Hacker News Reader

Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Hmm...makes me wonder if a PA-RISC HP 9000 712 is a better NeXTStation than a NeXTStation is today, in terms of longevity, supportability, performance, etc.

I guess its missing the DSP and fancy printer interface of the NS, maybe the overall sound quality.

View on HN

Unlikely to be better in supportability terms, since we are talking about a 30 year old OS on 30 year old hardware that wasnt the primary development target.

However, in terms of build quality, I would take the old HP 9000s over NeXT cube any day. Those old HPs were engineering workstations built by an HP that at the time still cared about engineering.

Jobs and the NeXT crew built beautiful things, but at that time they didnt have the decades of experience that HP did. (I'd say the same about old RS/6000s by the way.)

A trivial example is how when you open up the back, engineering workstations did not slice up your hands on stamped metal frames and risers. Whereas PCs of the time generally did. (Compaq was a notable exception, but you paid a price premium for it.)

> Those old HPs were engineering workstations built by an HP that at the time still cared about engineering.

I agree. They are heavy and very strong, and chassis is very stiff. That mattered given where some of these ended up being used and how they were treated, despite the cost.

Something to keep in mind is available software for NeXT computers versus for platforms that NeXTstep got ported to (x86, PA-RISC, SPARC). Many later software written for NeXTstep and its successor OPENSTEP had “fat binaries,” meaning that they contained machine code for multiple platforms. However, there are noticeable software packages released before NeXT’s transition away from their own hardware that only have a 68k binary. I believe WordPerfect, Lotus Improv, and Adobe Illustrator fall in this latter category.

I own a NeXT Cube and three NeXTstations.

When I was an intern at Apple in late 1997, my main machine was a PA RISC workstation running OPENSTEP for Mach (can’t recall which version). It was a lot faster than the PowerPC I had on my desk so I did much of my development on that before testing on Rhapsody.

I run it on a SAIC Galaxy 1100 which is a Gecko in a MIL-SPEC portable workstation case, and it is a delight to use. It's snappy and slick. But I have a soft spot for PA-RISC anyway since working on a K250 midrange was my first job out of college.

The 712 was already a better NeXTstation than the actual NeXTstation at the time

It cost half as much and had considerably more CPU power

There is a reason NeXT decided to become a software company...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com