NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software | Hacker News Reader

NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software

blog.pizzabox.computer

106 pointsluu43 comments

One interesting thing about the 712 "Gecko" was that it had a bi-endian CPU. So it could run HPUX in big endian, and Windows NT in little endian.

ARM also allows you to change the endianness.

ARMv7: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....

ARMv8: https://developer.arm.com/docs/den0024/latest/armv8-register...

IIRC POWER can also do that.

PowerPC too. Most of them anyways, with the notable exception of the 970 (“G5”)

The 970 was such a pain because of this, Virtual PC needed it to emulate the x86. I remember a massive delay.

What a great site. So many memories!

Prior to my time there, my university issued DEC alphastations to CS students. By my time they had moved on to Windows 2000/XP + Linux. So one saturday I popped into the university auction and picked up an DEC Alphastation, a NextStation turbocolor and a couple of Sparcstations. About $5-20 a piece. I was super tempted to get a SGI Origin. No one was bidding on it but the logistics of moving and powering a supercomputer was out of my scope. I power up the Alphastation and imagine my luck, it's my professor's old workstation!

Their collection is coming along nicely.

Right after NextStep, they really need to get Apollo Domain/OS (not HP-UX) on the HP 9000/425e. :) Apollo innovated a lot, and rethought or created the network OS, display system, SCM and CI/build servers, etc. There are ideas you won't see elsewhere, or that only reappeared decades later.

If they don't have SunOS 4 with SunView on one of those SPARCstations, that's another neat one to have in the collection. Architecture-wise, a Sun-3 (m68k-based rather than SPARC) would also be nice, and were often used with "shoebox" drives, to complement the pizza box. There were also some neat Sun-386i models, though those were minitowers, not pizza boxes.

Since the theme is "Pizza Box computer", DG actually advertised the less-known m88k-based AViiON as "Mainframe in a Pizza Box", IIRC. If you've read Soul of a New Machine, "AViiON" looks like "Nova II".

The last release of NeXTSTEP was in the 90s. It’s fascinating how many of the concepts that are still the same, or similar. DNS, TCP/IP, NFS, FTP, resolv.conf, tar, ICMP... Some of them are outdated, but still. The Unix paradigm has held up well IMO.

I don’t see most of these being examples of “the Unix paradigm”.

FTP, being from April 1971 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc114), predates Unix ‘escaping’ from Bell labs.

TCP/IP, reading http://elk.informatik.hs-augsburg.de/tmp/cdrom-oss/CerfHowIn..., also didn’t start on Unix (“The significant growth in Internet products didn't come until 1985 or so, where we started seeing UNIX and local area networks joining up.“)

BIND was fast to arrive on the scene but DNS, I think, was designed to be platform-agnostic.

And most of the internet protocols use CRLF, not Unix LF.

NeXTSTEP was hardly related to UNIX, as in culture.

Sure it had POSIX and was partially built on top of BSD, but that was just to get a foothold on the UNIX workstation market.

NeXTSTEP was all about Objective-C frameworks, including at the device driver levels, and the same culture is at play at Apple and NeXTSTEP derived OSes.

Being an UNIX is just a story to sell and get people into the platform, nothing else, specially valuable when one is either a startup getting into the nascent workstation market, or a business close to get insolvent.

Is the author, Sophie Haskins, here on HN ?

I went through pizzabox.computer and the personal blog, etc., but found no way to contact other than a twitter handle that hasn't updated in about two years ...

If you're here, I would like to donate funds to you, and these pizzabox endevours, with no strings attached. You can email info@rsync.net to reach me.

She's active on twitter here: https://twitter.com/sophaskins

They also have a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnxnVSs4q1c3zrQM7rFfEbw

But perhaps you are already aware of that.

Does anyone know where HPUX can be found on the net? I have a few old boxen I want to spin up, for fun.

WinWorld has two releases:

https://winworldpc.com/product/hp-ux/9

Thanks. Those could have worked, but my machines aren't that old.

Years ago I needed replacement HPUX 11.11 media for a box I owned and eBay was where I found some original CDs, in the shrink wrap, for cheap.

Could be fun to have the hardcopies

Almost everything can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/hpunix

Awwww yeah! This is amazing, cheers.

Yes, also make sure you check out this guy’s other UNIX related stuff on archive.org

What a great blog. Ended up on the SGI Indy page, and omg — that startup chime. Never knew.

I've long wondered how hard it is to port from Next to OS X

I myself do not know, but your question jogged my memory on something cool.

Behold: The OmniGroup Mac OS X mailing list archive. https://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-dev/

There aren’t many developers outside of Apple that jumped from NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X, but the OmniGroup would represent a good chunk of them.

More here: http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo

From OSX IDK, but from Next to GNUStep it may be straightforward with little change.

Porting from OSX to GNUStep would be far more useful.

Yeah, except they have stop around Panther or something like that.

No, GNUStep's support is more recent than that least the upstream version.

100% support? Because that is what I meant.

So, there are gaps to be filled or tools to flag them.

Which makes it useless for porting anything that people actually use nowadays.

That's the beauty of it being open source. If someone really needs it, they can do it.

I thought that is more than proven than willingness and source code on their own just don't make it.

If the developer used proper MVC it should be as simple as bolting on a GUI with interface builder. A lot of Next Step code has been in Cocoa for a long time (if you see NSObject, NSFoundation, etc. that's all NextStep).

This is someone starting with id Software's internal level editor for Doom (for NeXTSTEP circa '93), and getting it to build and run on OS X: https://github.com/fragglet/DoomEd/compare/b5885d42226568b18...

There are a few takes on this out there, same for QuakeEd.

It wasn't that hard as I remember. I didn't hit anything but the Objective-C libraries though.

ReDoomEd is a Mac/Linux/BSD port of DoomEd, id Software's Doom level editor for NeXTSTEP: http://twilightedge.com/mac/redoomed

About 95-99% of the program logic remained the same, however, there's naming differences (functions, classes, selectors), type changes (NeXTSTEP APIs used C strings & floats, Cocoa uses NSStrings & CGFloats), and missing functionality that had to be reimplemented (Display PostScript functions, Storage class).

I originally expected to have to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI resources by hand in Cocoa, as Xcode's Interface Builder can't read NeXTSTEP nib files. However, Xcode's IB does read OpenStep nib files (as of Xcode 2.5 & earlier - not sure if recent versions can still do this), and OpenStep's Interface Builder can read NeXTSTEP nibs, so it just took opening & saving the NeXTSTEP nibs to OpenStep nibs in an OpenStep VM.

Thats really cool!

Its interesting to know how possible (and easy) it is.

Thanks for your work, and pointing this out.

I still have an old Sun SPARCstation IPC somewhere at home. I haven't turned it on for over 15 years so I have no idea if it's still works. Good times.

Ah, NetInfo. So many memories! The HP was a nice development machine, definitely faster than the slabs.

Can you build modern Nethack releases on that?

I had one of these with NeXTSTEP but a while after a RAM upgrade it let its smoke out. I wasn't ever able to get it all back in so I threw the whole thing away.

That was like 20+ years ago.

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