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Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

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

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’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! :)

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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