
A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016) - kristianp
https://bytecellar.com/2016/03/02/a-quick-tour-of-the-hp-9000-712100-nextstep-workstation/
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ajross
Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture
fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined
architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the
Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it
done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when
Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the whole industry was now expecting
>1 IPS performance) it was kind of a joke.

While SPARC was proprietary (and PA and POWER were still in the future) MIPS
was actually shipping chips at the time for general sale. Why NeXT didn't go
with them I don't know.

~~~
smacktoward
I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was
trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix
workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time
Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc.

Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got
gobbled up was the market segment NeXT was hoping to sell into.

~~~
flyinghamster
I always wonder what personal computing might have been like had DEC not so
greatly feared cannibalizing their mini/mainframe business. By the time they
realized their mistake, it was already way too late. If Digital had played its
cards differently, x86 might have been just a footnote.

I found it very ironic that the biggest market for PDP-11-compatible micros
was one not actually open to DEC: the Soviet Union.

~~~
p_l
Soviet Union even made pocket computers that were electronically (not just
software!) compatible with PDP-11 peripherals, if you dared to open the case
and solder a connection.

There are also rumours that around 1980, there was a design at Digital that
could have led to a PDP-10 workstation, but Digital wanted to kill PDP-10.

~~~
pinewurst
It wasn't a rumor, it was the KT20 "Minnow". It was a workstation sans
display. Given the memory addressing limits there were reasons why it was
stillborn.

~~~
p_l
I assume Minnow didn't use Model B addressing, then? My understanding was that
_Minnow_ was important step towards miniaturization of the PDP-10 line, in
tandem with _Jupiter_ (IIRC?) which spearheaded high cpu speed initiative...

~~~
pinewurst
Apparently I’m wrong about the address limits but it’s running on a really
narrow microarchitecture with very limited (probably deliberately)
performance.

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mzs
article explaining the 'Color Recovery' DSP used
[https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a6.pdf](https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a6.pdf)

~~~
rasz
3DFX used similar trick in Voodoo 3D accelerators, 24bit graphics dithered
into 16bit framebuffer producing what they called "22-bit" image quality using
2x2/4x4 ordered mask

[https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36548](https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=36548)

It was very close to Nvidia 32bit color quality while sustaining/beating
Nvidia 16bit speeds, until Nvidia released GeForce card and killed
competition.

~~~
FullyFunctional
Based on your link (details at the bottom) it's not the same thing at all as
far as I can tell. The Color Recovery buffers a scanline and does a simple
edge aware filtering on a 2x16 block, for every pixel. The Voodoo 2 doesn't
appear to have a buffer. Also, the HP solution takes 8 to ~ 22 bit, a harder
problem.

~~~
rasz
Similar. Voodoo does color recovery on chip, not in external DSP/RAMDAC, you
dont need a line buffer then you have whole framebuffer in ram.

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at-fates-hands
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with
HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their
hardware?

~~~
jjoonathan
HP was _the_ top-shelf electrical engineering instrument company. Every top-
tier lab would have HP equipment. Aspiring computer-makers wouldn't be able to
afford it and would lust after it from a distance. This probably includes
young Steve Jobs.

HP built plotters and printers because their customers wanted hardcopies of
what they saw on their instrument screens. They built computers to control the
instruments and calculators to assist engineers with calculations. Then, for
some reason, the computers and printers started selling even better than the
instruments. HP, which still thought of themselves as an instrumentation
company, didn't catch on quickly or aggressively enough to capitalize, so
their computers and printers did not keep pace and became... other than
undisputably first tier. Eventually they span off the first-tier
instrumentation company as Agilent (bio + EE) which in turn eventually span
off Keysight (EE).

Electrical Engineers are still salty that the mediocre printer company got to
keep the HP name while the best-in-class instrumentation company that still
commands respect to this very day had to rebrand as "Keysight."

~~~
hermitdev
When I was in college, studying EE, we had HP oscilloscopes and digital logic
analyzers. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was the logic analyzers
that had an easter egg that if you held down a specific set of buttons while
powering on, you could play Tetris on it. I also remember the oscilloscope
being so sensitive, that without any leads connected, it could detect the
signal of someone walking by it.

~~~
jjoonathan
Yep! Their legacy continues today. Here's HP (sorry, I mean Agilent, sorry, I
mean Keysight) dropping a 110GHz real-time oscilloscope:

[https://youtu.be/dB5rg_TqmD8?t=32](https://youtu.be/dB5rg_TqmD8?t=32)

I'd like to think that if Bill and Dave (Hewlett and Packard) were still alive
they could still take pride in their T&M legacy, even though it's the DRM-
hobbled one-quarter-full printer ink cartridges that wound up with their names
on the front.

------
0-_-0
I was just reading about DOOM's history, and it was developed on a NEXT
machine which id software used at the time. A free book on the subject which I
highly recommend:

[https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html](https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/index.html)

