[HN Gopher] Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine
___________________________________________________________________
Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine
Author : marcodiego
Score : 187 points
Date : 2021-08-09 12:15 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (learn.adafruit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (learn.adafruit.com)
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I'd like to give this a try on qemu. Anybody happen to know why
| this wouldn't work?
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Early qemu versions had problems with the NeXTstep PS/2 mouse
| drivers. I created some patches for ancient qemu versions (0.8
| and 0.9 in 2005...) to emulate a Microsoft bus mouse, which
| worked well with NeXTstep
| (https://github.com/michaelengel/qemuNextSTEPpatches).
|
| I haven't tried running NeXTstep in qemu recently, but I
| suspect it might simply work today.
|
| The Previous emulator for "real" black 68k-based hardware that
| is mentioned briefly in the article is actually much more fun
| and also allows you to run 68k-only software such as Lotus
| Improv - http://previous.unixdude.net
| simonjgreen wrote:
| Could the title of this entry be altered to include the full
| article title including the extremely relevant "[...] with a
| virtual machine" so as to be less misleading and click-baity?
| eric__cartman wrote:
| yeah, I was expecting some hardware hacking of some sort, not
| setting up a regular virtual machine in a PC. At least they
| documented the process of building an ADB to USB adapter for
| the keyboard/mouse.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Take care, though. The original NeXT keyboard and mouse were
| not using ADB, but a proprietary (and a bit strange)
| protocol. The keyboard and mouse controller were actually
| contained in the monitor (for mono systems) or soundbox (for
| color systems), the NeXT communicated with the processor in
| the soundbox using a high speed serial protocol that also
| transmitted audio data. Only the later Turbo Cubes and
| Stations used ADB.
| dang wrote:
| Yes indeed.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| If you set up this VM, there's a tiff image of a young Scott
| Forestall hiding in the AppKit framework resources. See if you
| can find it.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| It's worth it to install the developer tools. A few observations:
|
| This is running a mix of older NextStep apps and newer OpenStep
| apps. For example, there are two text editors: Edit.app, and
| TextEdit.app. Edit.app is the original NextStep editor circa
| 1989, and TextEdit is the OpenStep reimplementation circa 1995.
| You can tell if it's a newer OpenStep app because it draws
| Windows-style focus rings around the buttons and controls.
|
| OpenStep became Cocoa, so OpenStep code looks very familiar to
| anyone who's done Objective-C development for Mac or iOS.
| NextStep code, on the other hand, looks very foreign to modern
| eyes (There are no NS classes. It's basically just plain C and
| AppKit classes like Window, Button, View, etc.)
|
| The TextEdit source code is included in the developer examples
| folder, written by Ali Ozer. Apple would continue to include the
| latest TextEdit source code with Xcode up until about OS X 10.9,
| if I remember.
|
| This version of TextEdit is cross platform, so there's plenty of
| #ifdef WIN32 code.
|
| There's no NSDocumentController, so there's boilerplate in the
| app controller, like checking if documents need to be saved
| before quitting, that a modern implementation would no longer
| need to worry about.
|
| If you're old enough to remember using Xcode 3, prior to the
| Xcode 4 redesign, you probably found that IDE quite strange and
| difficult to master (I miss Xcode 3, myself). Xcode 3 was a
| descendent of the NeXT Project Builder circa 1996. Playing around
| with the older, and much simpler, Project Builder makes it easier
| to understand why Xcode 3 worked the way it did.
| dhosek wrote:
| Back in 1989, I slept on Tom Rokicki's couch while I attended
| that year's TUG meeting at Stanford and I got to play with the
| NeXT that Tom was given to develop TeX for NeXT.1 It was an
| amazing machine, especially given the era. The optical disk was
| slow by modern standards but seemed quite responsive back then
| and the system was just mind-blowing.
|
| 1. I'm not sure if this was pre- or post-release of NeXTTeX
| EricRiese wrote:
| I appreciate how the hardware pictured is an Intel "NeXT" Unit of
| Computing.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Thats cool but please don't take me wrong when I say VMs are no
| fun. Perhaps some hardware exists that is so bog simple but yet
| relatively performant and is available from the shelves could run
| this on bare metal.
|
| I heard a few years ago that Intel Atoms are basically
| supercharged 486s.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I actually followed this guide the other day. Pretty neat to be
| able to run NeXTSTEP and play around with all the old apps. Be
| warned though, as the article says, the mouse is very difficult
| to use/control due to the drivers and differences between modern
| mice and the mice of the time.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Ive been meaning to try out the MAME version that the MAME devs
| added a few years ago. Not sure the speed is there but that
| could have changed, have not followed it too closely. Think
| they also added SGI Iris so you can say 'hey I know this'.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| I did this a few days ago and was really surprised by the copying
| and untaring not having progress bars. I know this thing is old,
| but as it is heralded so often as a really great system, this
| little detail struck me as really user unfriendly and I would
| have not expected to find something like this there.
|
| I have to admit, setting this up was kind of a pain in general
| and I am not sure if it is worth the trouble. Maybe someone can
| give some examples while it might be? I personally wanted to take
| a look at Lotus Improv, but could after setting it all up not
| find a version for intel. I guess there never was one?
| spitfire wrote:
| There never was a lotus improv for non NeXT hardware. Lotus
| killed NeXT improv basically lay immediately after it came out.
|
| What happened was lighthouse design came in and built an exact
| clone of improv called quantrix. The manuals were
| interchangeable - I'm actually learning them now.
|
| I bought a boxed copy of improv and quantrix manuals. It is
| /excellent/ we really have a lot of excellent ideas in our
| computing past.
|
| If you want a copy of the lighthouse apps (they gave away
| licenses when sun bought them in 1996 or so. ) check out next
| computers.org They have a file section.
| tssva wrote:
| Do you mean a NeXTSTEP version for non NeXT hardware because
| there was a Windows version?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| He means for next os.
| spitfire wrote:
| So this gets complicated so Improv 1.0 is available on m68k
| next hw.
|
| Improv 2.0 was only available for windows x86.
|
| Lighthouse design quantrix for nextstep is available on
| m68k, x86, hp-parisc and sun hardware.
|
| Then there's an offshoot of lighthouse design quantrix
| which is quantrix modeller written in Java and available
| for windows and Mac. It costs $2500/year.
|
| I'm learning improv on m68k and quantrix(the manuals
| interchange freely) on m68k/x86.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Lotus Improv was available for Windows (3.x) as well if that's
| your main interest. Might be easier to get running, if you can
| find it.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| I have it along with manuals and the update. I used it for
| years for various personal finance tracking (runs in a
| Windows XP VM on macOS). This is _Lotus_ Improv, nothing to
| do with Quantix.
| lupinglade wrote:
| A beautiful OS that is far more enjoyable to use than todays
| inconsistent, schizophrenic UIs.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Apple failed miserably by not only _not_ choosing the NeXT
| interface (which was a joy to work with), they kept the outline
| of the Classic Mac OS interface while getting rid of the good
| stuff (spatial Finder, etc.).
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?
| bitwize wrote:
| It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent
| to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each
| file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its
| on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just
| like real objects.
|
| Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of
| human psychology in such a deep way to make computers
| easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for
| decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer
| truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that
| approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting
| worse with the iOS-ization of everything).
| handrous wrote:
| iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with
| folders having a kind of visual physicality--tapping a
| folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it
| underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the
| outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and
| bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with
| dimension and location. The down-side was that they were
| limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would
| have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the
| whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've
| watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers,
| you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when
| using folders, now--iOS6 and earlier was the only
| OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically
| recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that
| she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after
| some light config of the a11y features).
|
| 7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff.
| The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far
| into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Spatial Finder was the ultimate example of "It just works"
| from Macs in the past. Unless you knew what it was doing
| (always opening folders in the same place), it was
| something that would be hard to articulate as an advantage
| over other operating systems.
|
| The tradeoff against that of course was that you could not
| open the same folder in two different windows. With OS X,
| Finder implemented Miller Columns[0] (as taken from
| NextStep), so that ended spatial Finder, since windows
| could no longer be associated with particular folders.
|
| Personally, I'm a huge fan of Miller Columns as I find the
| easy hierarchy great as part of the "operating system is
| the dev environment" approach, but if I worked on more
| chaotic art projects perhaps I'd like spatial finder more.
| Either way I use Windows now and most of the alternative
| file managers don't seem to integrate into the OS well, so
| I get neither lol
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Lots of true-blue Mac partisans were crazy salty about the
| loss of the spatial finder, but I never gave a damn.
|
| I want my file-browsing window to maintain a consistent
| presentation as I navigate. I don't need each folder to
| open another window; that makes me crazy, and was one of
| the things I hated about OS 9 when I moved to the Mac in
| the late 90s. To me, the shifts under OS X -- mostly, the
| unixy (BSD-y) underpinnings but also changes like the
| abandonment of the spatial Finder -- made it WAY better.
| Jetrel wrote:
| Yeah - that was the thing. To traditional mac users, the
| finder wasn't a file-browser, full stop. It was a
| document viewer. Each folder was a document.
|
| What would have been really nice would have been to get a
| clear, visually-distinct instance of both; to get a
| really clear "this is a file browser" tool in the finder,
| and a really clear "this is a folder" tool in the finder.
|
| They're both really useful tools to have - what was awful
| wasn't gaining a file browser, but was how they mixed
| file browsing and folder viewing into this awful pea-soup
| thing that damaged a bunch of the value points of both
| tools.
|
| I really like having a file browser, but there's a LOT of
| value to having something that treats folders as
| individual, stateful documents.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's an interface wrought in the era of 720K floppies
| where there was a limit to how much hierarchy you would
| need to plow through to get somewhere.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to
| think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies
| because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them
| (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft
| becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder
| never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of
| the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser
| interface.
|
| Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the
| workspace to actually _do_ anything. They always went to
| the command line to copy /move files and do other file
| management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was
| mainly a proof of concept.
| Jetrel wrote:
| The spatial finder was really 2-3 promises: * Every time
| you opened a given folder, it _always_ opened in the same,
| physical place on the screen. Same size, same spot, same
| view options. Always.
|
| * Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If
| you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the
| previous one to the front, instead.
|
| * the act of opening a folder would always consistently
| draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-
| clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder.
|
| Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great,
| "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful
| aspect of human memory. It has to be _absolutely_
| consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move
| your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it
| feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can
| always find things instantly based on where they are,
| physically. It 's like going from O(log(n)) to find
| something to just O(1).
|
| It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed,
| where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you
| have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time
| "searching" for something, because you know exactly where
| you put it when you left it there.
|
| Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on
| this front; some are better than others, and there's
| probably some "learning differences" science on this, but
| as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is
| really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this
| are really, really good.
|
| --
|
| The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that
| had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same
| document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time
| in code editors, and in photoshop.
|
| Something that could have been a great compromise, which I
| think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been
| having a much stronger separation between two concepts,
| that in OS X are (practically speaking) really
| blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file _browser_ ".
|
| A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder"
| behaviors, but a file browser would have looked
| dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the
| benefits of opening multiple document views, without the
| confusion.
|
| The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open
| is you never can tell which one is the master copy for
| setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is,
| but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws
| with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the
| right side of the screen, and have another on the left
| side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your
| memory, but when you go looking for the one that was
| ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got
| stored was the other one.
| em-bee wrote:
| but they did choose the NeXT interface. not so much visually,
| but having worked with the original NeXTstep, OpenStep, very
| early and later versions of OS X and also various linux GUIs
| and windows, i have to say that at least the early versions
| of OS X were quite faithful renditions of the NeXTstep GUI.
| all the pieces of functionality were recognizeable, and the
| interface was just as comfortable to work with.
| bogwog wrote:
| I non-sarcastically switched to Window Maker
| (https://www.windowmaker.org/) on my main desktop for a little
| while out of curiosity and was very impressed by the
| experience. I even installed GNUStep and made a crappy little
| GUI for an old software renderer I had with the Project Center
| IDE (http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html)
| which is surprisingly powerful and full of features.
|
| Sure, it was all old and ugly by today's standards, and a big
| step backwards overall from the Plasma desktop I was used to,
| but it felt really good to use.
|
| The whole GNUStep ecosystem is crazy impressive too, and idk
| the history around it, but I assume interest for it died off a
| long time ago. Which is a shame, because having that
| development environment on a modern (free as in freedom)
| desktop would be awesome. Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but
| IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as
| it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other
| bloat.
|
| But apparently development for GNUStep is still alive (last
| stable release was ~2 months ago), so maybe there is still hope
| that it will take off one day!
| handrous wrote:
| Ran Windowmaker for a long time on my laptop in the early and
| mid 00s, on Gentoo. It's entirely fine when you're not going
| to be able to run more than 3-4 things at a time anyway, and
| manage all your system stuff like wifi from the command line,
| because the GUI tools are unreliable or absent. _Very_ light,
| and tiny on disk.
|
| Eventually switched to XFCE near the end of my time with
| Gentoo, and kept that when I changed distro to Ubuntu.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Take a look at this: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
| pak9rabid wrote:
| Awesome! I ran WindowMaker religiously back in the late 90s
| and early 2000s. I have very fond memories of how elegant and
| snappy it was compared to other popular window managers &
| desktop environments of the time.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I switched to WM for a year or so at work and became very
| comfortable with its way of doing things. It reminds me of
| the parts I liked of early Mac OS X. The main thing I wished
| for was a miller columns file manager like in NeXTStep or OS
| X. I briefly contemplated trying to write my own, but my
| Objective-C knowledge is minimal and very rusty.
|
| Unfortunately I changed positions and needed a DE that other
| people could use without getting confused, so I switched to
| Mate and made it act like Windows 10.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I used Window Maker back in the 90s, and now that I've gotten
| back into Linux on Pi and other hardware, I use it again as
| my preferred desktop (usually on DietPi). It's just fast,
| clean, and easy to configure, as well as port or copy the
| configuration wholesale.
| em-bee wrote:
| i used window maker too. it was actually after i had a chance
| to work with the real NeXTstep interface, that i started to
| get disappointed, because as nice as window maker looks, it
| is not NeXTstep and the quirks and differences in behavior
| were just irritating.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| It very much resembles early TWM / Solaris / Athena based GUIs.
| They still exist! You can install TWM. I've used MWM since the
| late 80's* (mostly on AIX for about a decade), and am glad it
| is still easily installable on Ubuntu 20.04
|
| That's the cool thing about Linux, you don't NEED your GUI to
| be a noisy nightmare (looking at you KDE). All my menus are
| context mouse menus. I don't do start menus, 1 level deep, with
| fewer than ~8 items, otherwise i'm using CLI or launching it
| via Xterm. Of course, apps are still at liberty to look like
| crap!
| Apocryphon wrote:
| BeOS really gave it a run for its money, though.
| neilv wrote:
| The NeXTstep UI has a bunch of neat things about it.
|
| I didn't use it much (way too expensive for a PC, and not
| considered an engineering workstation), but I did get to play
| with one in a computer lab a short while. And later I used a
| bunch of open source window management and utilities on Linux
| that mimicked aspects of OpenStep.
|
| The NeXTstep look was very legible and understandable, and
| stylish at the time. Compare to Mac of the time, or the later
| Win95. (Today you might be bothered by the wide non-autohide
| scrollbars with the stipple, the font aliasing, or the particular
| shade of gray. But you might find it more accessible than ad hoc
| brochure looks in a lot of UX.)
|
| On the scrollbars, note that the buttons for the two arrows are
| right next to each other, rather than at each end, which made a
| lot of sense if the user is actually clicking on the buttons to
| navigate, and might want to change direction.
|
| The hierarchical assemblies of lists in the UI seemed to come
| from Smalltalk browsers.
|
| The desktop icons weren't just to represent programs that were
| running, like'd see on X at the time, or later in Windows 95, but
| are more like both launchers and navigation (and could be other
| things), and dockable. More like the dock in current Mac OS X,
| etc. (I thought of NeXTstep when I made my XMonad window manager
| setup, where I made commands that navigate to a particular kind
| of window, starting the program if needed, and a modifier key can
| be held down to create additional instances of some kind of
| window.)
|
| Note that the Mac's trash can became a more environmentally
| conscious recycling bin.
|
| I'm sure some people who used the NeXT heavily could point out
| many other points of interest.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the programming demos were pretty shocking, the IDE was years
| ahead of anything mainstream and the system well modularized to
| provide actual RAD
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Any use for this now? I would not mind however to have a VM of a
| single computer i used since 1990 (mind you i skipped windows
| from 98 til 10) so it would mostly VM for mac & linux)
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The link title should probably be capitalized the way the company
| spelt it (NeXT), because otherwise I see this in the article list
| and I've no clue what the article is about ("Next" reads simply
| as a titlecased adverb).
| tnzk wrote:
| I thought it's the article about yet another JavaScript
| framework indeed.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| You know, thinking about it seriously, I'm not sure I agree
| with this sentiment, as reasonable as it seems on the
| surface.
|
| I do think the Web Platform makes a pretty bad (foundation
| for a) UI toolkit, at least judging from the results. I think
| the amount of awkwardness in JavaScript is just plain
| unreasonable. I'm also disappointed by how badly the
| practices of the modern Web accomodate, well, viewing static
| text and images retrieved over the Internet. Various
| JavaScript libraries and approaches seem to pass by so fast I
| get dizzy if I look. (The last point would probably disappear
| were I to fully immerse myself in Web programming, but I just
| don't like it enough for that.)
|
| And yet.
|
| It seems that the people making all these frameworks and
| producing unjustifiably heavy blobs of JavaScript in order to
| display a photo... Are gradually encountering and solving, in
| a practical context and with real-world feedback, a lot of
| genuinely difficult problems--problems which often have only
| been considered in an academic context, and then not with an
| overabundance of results.
|
| It's not that they go out looking for difficult problems to
| solve--unlike academics. They frequently don't even _realize_
| the difficulty or the existence of the problem at first. It's
| just that they start with a reasonably complete solution for
| a small problem area, go right to the boundary, and _push_.
| Pretty soon the boundary reaches things that were previously
| only attacked with Grand Generalized Solutions, found hard,
| and left unsolved. Yet they _need_ them solved, so they push
| further. The flood of frameworks and best practices occurs
| because they are _iterating_.
|
| This process produces warts. I mean, _of course_ it produces
| warts. It cannot _help_ but produce warts. In a setting that
| also prizes backwards compatibility, some of those warts
| survive long enough to become functionally immortal, and so
| the survivors accumulate even if most warts are eliminated
| very quickly. Eventually we reach a point where we can only
| look back at a five-meg Opera executable and weep.
|
| This process also means that some of the new best practices
| are practically indistinguishable from the old ones. However,
| that is not in itself a condemnation: a lot of people
| changing their minds can very well happen a function at a
| time, a default at a time, even a function _name_ at a time.
| Some of those changes--maybe even most of those changes--are
| still noise and passing fads. But they are fads of a specific
| kind--they are generally not _sticky_ : because iterating is
| the (social) norm, whole industries and schools of thought
| don't get founded around a single supposedly universal
| solution, and giant edifices of millions of lines and man-
| centuries of effort don't get erected around a suboptimal
| approach (see: XML). As fads go, I'd say these are pretty
| mild.
|
| So what are some of the hard problems the Web people are
| solving or found themselves having solved?
|
| Native code generation for dynamic languages. (Tracing JITs
| pretty much won, from what I can see, yet it seems that
| nobody expected that, not even the Self people that did much
| of the foundational work in an academic context before.)
|
| Ergonomics of a fully asynchronous programming environment,
| up to and including system calls. (Again, cooperative
| concurrency seems to have pretty much won here, yet it wasn't
| that long ago that the BeOS approach of preemption and shared
| memory seemed a plausible solution for responsive UIs. While
| people were already doing cooperative threads when the 6502
| was the new hotness, my machine has IndexedDB but neither
| scheduler activations nor transactional memory.)
|
| Model that can represent most of the meaningful
| organizational semantics in most of the documents. (The
| problem isn't inventing _a_ model, the problem is obtaining
| enough data to converge on the _right_ one. HTML5 is a
| resounding success in this respect; from what I can see most
| of the other document preparation or processing systems
| either had the document author code a bespoke structure, fell
| back to presentation details, forced everyone to adjust their
| documents to match the limitations by administrative mandate,
| were basically unusable, or all of the above.)
|
| Declarative, non-Turing-complete styling that's still
| flexible enough to make following the semantic model above
| feasible and even pleasant. (I like XSLT and dislike most
| templating, but CSS selectors feel so much more carefully
| designed than XPath. I suspect having to do efficient and
| even incremental implementations from the start has something
| to do with it. I still want a neat mathematical model, like
| maybe tree transducers, to tell me what I should and
| shouldn't include in a styling language.)
|
| Practical, _interactive_ reflowable text layout that can do
| modestly non-trivial typesetting. (TeX can do some things
| better but basically can't do cutouts at all without
| hardcoding sizes, _and_ it's a language powerful enough you
| can basically only execute it. Roff does much less.
| Everything else either requires babysitting by a human when
| changing layout widths or would make a typographer from half
| a millenium ago cringe.)
|
| Resolution independence including on pretty low-resolution
| devices without fuzziness or glitches and with support for
| zooming in while preserving in the layout. (The CSS "pixel"
| is a hack but the approaches in native app ecosystems are
| absolutely infested with much worse hacks. I wonder how many
| people on Earth understand the rounding code in a major
| browser.)
|
| Understandable, even intuitive GUI conventions for
| (extremely) untrusted applications. (It starts with
| powerboxes but ends with very subtle tricks like a timer on
| the "Open" button. Still no petnames for some reason.)
|
| Applications that work offline yet can be used immediately
| without a user-visible installation step. (Turns out you just
| had to make the online case the default one and get it wrong
| a couple of times, and you can give people enough of a
| framework that they are able to make the major effort
| required to get it working if they have the motivation.)
|
| Graphical user interfaces that are general enough to do
| almost anything yet are not a maze of twisty little
| assignments and repaint calls. (I've been watching the
| progress in FRP since about 2010, and while the Web
| variations are all pretty kludgey, they're still a damn sight
| better than everything I've seen atop a native UI toolkit. I
| get the impression XAML might be a contender but haven't been
| able to find a description of how it deals with the difficult
| stuff; it's also purely presentational from what I
| understand.)
|
| Each of these purported solutions has flaws and can be
| disputed, and I'm sure people can point me to prior work
| that's more principled or does some aspects better (please
| do!). My point is that all of the questions are _very
| difficult_ , mostly unrelated to the Web's natural monopoly
| position, and yet for every one of them the Web ecosystem
| approach of dumb but dauntless iteration has done the state
| of the art a lot of good.
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| Fixed
| ttul wrote:
| In 1995, my university had an entire lab of NeXT stations and
| almost nobody ever used them. Everything about NeXT was amazing,
| from the hardware specs to the user interface design and forward-
| thinking industrial design.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Back in about 2000 I managed to get my hands on twelve free
| NeXTcubes that a tech company was throwing out. I was over eager
| with my generosity handing them out to the local geek community,
| and before I realized what I'd done, I didn't have one left for
| myself. Always regretted that, as they're very cool machines even
| just sitting on the shelf.
|
| I do still have stacks of NeXTStep CDs sitting in a closet
| though. I used one of the Intel version ones a couple years ago
| to install a copy on VirtualBox like this guide is showing. Fun
| to screw around with it, brought back fond memories of my days in
| school using an original NeXTstation.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I let a NeXT cube through my hands too, and regret it as well.
| In high school I guess I was the teacher's pet in my
| electronics class, and we regularly got old computers and parts
| as donations. I helped the teacher get a classroom's worth of
| PCs up and running as a network so he let me have the oddball
| donated NeXT cube that was just gathering dust. Then in college
| I traded it to another geek for an Xbox and a bunch of games.
| Seemed like an even enough trade at the time although now I
| wouldn't mind having that lovely magnesium cube around.
| itomato wrote:
| Previous on M1 is setting new records in NXBench.
|
| Rob Blessin at Blackhole can probably help you with black
| hardware if you're into that. (NeXT non-ADB keyboards are a
| pleasure to use for a while).
|
| There are also some of us who are still building and running
| native X86 boxes to run Openstep natively.
| epaulson wrote:
| Has anyone here bought from Blackhole? I always wanted a NeXT
| but never pulled the trigger back when they were easier to
| find.
| a-dub wrote:
| 25 years ago! the prices haven't changed!
| maximilianburke wrote:
| Yep. I bought my NeXTStation from him, as well as some
| replacement parts. Rob's fantastic, I have always had a good
| time dealing with him.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| I never bought from Black Hole (Rob Blessin) directly since
| shipping to Europe is rather expensive, but Rob is a long-
| term NeXT supporter and also very active on the
| nextcomputers.org forums - so I would recommend getting in
| touch with him if you are interested in buying a system.
|
| I think his company is mostly a single-person operation, so I
| would expect response times sometimes a bit longer than what
| you might be used from larger companies.
| _moof wrote:
| The keyboards really are nice to type on. Though for the life
| of me I can't figure out why, on a UNIX system, they put the
| pipe character in such a weird place. It's above the keypad.
|
| If you (the general you, not you specifically, since you
| probably already know this) get your hands on a NeXT keyboard
| and want to use it with a modern system, Adafruit has a guide
| here for building a USB adapter with an Arduino:
| https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-next-keyboard-with-arduino-mi...
| foobiekr wrote:
| Both the mouse and keyboard were banes of my existence as a
| lab owner. They failed constantly.
| _moof wrote:
| Bleh, sorry to hear that. Never had any trouble with mine.
| Maybe you had too many college students? :)
| foobiekr wrote:
| :-) well, it was a college lab.
|
| I had three big problems with the NeXT systems.
|
| One was the MO; that was dire and terrible and they
| should never have shipped it. This was very rapidly fixed
| by adding HDs to every system as soon as we realized what
| boat anchors the MO-only systems were.
|
| The second was the poor HW quality of the mice and
| keyboards. They simply broke a lot more frequently than
| the PCs, Suns (even the cheap pink/grey ones that I've
| forgotten the name of), SGIs and Dec systems.
|
| The last was that we were an AFS university and the NeXT
| systems, if you accidentally browsed the AFS top level
| directory, would hang the browser for at least 30
| minutes. Super unpleasant if you needed to head to class
| since a locking screen saver did not kick in even after
| the browser recovered. As a side effect, we'd have
| students yanking the power cord which itself was not
| always something that the HD slabs recovered from.
|
| That said, I loved them, everything about them, and there
| has never been anything like that. The Sun-vs-NeXT thing
| was night and day.
| musicale wrote:
| This looks very similar to the vm installation guide at
| https://openstep.bfx.re except that it uses VirtualBox rather
| than Parallels.
| a-dub wrote:
| i bought one of these used back when i was in high school. at the
| time mono 040 slabs could be had for a few hundred dollars.
| without a doubt, the coolest thing about it was the hardware.
| oversized flat screen monitors, 2.88mb disk drives, onboard mc56k
| dsp.
|
| the audio output hardware only operated at 22khz when in stereo,
| if i recall correctly... however, the presence of the mc56k dsp
| made realtime resampling of any stream possible without burdening
| the mc68040 cpu.
|
| perhaps the most interesting component of the next hardware was
| the "geekport" which was some oddball connector, like a db-19 or
| something that was a mix of ttl digital lines and analog in/out
| attached to a/d and d/a that were convenient to the dsp.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| I think with the geekport that you might be getting mixed up
| with the BeBox. "The BeBox aimed to be the ultimate multimedia
| workstation. It had dual PowerPC CPUs and tons of I/O options
| including four MIDI ports, multiple sound ports, and the
| "GeekPort", a 37-pin connector that had power plus digital and
| analog I/O with a built-in ADC and DAC. Less than 2000 BeBoxes
| were sold so it's very rare to see one today."
|
| https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtu...
| a-dub wrote:
| you may be right on the name, but the next also had a "weird
| dsp port"
| a-dub wrote:
| so apparently it was a db-15. i think the dac lived in the
| monitor, and devices that connected were things like modems
| and voicemail units. line level audio could be noisy so i
| wonder if it was just 8 bits of data (or more) and a few
| control pins that were attached directly to the m56k... i
| think the native width was 24 bits...
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Notice the .app extension? Did you ever wonder why programs are
| called apps now?
|
| Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Programs were called apps long before NeXTSTEP existed._
|
| Programs were called "applications" long before NeXTSTEP
| existed, but not "apps".
|
| "Apps" was mainstreamed primarily by the iPhone and its App
| Store ecosystem.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
| bitwize wrote:
| People called applications apps long before the iPhone or
| NeXT. The term "killer app" was coined in the early 1980s to
| mean an application that was so must-have it would sell
| computers on its own. Typically this was a spreadsheet;
| VisiCalc was the Apple II's killer app, and Lotus 1-2-3 was
| the killer app for the IBM PC.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The word "app" existed, sure. But as the "Trends" chart
| shows it because prominent as the preferred name for
| executables with smartphones in general (meaning, "small
| application"[0]), and the iPhone in particular. From my
| memory that was causation, but I grant that it could've
| been correlation.
|
| [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/app#Etymology_1
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Actually the first use of the term "killer application"
| (not even "killer app" yet) in print was 1988, in PC Week.
| See Wikipedia. NeXT's first computers were 1987.
|
| "App" however dates from at least 1981.
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/24882/the-history-of-app-and-
| th...
| rleigh wrote:
| It was mainstream long before that.
|
| It was in common use with the Digital Research GEM desktop in
| the mid '80s (which used a .app suffix for applications), but
| was not particularly unique to GEM.
| CharlesW wrote:
| For the file extension. I did a quick search and all of the
| GEM ads and articles I could find call them "applications",
| "software applications", and even "executables".
| handrous wrote:
| Been using computers since DOS 6. "App" was very rarely used,
| to the point that if you'd ask me to list names for the concept
| of a computer program I'd probably not have come up with it,
| before iOS, in my experience.
| foobiekr wrote:
| "Application" was very common when I was running msdos 2.
| handrous wrote:
| Yes, but the shortening of "app" wasn't.
| adolph wrote:
| _The second cube continued to burn, its sides falling into the
| slag pile that had consumed the first. "You know, we could make
| it flare up by throwing some water on it," one of the Livermore
| engineers suggested. It seemed like a good idea to us, so he
| pulled out a garden hose with a trigger nozzle and doused the
| fire with a few quick spurts. The water instantly turned to
| steam. Thick clouds of white smoke bellowed forwards, out of the
| chamber. We were covered with a fine white powder._
|
| https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| I enjoyed that, thanks for sharing
| adolph wrote:
| Glad to remember it and see others enjoying the old stories.
| I, like others, read "Build Your Own NeXT" with an eye opened
| for "casting magnesium!" rather than "run a VM with a time-
| honored OS."
|
| Given the recent anniversary, maybe it would be apt to add a
| vintage looking sticker with red inked "This machine is a
| server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"?
|
| https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-
| history-...
| voidfunc wrote:
| Not nearly as cool without the NeXT Cube, but that's a bit harder
| to get.
| ragingrobot wrote:
| While it's neat to be able to run the actual OS, the title as
| provided from the blog is a bit misleading. Adafruit also did
| something similar a few days ago with Solaris. I may be the only
| one as I see no one else has commented so, but when I read "build
| your own..." I'm thinking the actual hardware, or compatible.
| They should call these articles something like "Run XXX OS and
| software on your existing machine."
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > but when I read "build your own..." I'm thinking the actual
| hardware, or compatible.
|
| I definitely thought the same thing being it was an Adafruit
| post and disappointed both times to see it was just a basic
| howto on running the OS in a VM. Still very useful knowledge if
| someone wants to play, but kinda can't help think they worded
| it that way to draw folks in. I was really hoping it was some
| FPGA or maybe even an MCU running an emulator, but alas, QEMU /
| Virtualbox is what they used.
| cat199 wrote:
| here's a 3d print next case for raspberry pi:
|
| https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/25vy/next-cube-rasp...
|
| enjoy :)
| swiley wrote:
| Especially with m68k machines. I thought you could still get
| those chips in DIP packaging.
| _moof wrote:
| Not the ones in NeXT hardware, unfortunately. The '040 only
| came in PGA and QFP. And although you can still find LC, EC,
| and Z variants without much difficulty, finding the version
| that includes both an MMU and an FPU requires meeting strange
| men in empty parking garages.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| In this particular case it seems reasonably fair, because this
| is recreating what NeXT had become by the end. While they did
| continue shipping units for a couple years after the pivot,
| NeXT's focus on building hardware didn't even last half the
| period between the company's founding and its acquisition by
| Apple.
|
| Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were
| certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I
| don't know that there was anything particularly special bout
| the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the
| interesting bit.
| foobiekr wrote:
| The NeXT physical design - well except the terrible mouse abd
| keyboard - was absolutely glorious. Just wonderful.
|
| Nextstep was also glorious. I supported a lab full of cubes
| and slabs.
|
| But under the covers, the hardware other than the terrible
| magnetic optical drive was boring. There was only minimal
| hardware distinctiveness. The built in Motorola DSP was
| nice..ish, but the real revolution before and after NeXT was
| graphics. The non-NextDimension-equipped cubes were utterly
| pedestrian compared to things like the Amiga (before) and the
| SGI machines. Not long after the slabs shipped Apple shipped
| a Mac ii with a TI DSP on a card for accelerated 3D.
|
| I'm a huge next fan but it was all the experience -
| excruciatingly terrible for the MO cubes to glorious for the
| color turbo slabs - which defined NeXT.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well, even the pedestrian NextCube had a "megapixel"
| display -- 1024x1024 graphics. Even in monochrome, that was
| pretty impressive for the day. The icons actually looked
| like what they represented, not abstractions.
| rasz wrote:
| Thanks to open nature PCs had better capabilities for
| many years before Next even came out, and cheaper too.
|
| October 1986 https://books.google.com/books?id=mzwEAAAAMB
| AJ&lpg=PA41&ots=...
|
| Multiple 1024x768@16 cards in $2-3K range, and an
| absolute steal - $3K Number Nine 1280 1280x1024@256.
|
| In 1988 you could buy 1664x1200 PC card + 19 inch monitor
| $2400 combo https://books.google.com/books?id=Cj8EAAAAMBA
| J&pg=PA53&dq=Si... or ~$1K 15 inch 1mpix version.
| foobiekr wrote:
| It's a nit, but I think the megapixel display was
| 1120x832.
| lizknope wrote:
| You are correct
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_MegaPixel_Display
|
| The original MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17"
| monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray,
| light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832
| at 92 DPI (just shy of a true Megapixel at 931,840 total
| pixels) at 68 Hz
| spamizbad wrote:
| Maybe at the Cube's (albeit still very expensive) price-
| point. But by 1990 SGI had VGX(T) graphics on the market,
| which could do 24bit color at 1280x1024. It could also
| clock to early HGTV signals for overlays.
| _moof wrote:
| I've got a NeXTstation, AKA "pizza box," the black m68k
| workstation hardware. There's really nothing special about it
| electrically other than an onboard DSP. It's a pretty
| standard 68040-based computer. The case though... gorgeous.
| Hard to imagine recreating that.
|
| Agreed though, the headline is a little odd. I was expecting
| something akin to that guy who designed and fabbed a new
| logic board for an SE/30. That would've been a feat,
| especially since those Motorola processors are so hard to
| come by now.
| sixothree wrote:
| Do you happen to know if you can run NeXTStep on vintage
| Apple hardware or maybe SPARCstations? I have some various
| IIcx and quadras and sparc 10, 20, etc.
|
| Maybe a pizmo macbook?
| classichasclass wrote:
| If you want to run NeXTSTEP on a Mac laptop but don't
| want to run OS X, then run Rhapsody or Mac OS X Server.
| It's closer, though it has a sort of not-fish-nor-fowl
| incomplete facsimile of classic Platinum as its
| interface. The Wally is probably the best choice for
| this.
|
| http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-now-for-
| something...
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Sparcstation 4, 5, 10 and 20 models (and the Voyager) can
| run NeXTstep. For the 10 and 20, it depends on the CPU.
| Sun SuperSPARC modules should work, but Ross HyperSPARC
| CPUs are not supported. NeXTstep only supports one CPU,
| additional CPUs are ignored. Later models (UltraSPARC)
| are not supported, unfortunately there is also no support
| for earlier SuperSparc Sun 4m (e.g. the LX) or Sun 4c
| systems.
|
| I have a SparcStation 20 with 512 MB RAM and the 24 bit
| framebuffer RAM expansion, this is a great machine for
| NeXTstep.
|
| If you happen to have an hp PA-RISC machine, some models
| using the PA7100 CPU (e.g. the "Gecko" 712-series) are
| also supported and are really nice NeXTstep machines.
|
| Vintage Apple hardware does not work with NeXTstep
| directly, but you can run Rhapsody (essentially NeXTstep
| for PowerPC with a System 9-like UI) on early G3 Macs.
|
| The Motorola 88k-based NRW (NeXT RISC workstation) was
| unfortunately canceled when NeXT decided to leave the
| hardware business...
| NexRebular wrote:
| Just a while ago installed NeXTSTEP on a HP 9000 712/60
| for playing around with the original DoomEd. Runs great
| except for having not found PA-RISC DooM client binaries
| or sources for recompiling.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| The DoomEd source code seems to be available at
| https://github.com/DrinkyBird/DoomEd and it's Objective C
| code, so I would expect this to compile on NeXTstep/PA-
| RISC (but I haven't tried).
|
| If you don't have a compiler set up on the PA-RISC
| machine, you should be able to cross-compile or generate
| a fat binary from ProjectBuilder on NeXTstep/intel.
| classichasclass wrote:
| I have OmniGroup's port of Doom on my SAIC Galaxy 1100,
| which is a 712/80. id even had a Gecko for awhile. The
| fat binary is at http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/S
| oftware/NEXTSTEP/App...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| omg can't agree more: i sooooo wish i had kept my
| NeXTstation Color from 1992 just to have its amazing
| magnesium case. just beautiful mechanical engineering /
| materials design. also feel that way about my parents' long
| sold 1969 LawnBoy 2-cycle engine lawn mower, also
| magnesium, sturdy engineering, and with which i mowed
| countless lawns as a kid to save money for computer stuff
| and sports stuff.
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| Wasn't the casing out of magnesia... I always thought if I
| get one I will be worried it will go down in a blaze on new
| years eve if somebody touches it with a sparkler. (I have
| somehow very specific counter factual worries, since I do
| not own one)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It was a magnesium alloy that turned out to be devilishly
| difficult to get going in practice.
|
| See this article that adolph linked in another comment:
| https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Out of all the things I expected to see today, a very
| detailed description of the conditions required to set an
| NeXT cube on fire was pretty near the bottom of the list.
| jandrese wrote:
| > "This is so NeXT," I told Sally. "Everything works
| great in the tests, then when you try to make it work for
| real, in the field, nothing works. They build a computer
| out of magnesium, and it doesn't even burn!"
|
| LOL
| _moof wrote:
| It is, yes. Don't take it outside on holidays :)
| codetrotter wrote:
| > Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube. They were
| certainly a distinctive-looking computer for the day, but I
| don't know that there was anything particularly special bout
| the hardware that was worth recreating. The software was the
| interesting bit.
|
| A modern computer running the whole thing in emulation is not
| the same though.
|
| Whereas for example an FPGA implementation, that's in line
| with my idea of "build your own NeXT". Even though someone
| might say, that's emulation too. And they'd be correct in a
| way. But like, do you see what I mean?
| ido wrote:
| Would you consider an "IBM compatible" PC from the late
| NeXT era that can natively run NeXTSTEP/i486 authentic?
| Seeing as that's the (one of) the kind of computer that
| NeXT sold the OS for.
| nuclearnice1 wrote:
| Maybe the next four words of the title provide the required
| clarification?
|
| "Build your own NeXT with a virtual machine"
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Though those last four words were left out of the HN
| submission's title.
|
| Which may not be in accordance with the submission
| guidelines.
| ragingrobot wrote:
| > Whereas for example an FPGA implementation, that's in
| line with my idea of "build your own NeXT". Even though
| someone might say, that's emulation too. And they'd be
| correct in a way. But like, do you see what I mean?
|
| That would be acceptable, as you built a machine that
| functioned exactly like the original, running the OS on
| bare metal - not on unrelated hardware under emulation.
| That would fit my idea of "building" the machine as well.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Years ago I acquired and refurbished a NeXT cube....
|
| > A modern computer running the whole thing in emulation is
| not the same though.
|
| >> Whereas for example an FPGA implementation, that's in
| line with my idea of "build your own NeXT".
|
| But the OP is not that. IIRC, there were two distinct
| versions of NeXTSTEP: a 68k version for their custom
| hardware, and a x86 version for PCs. The OP is setting up
| VM for the latter (which given its age does not seem like a
| trivial thing, either).
|
| So if you must have an FPGA version, it would be equally
| equivalent to have one that simulates a mid-90s IBM clone.
| saagarjha wrote:
| NeXTSTEP also supported SPARC and PA-RISC.
| a-dub wrote:
| along with intel. they had sweet 4 way fat binaries that
| had code for all 4 architectures.
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