Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side | Hacker News Reader

Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

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230 pointsCharlesW51 comments

Author of the post/creator of the site here. To save everyone the click, NeXTStep 3.3 is probably the best release to try out: https://infinitemac.org/1994/NeXTSTEP%203.3 (it was the last release that ran well on the original NeXT hardware, OPENSTEP 4.0 and later were mostly focused on Intel support).

If you'd like to play the NeXT version of DOOM and explore a few other apps, they're in the "Infinite HD" drive (you can get to different drives by clicking on the computer icon in the Workspace file viewer).

Yep, that tracks. I used to have a NeXTCube on my desk and tried to hold on to it (and 3.3) for dear life, but sadly the research institute I was in at the time didn’t allow it. Thank you so much for grafting previous into your wonderful site, I’ve been having a blast with it on idle moments.

Yep. That’s the version I run on my “Turbo Slab”.

It’s always kind of amazing what a 33 MHz 68040 was capable of whenever I fire it up and fool around.

Boy, I’d love nothing more than for some team at Apple to take the NS 3.3 source code and port it to an RPi 400.

They could even punt on the multi core aspect. Just port the drivers and get the frame buffer to work with the raw DPS server.

Do with NS what the Squeak team did with Smalltalk.

That would be such a wonder. I’d buy that for a dollar.

> I’d buy that for a dollar.

They even throw in a giant picture of Steve Jobs in your default mail inbox for free.

I dont know if it's just me but the way mouse acceleration "works" is driving me bonkers.

+1 on this. only thing that was bugging me on this glorious thing.

You can reduce the mouse speed a bit using Preferences.app.

The fundamental issue is that there’s two acceleration curves being applied (the guest OS’s and NeXTStep’s). I experimented with the unadjustedMovement option (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/req...) but it didn’t seem to help (and if anything, made things feel even harder to control)

Any hope of getting more software onto these? I'd love to play around with some ancient versions of proto-XCode.

That would be Project Builder and Interface Builder. Project Builder was kind of a graphical make tool and Interface Builder was the real star of the show, it was the graphical user interface builder. And there was Edit for source code editing.

There were sold as separate product, NeXTStep Developer that had all the development tools, but if you bought the education version of NeXTstep the developer tools came bundled.

The Developer CD for the 3.3 release is in the CD-ROM drawer, you should be able to mount it and install IB and PB.

Besides the sibling comment, that was kind of Smalltalk like, in the sense how code navigation and code editing was implemented.

You can also get a glimpse of it on the famous NeXT vs Sun commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

It was also the one with surviving documentation, https://www.nextop.de/

Take your copy while it is still around.

Great Website by the way.

Hey there, this is an off topic question but I recently picked up a Next computer (the slab) with a monitor. I am a complete newbie in this world and just getting my feet wet. Did the community ever find a solution to the 'dim monitor' issue? Thanks for this slick release.

I love getting to play with these OSes that I never got to touch 20 years ago, so thanks for this! Now that you've got NeXTStep, have you considered Rhapsody?

Credit to whoever named the NeXT emulator “Previous”. That’s brilliant.

Should've stylised it as PReVIOUS for maximum effect.

The NeXTStep 2.0 email was fun to read! Then there's an audio clip of Jobs giving the spiel himself!

> 1990s: Interpersonal Computing / Mission: Improve group productivity and collaboration / In the 1990s, competitive advantage will come from improving the productivity of groups and teams of people. We need to transform Personal Computing into Interpersonal Computing-and your NeXT computer was designed to do exactly this. At NeXT, we think that Interpersonal Computing will be the most important and exciting contribution of desktop computing in the 1990s.

The idea of networked technology & connected computing was & is so cool. I'm not sure what exactly here offers that though?

And alas alas alas: yes interconnectedness has defined the new age of computing. But where we've landed is vast cloud neo-mainframes and war-against-general-purpose-computing devices that don't even expose file systems to the users.

I'd love to see a re-personalization of computing. But somehow that also has to be connected too at the same time, if it's going to get anywhere.

>The idea of networked technology & connected computing was & is so cool. I'm not sure what exactly here offers that though?

It was talking about the features of NeXTMail. It might not be obvious if you weren't using computers at the time, but email in the 1980s was just text. NeXTMail allowed fonts, formatting, pictures, and audio. All normal features of email now, but not then.

The ambition certainly felt bigger than email from what he was saying & how he said it!

The object oriented ideas that arose shortly after this 2.0 seem nebulous to me now, buts it's clear there was something happening, that this meant a lot. That it meant computing interoperability & components. I have no idea the provenance here, but https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/9... in 94 at least starts to hint at the bigger current. (Not just email!!!)

Love the UI.

We still don't have a full and polished NeXTSTEP replicate after so many years. The closest thing is probably https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Are there aspects you miss in modern UIs?

Everything.

Clear visibility and contrast for all UI elements. Consistenty throughtout the system. Scrollbars that stay visible. Borders of windows clearly visible. Clear differentiation between buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons. No useless animations that make you miss clicks, take you out of the flow. Predictability and reliability of all UI components. Big icons designed for recognizability, not to look good on a screenshot/presentation.

In Windows we used to have themes... Wouldn't it be nice to be able to still customize window border thickness given our large resolution screens and precise mice? Now the task bar is huge, but can only be a single line, there is never enough text on task bar icons, windows explorer taskbar icons can't be reordered, yet if you try to quickly select an explorer icon in the taskbar, the entire group of windows explorer windows offers to be moved. We have rounded corners for the windows, but to resize diagonally you have to find the pixel where corner would be if the corner weren't rounded.

You know what takes the cake: In VSCode Nuget Gallery the search field is now entirely invisible in light theme. You literally have to click on the white space next to the filter button to reveal the search field. This his how it looks on my machine:

https://imgur.com/a/QPqIrod

What about https://gnustep.github.io/ ?

edit: GNUstep provides the foundations for a portable desktop environment, but delegates this task to other projects, like:

- The GNUstep Application Project: http://www.nongnu.org/gap/

- NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

- Etoile: http://www.etoile-project.org/

It run out of steam around Snowleopard time frame.

I'm still using Window Maker on Linux.

I saw this kind of UI (bit more colorful) back in the 80s while reading some catalogs from HP. It was in USSR. After I first saw it I absolutely loved it and had spent next 3 month writing low level assembly graphics and was able to replicate it in my programs written for generic PC. Implemented threading inside program as well.

I've tried running OPENSTEP 4.0 in VirtualBox (on MacOS) and the mouse performance really jerky, even on the slowest speed. I ran this version and it was pretty much the same thing, even with 3.3. Is this typical?

Is this a "cycle accurate" system? (For assorted values of "accurate".)

That is, is what were seeing with this similar to what we'd see on real hardware, or is the browser the determinant of performance.

The CPU emulator tries to be pretty accurate about timing, but the I/O is not throttled, so that might be unrealistically fast (depending on your Internet connection).

Other JS based in browser OS emulators

https://copy.sh/v86/

https://webvm.io/

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ (https://github.com/jsdf/pce)

https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) (https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs)

https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...

For the Oberon linage,

https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

Has anyone ported Previous to iOS? Would be a pretty fun emulator.

the article is about porting it to wasm. it therefore runs on iOS via a wasm-capable browser on iOS.

This is great because last time I tried running NeXT in a virtual machine, I had issues with resolution mode - it was way too small to do anything

Judging by the screenshot it can play Doom, which is all the qualification one might require.

god I miss my NeXT hardware. I used one as a daily driver till ~2008ish. sniff Shouldn't have sold it.

I’m curious how you used it as a daily driver back then. Did you use it for internet access? Granted, JS was less prevalent back then, but I’m not sure what browser you had available. What about listening to mp3s while doing something else, could the m68k manage or are you just not doing those things normally?

Not OP, but if it was anything like Macs running on similar hardware - MP3s was not viable, simply not enough grunt. Also most (all?) MP3 decoders relied on a FPU unit to function. But CD's where fine.

I don't know which era of chip you're thinking of, but when I was a kid listening to MP3s, it was the late 90s, and I had a Performa 5200 with a 75 MHz PowerPC 603 (or possibly 603e); it had a FPU, like all PPC chips, and IIRC like the final series of 68k that Apple used, the 68040 which Wikipedia says was also used in some models of NeXT machine — my problem was MacOS and how it multitasked (cooperatively), making MP3 playback clip every few seconds if the player was in the background; and I'm sure it was the OS not the chip, because I later upgraded to a newer computer with a 200 MHz chip, and it behaved exactly the same way.

75Mhz PPC could just barely handle it.

I think the PPC had just enough power to get through a 128Kbit MP3, it was just more efficient than the 68K range which is why Motorola stop developing those. As for the stuttering that sounds about right. Co-operative multitasking is computationally efficient but caused a problematic user experience.

Yeah, I listened to mp3s on my Performa 5260/120. I actually could notice the difference playing 96kbit vs 128kbit mp3s, in how much it affected the computer's performance. Luckily all I was probably doing at the time was chatting on Hotline so it didn't matter TOO much... haha

NeXT had a Motorola 56001 DSP (coprocessor) that could decode MP3 in realtime

mpg123 (command line) worked fine on my turbo dimension cube. Apparently others as well: https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2691.0

Also not OP, but 90% of everything I do happens in an SSH session. It doesn't really matter what I run on as long as the terminal isn't completely broken. I run `ssh TheHost exec tmux a` from all sorts of devices. A NeXTstation would do fine except I prefer my custom USB-only keyboard.

In the 680x0 days we all tossed a CD into the drive and played that. Or put it in the multi-disc cd changer nearby, sometimes along with a few other discs carefully chosen for maximum sonic whiplash when you put them on shuffle.

Or maybe you put a mixtape in the tape deck.

Im currently putting kids to bed and dead tired. So I will dig up stuff and post a better response tomorrow.

But tl,dr: most everything I did was SSH based for network. Otherwise document editing, pdf viewing etc worked fine. I had a turbo color 33mhz with 128mb of ram.

I also had a ton of custom compiled replacement libraries friends and I worked on and we managed to get newer openSSL working with omniweb etc. I was able to use html mode gmail even! :)

Oh do I get the pain of hardware lost due to short sighted ambitions. Some many things I have let go over the years.

But let me try to make you feel a bit better. A lot of this retro hardware nowadays is more about maintenance rather than just using it. If you are into that, it is great! But for many it just comes to a point of trying ever harder just to keep these things going. It is to be the technology Sisyphus.

Last year I finally gave up on my Powermac G5 when the power supply went, a machine much younger than any Next hardware. I just gave it away to someone that had the patience to work with it. Unfortunately the FIF (F*K It Factor) is a thing that eventually creeps up and it becomes a case of passing these things onto others that have a higher tolerance for aging hardware issues.

I saved an old sun system of mine.

Now I realize it's not bootable without a 13w3 to something video adapter, and a sun cdrom, and a sun keyboard, and more...

Link to a past post of mine with flickr links to my old NeXT stuff for people interested.

I reeeeeaallly want to get another one again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35865933

Oh, here is a screenshot of my NeXT loading gmail:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...

Dated 2009. So I think I was actually using it till 2010.

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