
NeXTstation Turbo Color Computer from 1992 Running Nextstep 3.3 (2016) [video] - mpweiher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY47JNP4-54
======
microwavecamera
If you're into NeXT or want to mess around with it you can get OpenStep 4 x86
to run in VirtualBox. You can get the ISOs here (including a crapton of other
old OS's):

[https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/4x](https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/4x)

Instructions:

[http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2621](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2621)

I got it running but I haven't had a chance to setup the display (no color or
high resolution) or install any apps yet:

[https://i.imgur.com/pDfDT2v.png](https://i.imgur.com/pDfDT2v.png)

~~~
amiga-workbench
There are a few old ThinkPads which were officially supported by OpenStep,
I've never tried it out before on my old machines but I do get a kick out of
running WindowMaker.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
And in fact Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad running OpenStep when he first returned
to Apple at the very end of 1996.
[http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2209](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2209)

------
contingencies
Cool stuff: Box made of magnesium, included Illustrator and FrameMaker,
familiar UI from using WindowMaker, email from Steve Jobs in the mbox file
when you start up, first version of the WorldWideWeb browser by Tim Berners
Lee, first ever website displayed in said browser.

See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3261592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3261592)

~~~
wpietri
Also cool, at least at the time, was Objective C, a Smalltalk-influenced C,
and their custom kernel, based on Mach:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_\(kernel\))

I haven't kept up in Apple-land, but I believe the NeXT stuff is still
foundational to their whole range of current OSes. When it was still NeXT,
they went from supporting only Motorola processors to Sun's SPARC and Intel's
processors, in hopes of finding a bigger market. I understand that OS
flexibility enabled Apple to be much more strategic in their processor
choices.

~~~
karmakaze
I remember trying and finally getting the i86 version of NeXTSTEP 3.3 running.
Ended up with a Digital 486 base with parts from about three other machines
for supported SCSI adapter, video card, CD-ROM, and special startup
incantations. When it finally booted in glorious 2bit (4-level grayscale and
I'm not even being facetious), it was honestly all worth the effort.

Interface Builder was mind-blowing. It's why we have .nib (or is it .xib now)
files on macOS as well as all the NS* classes. The layout constraint solver
was really slick back then too.

I suspect that 'porting' the operating system, but not really supporting
machines of the day didn't help.

~~~
wpietri
Yeah, I loved Interface Builder. In a sense, it's responsible for me mainly
focusing on back-end work. Because after building GUI apps with IB and ObjC,
writing anything for Windows seemed like stone knives and bearskins.

I think the reason for modest hardware support was that at the time they were
chasing the high-end custom development market that had been so receptive to
their workstations. At the time I was working for financial traders. We were
buying machines specifically to run our in-house software, so we were happy
buying whatever was supported.

Their strategy for broader adoption was OpenStep, which was taking the great
NeXT-specific stuff and making it run on Windows NT. It would have been
interesting to see where that went, but as you know Apple's acquisition put an
end to all that.

~~~
jonhendry18
"I think the reason for modest hardware support"

Also they only had 250 or so employees. So not a lot of staff to track down
hardware compatibility issues, and not a lot of motivation from vendors to
help.

That said, they did pretty well.

------
52-6F-62
My immediate response was this is straight up machine porn.

But digging into the design of that machine really shows Jobs & company's
design philosophy. It was unparalleled.

It looks like that machine came from a publishing or design shop— I'll
probably share the video around the office— some of the people I work with saw
that desktop publishing revolution when it was new.

And a weird part of me loves the size of the manuals

~~~
wpietri
They really did value design. Even at OS version 0.8, the thing was still so
much prettier than the competition. The use of Display PostScript made
everything so sharp. The dictionary and especially the full Shakespeare in
nicely rendered fonts were great demos.

The NeXT monitors were so pretty that Steelcase bought a bunch for catalog
photos of their furniture. Eventually somebody said, "Well, maybe we should
get some computers to go with these" and they became early NeXT users.

------
spitfire
If the author is here (or anyone else) please, please, please put a copy of
Framemaker/Illustrator with serials somewhere for people to grab. It is simply
impossible to find this NeXT software on the net.

------
Nexxxeh
I do love Cameron Grey's videos. Often worth reading the YouTube comments too,
which not something one would expect to say. In the comments:

>That slot is for RAM for the DSP. Very few things ever used it, but the
option did exist. I've never seen one with a SIMM in there, though. IIRC it
wants 50ns FPM RAM, and can take up to 1024Kb.

------
tambourine_man
I've never been a fan of the Next aesthetics, hardware or software, and was
afraid of what the Mac would become after the merger. I actually rooted for
Be, which had Mac OS written all over it and great taste overall. Till this
day I miss BeOS.

But the tech on Next was way more mature. And there was this guy named Steve.

~~~
jernfrost
I was a big BeOS fan too back in the day. But in retrospect I’ve realized NeXT
was simply much better technology. Unlike BeOS they had vector based UI.
Objective-C was a better language for GUI apps. Pervasive mulithreading that
BeOS went for was a mistake

~~~
tambourine_man
Yes, NeXT's tech was better aaaand[1] it came with Steve Jobs.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788883)

But Be's taste and priorities (the most responsive UI I've ever used until the
iPhone), were more aligned with mine.

~~~
mattl
Was there much software released for BeOS?

~~~
tambourine_man
No much unfortunately.

------
kickingvegas
Thanks for the reminder that FrameMaker still has not been ported to MacOS in
2018.

~~~
linguae
I'm surprised that in the history of Mac OS X (including the days of Rhapsody
and Mac OS X Server 1.0), nobody wrote a Rosetta-style compatibility layer for
running NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP applications on Mac OS X, given that Cocoa is a
modern version of the OpenStep API and Mac OS X's Mach-O binary format is
based on the binary format used in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.

Now, I don't know if anyone would be interested in running 25-30 year old
software on High Sierra (though it would be cool to experience native
FrameMaker and WordPerfect), but a compatibility layer may have been really
useful back in 2001 or 2002 when there was little native software for Mac OS X
at the time. This would have given the Lighthouse Design suite of productivity
tools some extra time; it's a shame they were never open sourced by Sun.

~~~
jamesmcnalley
You would need to emulate both a Motorola 68040 and an Intel i860, plus
whatever other unusual silicon was present.

~~~
linguae
Come to think of it, the other problem with providing a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP
binary compatibility layer is that the UI guidelines for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and
Mac OS are different. It's more than just the differences between NeXTSTEP's
grayscale theming versus the Platinum theme used by Apple at the time. It's
also the little details, down to the order of the command buttons on a dialog
box. Apple is famous for its UI guidelines, especially back in the Classic Mac
OS era.

The problem with having NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP applications run unmodified in
Rhapsody or Mac OS X is that users would have to deal with applications
designed under two sets of UI standards. This is similar to the Windows
ecosystem; because Microsoft emphasizes backwards compatibility, some users
could be running Windows software conforming to different UI standards based
on when those software tools were written. Already Rhapsody had official
support for two types of applications: applications for Mac OS running under
the Classic (Blue Box) environment, and applications written using the Cocoa
(Yellow Box/OpenStep) API. Large software developers such as Microsoft and
Adobe balked at the prospect of having to port their large code bases to Cocoa
in order to take advantage of Rhapsody's features; this is how we ended up
with Carbon.

Perhaps the reason we can't run Lotus Improv and FrameMaker on Macs has less
to do with emulation and compatibility layers (which Apple was willing to do
for 68k apps on PowerPC Macs, Classic Mac apps on PowerPC versions of Mac OS
X, and PowerPC Mac OS X apps on early Intel versions of Mac OS X) and more to
do with the UI differences between NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP apps and Rhapsody/Aqua
apps. Plus, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP had small user bases that Apple could ignore
or sacrifice in favor of meeting the needs of its "native" classic Mac OS
users, and I don't know if Apple itself ever billed Rhapsody and Mac OS X as
successors to OPENSTEP for OPENSTEP users; if I understand correctly, Rhapsody
and Mac OS X were always billed as successors to the classic Mac OS. That
might have also led to the decision not to provide support for old NeXTSTEP
and OPENSTEP binaries in Rhapsody and Mac OS X.

~~~
scruffyherder
After finding the source to Darwin 0.1 / 0.3 which was Rhapsody / OS X Server
1.0 and getting it to build on x86, I thought it was cool that using remote
display, and chroot from a NeXTSTEP root many things would run using the
Rhapsody beta UI stuff.

Although the response was about nill... Nobody really cared.

I started work on merging the newer BSD stuff into the 0.3 kernel but the lack
of overall interest kind of demotivated me.. and I couldn't see anyone
seriously caring.

That and previous does such a great job with the legacy black box stuff, it'd
seem full emulation was a better solution.

------
mrbill
I owned a number of color and B/W slabs through the years, but four years ago
I finally got an '040 Cube, and the cable that lets me hang a modern VGA
(flatpanel) monitor off the sound box. I picked up one off eBay that sorta-
matches the Cube, it doesn't look half bad.

------
caio1982
I am super impressed by how "new" the machine looks in the inside after all
these years.

