
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software - luu
https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/hp712-nextstep-part-2/
======
linsomniac
One interesting thing about the 712 "Gecko" was that it had a bi-endian CPU.
So it could run HPUX in big endian, and Windows NT in little endian.

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ginko
ARM also allows you to change the endianness.

ARMv7:
[http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.kui0100a/armasm_cjacabbf.htm)

ARMv8:
[https://developer.arm.com/docs/den0024/latest/armv8-register...](https://developer.arm.com/docs/den0024/latest/armv8-registers/endianness)

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rbanffy
IIRC POWER can also do that.

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arcticbull
PowerPC too. Most of them anyways, with the notable exception of the 970
(“G5”)

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protomyth
The 970 was such a pain because of this, Virtual PC needed it to emulate the
x86. I remember a massive delay.

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yardie
What a great site. So many memories!

Prior to my time there, my university issued DEC alphastations to CS students.
By my time they had moved on to Windows 2000/XP + Linux. So one saturday I
popped into the university auction and picked up an DEC Alphastation, a
NextStation turbocolor and a couple of Sparcstations. About $5-20 a piece. I
was super tempted to get a SGI Origin. No one was bidding on it but the
logistics of moving and powering a supercomputer was out of my scope. I power
up the Alphastation and imagine my luck, it's my professor's old workstation!

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neilv
Their collection is coming along nicely.

Right after NextStep, they _really_ need to get Apollo Domain/OS (not HP-UX)
on the HP 9000/425e. :) Apollo innovated a lot, and rethought or created the
network OS, display system, SCM and CI/build servers, etc. There are ideas you
won't see elsewhere, or that only reappeared decades later.

If they don't have SunOS 4 with SunView on one of those SPARCstations, that's
another neat one to have in the collection. Architecture-wise, a Sun-3
(m68k-based rather than SPARC) would also be nice, and were often used with
"shoebox" drives, to complement the pizza box. There were also some neat
Sun-386i models, though those were minitowers, not pizza boxes.

Since the theme is "Pizza Box computer", DG actually advertised the less-known
m88k-based AViiON as "Mainframe in a Pizza Box", IIRC. If you've read _Soul of
a New Machine_ , "AViiON" looks like "Nova II".

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cpach
The last release of NeXTSTEP was in the 90s. It’s fascinating how many of the
concepts that are still the same, or similar. DNS, TCP/IP, NFS, FTP,
resolv.conf, tar, ICMP... Some of them are outdated, but still. The Unix
paradigm has held up well IMO.

~~~
Someone
I don’t see most of these being examples of “the Unix paradigm”.

FTP, being from April 1971
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc114](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc114)),
predates Unix ‘escaping’ from Bell labs.

TCP/IP, reading [http://elk.informatik.hs-augsburg.de/tmp/cdrom-
oss/CerfHowIn...](http://elk.informatik.hs-augsburg.de/tmp/cdrom-
oss/CerfHowInternetCame2B.html), also didn’t start on Unix (“The significant
growth in Internet products didn't come until 1985 or so, where we started
seeing UNIX and local area networks joining up.“)

BIND was fast to arrive on the scene but DNS, I think, was designed to be
platform-agnostic.

~~~
Conan_Kudo
And most of the internet protocols use CRLF, not Unix LF.

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rsync
Is the author, Sophie Haskins, here on HN ?

I went through pizzabox.computer and the personal blog, etc., but found no way
to contact other than a twitter handle that hasn't updated in about two years
...

If you're here, I would like to donate funds to you, and these pizzabox
endevours, with no strings attached. You can email info@rsync.net to reach me.

~~~
detaro
She's active on twitter here:
[https://twitter.com/sophaskins](https://twitter.com/sophaskins)

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unixhero
Does anyone know where HPUX can be found on the net? I have a few old boxen I
want to spin up, for fun.

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olympusultra
Almost everything can be found here:

[https://archive.org/details/hpunix](https://archive.org/details/hpunix)

~~~
unixhero
Awwww yeah! This is amazing, cheers.

~~~
olympusultra
Yes, also make sure you check out this guy’s other UNIX related stuff on
archive.org

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gdubs
What a great blog. Ended up on the SGI Indy page, and omg — that startup
chime. Never knew.

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Aloha
I've long wondered how hard it is to port from Next to OS X

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tedge
ReDoomEd is a Mac/Linux/BSD port of DoomEd, id Software's Doom level editor
for NeXTSTEP:
[http://twilightedge.com/mac/redoomed](http://twilightedge.com/mac/redoomed)

About 95-99% of the program logic remained the same, however, there's naming
differences (functions, classes, selectors), type changes (NeXTSTEP APIs used
C strings & floats, Cocoa uses NSStrings & CGFloats), and missing
functionality that had to be reimplemented (Display PostScript functions,
Storage class).

I originally expected to have to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI resources by hand in
Cocoa, as Xcode's Interface Builder can't read NeXTSTEP nib files. However,
Xcode's IB does read OpenStep nib files (as of Xcode 2.5 & earlier - not sure
if recent versions can still do this), and OpenStep's Interface Builder can
read NeXTSTEP nibs, so it just took opening & saving the NeXTSTEP nibs to
OpenStep nibs in an OpenStep VM.

~~~
Aloha
Thats really cool!

Its interesting to know how possible (and easy) it is.

Thanks for your work, and pointing this out.

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immigrantsheep
I still have an old Sun SPARCstation IPC somewhere at home. I haven't turned
it on for over 15 years so I have no idea if it's still works. Good times.

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lukeh
Ah, NetInfo. So many memories! The HP was a nice development machine,
definitely faster than the slabs.

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anthk
Can you build modern Nethack releases on that?

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MintelIE
I had one of these with NeXTSTEP but a while after a RAM upgrade it let its
smoke out. I wasn't ever able to get it all back in so I threw the whole thing
away.

That was like 20+ years ago.

