillion dollar industry) on the map, was written by John Carmack and associates on NeXTstation.

My immediate response was this is straight up machine porn.

But digging into the design of that machine really shows Jobs & company's design philosophy. It was unparalleled.

It looks like that machine came from a publishing or design shop— I'll probably share the video around the office— some of the people I work with saw that desktop publishing revolution when it was new.

And a weird part of me loves the size of the manuals

They really did value design. Even at OS version 0.8, the thing was still so much prettier than the competition. The use of Display PostScript made everything so sharp. The dictionary and especially the full Shakespeare in nicely rendered fonts were great demos.

The NeXT monitors were so pretty that Steelcase bought a bunch for catalog photos of their furniture. Eventually somebody said, "Well, maybe we should get some computers to go with these" and they became early NeXT users.

If the author is here (or anyone else) please, please, please put a copy of Framemaker/Illustrator with serials somewhere for people to grab. It is simply impossible to find this NeXT software on the net.

I do love Cameron Grey's videos. Often worth reading the YouTube comments too, which not something one would expect to say. In the comments:

>That slot is for RAM for the DSP. Very few things ever used it, but the option did exist. I've never seen one with a SIMM in there, though. IIRC it wants 50ns FPM RAM, and can take up to 1024Kb.

I've never been a fan of the Next aesthetics, hardware or software, and was afraid of what the Mac would become after the merger. I actually rooted for Be, which had Mac OS written all over it and great taste overall. Till this day I miss BeOS.

But the tech on Next was way more mature. And there was this guy named Steve.

I was a big BeOS fan too back in the day. But in retrospect I’ve realized NeXT was simply much better technology. Unlike BeOS they had vector based UI. Objective-C was a better language for GUI apps. Pervasive mulithreading that BeOS went for was a mistake

Yes, NeXT's tech was better aaaand[1] it came with Steve Jobs.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788883

But Be's taste and priorities (the most responsive UI I've ever used until the iPhone), were more aligned with mine.

Was there much software released for BeOS?

No much unfortunately.

I absolutely love the Next aesthetics and its hardware. Everything from the Logo (Paul Rand) to the industrial design of Next machines was top. I can't say much about the software since I have never used it.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I find the icons hideous and all over the place (lacking a standard cohesive vision). The window elements layout, a menu that disregards Fitts's law completely, that heavy grey… just poor taste all in all. I'm amazed it was Steve's creation.

Thankfully they took another route designing OS X.

That logo is great though.

AIUI the menu appears under the mouse when you right (or middle?) click.

> The NEXTSTEP operating system further developed the idea, incorporating a feature whereby the right or middle mouse button brought the main menu (which was vertical and automatically changed depending on context) to the location of the mouse, thereby eliminating the need to move the mouse pointer all the way across the large (for the time) NextStep screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_menu

I just edited that Wikipedia article. Interlisp on Xerox Daybreaks (and maybe Viewpoint; I've only used Interlisp) had left/middle-click context menus under cursor in the mid-1980s, so I imagine it was present on the earlier D* Xerox systems and maybe the Star. Definitely predates Nextstep though.

Ah, that makes sense, didn’t know it, thanks.

Always saw people moving the menus around as the big differentiating factor. Never thought it would first pop under the cursor.

I agree, software is pretty ugly with skeuomorphism in full effect just short of actually using pictures of stuff as icons.

OS X went the skeuomorphic route as well for many icons, but by then we could accurately represent objects on screen, at least.

Thanks for the reminder that FrameMaker still has not been ported to MacOS in 2018.

I'm surprised that in the history of Mac OS X (including the days of Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server 1.0), nobody wrote a Rosetta-style compatibility layer for running NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP applications on Mac OS X, given that Cocoa is a modern version of the OpenStep API and Mac OS X's Mach-O binary format is based on the binary format used in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.

Now, I don't know if anyone would be interested in running 25-30 year old software on High Sierra (though it would be cool to experience native FrameMaker and WordPerfect), but a compatibility layer may have been really useful back in 2001 or 2002 when there was little native software for Mac OS X at the time. This would have given the Lighthouse Design suite of productivity tools some extra time; it's a shame they were never open sourced by Sun.

You would need to emulate both a Motorola 68040 and an Intel i860, plus whatever other unusual silicon was present.

Come to think of it, the other problem with providing a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP binary compatibility layer is that the UI guidelines for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and Mac OS are different. It's more than just the differences between NeXTSTEP's grayscale theming versus the Platinum theme used by Apple at the time. It's also the little details, down to the order of the command buttons on a dialog box. Apple is famous for its UI guidelines, especially back in the Classic Mac OS era.

The problem with having NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP applications run unmodified in Rhapsody or Mac OS X is that users would have to deal with applications designed under two sets of UI standards. This is similar to the Windows ecosystem; because Microsoft emphasizes backwards compatibility, some users could be running Windows software conforming to different UI standards based on when those software tools were written. Already Rhapsody had official support for two types of applications: applications for Mac OS running under the Classic (Blue Box) environment, and applications written using the Cocoa (Yellow Box/OpenStep) API. Large software developers such as Microsoft and Adobe balked at the prospect of having to port their large code bases to Cocoa in order to take advantage of Rhapsody's features; this is how we ended up with Carbon.

Perhaps the reason we can't run Lotus Improv and FrameMaker on Macs has less to do with emulation and compatibility layers (which Apple was willing to do for 68k apps on PowerPC Macs, Classic Mac apps on PowerPC versions of Mac OS X, and PowerPC Mac OS X apps on early Intel versions of Mac OS X) and more to do with the UI differences between NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP apps and Rhapsody/Aqua apps. Plus, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP had small user bases that Apple could ignore or sacrifice in favor of meeting the needs of its "native" classic Mac OS users, and I don't know if Apple itself ever billed Rhapsody and Mac OS X as successors to OPENSTEP for OPENSTEP users; if I understand correctly, Rhapsody and Mac OS X were always billed as successors to the classic Mac OS. That might have also led to the decision not to provide support for old NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP binaries in Rhapsody and Mac OS X.

After finding the source to Darwin 0.1 / 0.3 which was Rhapsody / OS X Server 1.0 and getting it to build on x86, I thought it was cool that using remote display, and chroot from a NeXTSTEP root many things would run using the Rhapsody beta UI stuff.

Although the response was about nill... Nobody really cared.

I started work on merging the newer BSD stuff into the 0.3 kernel but the lack of overall interest kind of demotivated me.. and I couldn't see anyone seriously caring.

That and previous does such a great job with the legacy black box stuff, it'd seem full emulation was a better solution.

Only for m68k NeXTSTEP software. And I don't think anything ever ran code on the NextDimension's i860, which was strictly running Postscript for the color monitor.

If you mean the 56001 DSP, perhaps that could be emulated too.

Especially at the time when Jobs was complaining that nobody was signing up to make Rhapsody apps.

That is when they had to dump Rhapsody, and do the whole Carbon thing, as nobody was going to write for NeXTSTEP.

Yeah, I also remember that every now and then. One of the casualties from the OS X transition.

I owned a number of color and B/W slabs through the years, but four years ago I finally got an '040 Cube, and the cable that lets me hang a modern VGA (flatpanel) monitor off the sound box. I picked up one off eBay that sorta-matches the Cube, it doesn't look half bad.

I am super impressed by how "new" the machine looks in the inside after all these years.

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