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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

>> 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.

NeXTSTEP also supported SPARC and PA-RISC.

along with intel. they had sweet 4 way fat binaries that had code for all 4 architectures.

Maybe the next four words of the title provide the required clarification?

“Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine”

Though those last four words were left out of the HN submission's title.

Which may not be in accordance with the submission guidelines.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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)

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

> "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

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.

It is, yes. Don't take it outside on holidays :)

Do you happen to know if you can run NeXTStep on vintage Apple hardware or maybe SPARCstations? I have some various IIcx and quadras and sparc 10, 20, etc.

Maybe a pizmo macbook?

Sparcstation 4, 5, 10 and 20 models (and the Voyager) can run NeXTstep. For the 10 and 20, it depends on the CPU. Sun SuperSPARC modules should work, but Ross HyperSPARC CPUs are not supported. NeXTstep only supports one CPU, additional CPUs are ignored. Later models (UltraSPARC) are not supported, unfortunately there is also no support for earlier SuperSparc Sun 4m (e.g. the LX) or Sun 4c systems.

I have a SparcStation 20 with 512 MB RAM and the 24 bit framebuffer RAM expansion, this is a great machine for NeXTstep.

If you happen to have an hp PA-RISC machine, some models using the PA7100 CPU (e.g. the "Gecko" 712-series) are also supported and are really nice NeXTstep machines.

Vintage Apple hardware does not work with NeXTstep directly, but you can run Rhapsody (essentially NeXTstep for PowerPC with a System 9-like UI) on early G3 Macs.

The Motorola 88k-based NRW (NeXT RISC workstation) was unfortunately canceled when NeXT decided to leave the hardware business...

Just a while ago installed NeXTSTEP on a HP 9000 712/60 for playing around with the original DoomEd. Runs great except for having not found PA-RISC DooM client binaries or sources for recompiling.

I have OmniGroup's port of Doom on my SAIC Galaxy 1100, which is a 712/80. id even had a Gecko for awhile. The fat binary is at http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/App...

The DoomEd source code seems to be available at https://github.com/DrinkyBird/DoomEd and it's Objective C code, so I would expect this to compile on NeXTstep/PA-RISC (but I haven't tried).

If you don't have a compiler set up on the PA-RISC machine, you should be able to cross-compile or generate a fat binary from ProjectBuilder on NeXTstep/intel.

If you want to run NeXTSTEP on a Mac laptop but don't want to run OS X, then run Rhapsody or Mac OS X Server. It's closer, though it has a sort of not-fish-nor-fowl incomplete facsimile of classic Platinum as its interface. The Wally is probably the best choice for this.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-now-for-something...

omg can't agree more: i sooooo wish i had kept my NeXTstation Color from 1992 just to have its amazing magnesium case. just beautiful mechanical engineering / materials design. also feel that way about my parents' long sold 1969 LawnBoy 2-cycle engine lawn mower, also magnesium, sturdy engineering, and with which i mowed countless lawns as a kid to save money for computer stuff and sports stuff.

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.

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.

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.

It's a nit, but I think the megapixel display was 1120x832.

You are correct

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

Thanks to open nature PCs had better capabilities for many years before Next even came out, and cheaper too.

October 1986 https://books.google.com/books?id=mzwEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA41&ots=...

Multiple 1024x768@16 cards in $2-3K range, and an absolute steal - $3K Number Nine 1280 1280x1024@256.

In 1988 you could buy 1664x1200 PC card + 19 inch monitor $2400 combo https://books.google.com/books?id=Cj8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA53&dq=Si... or ~$1K 15 inch 1mpix version.

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