Going Online with a NeXT Color Slab!
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
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If you need the best UNIXy computing experience that 1990 has to offer, look no further than NeXT! Today, we're spicing up a NeXTStation Color and talking about how this obscure line of machines helped push computing forward.
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#NeXT #SteveJobs #68K
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That (or a NeXTcube) is my holy grail of vintage computers. I started my IT career on those. So great to see one running!
I’ve considered going that route. I’m also considering a 486 or Pentium build. Whatever I come across first I guess.
@Lurch NEXTSTEP never supported SMP, it only uses a single CPU only, even if the system has multiple processors.
It was later on, with Mac OS X, that support for multiple processors was added.
I got my 1st one, a Turbo monochrome as part of a bulk sell off by a game developer (Trilobyte I think) in the mid 90s. It was $400 at the time, but still one of the best computers (along with the color Turbo) I have ever used or owned.
I miss those days.
Ive always been into tech but recently learning a lot about the history and the future of it and I love the way the next computer looks. Also for the fact that the internet was born in it.
Yesssss! I've been wondering what you would do NeXT. Pardon the pun! This was a computer I was dreaming about in the 90's. I even had the first copy of the NeXT World magazine. It would also be cool to see you run Lotus Improve on your system. It was a spreadsheet program that was ahead of it's time.
That battery was almost dead flat. A fully charged one gives about 3.5 Volts, and end-of-life is anything below 3.0 Volts - or 2.5 Volts, depending upon the manufacturer.
I was lucky enough to use the NeXT box. We used it in prepress and we ran Signastation imposition software. The OS was super smooth.
Prepress?
@@patrickazz5430 yes. The software was released by Heidelberg
Lately I play the following game: every time you hit a computer/monitor, I take a shot.
Here I am on a Saturday night (From Spain :P ) a bit drunk lol PD: thank you for your videos, I love them and they are very entertaining!
I got a fully upgraded Mac IIci in the late 90s as a birthday gift when I was 7 that was a workstation at my Uncle's work that went with the cost is no problem approach to machine ram, processor upgrades, etc. That was around the Next era towards the beginning. The IIGS I got a year earlier from the same person/place fully maxed out with the best parts at the time. He also gave me disks for a proper Assembly and C development setup for both when I got them along with books so that's what I didn't my entire time off from school doing every day.
I always liked the skin look of this model of the next workstations. Both my IIGS and IIci are technically small, but these next computers were something else. Apple was basically begging Jobs to come back due to being borderline bankrupt. They kind of ran him out of the company he cofounded to begin with prior. When he came back he axed tons of projects and had them focus all of their efforts on Macintosh using Next as a basis more or less. His shift in having the company focus on what was important saved them (and maybe a little help from Gates/Microsoft)
4:02 thereabouts: I had the same thing with a Philips TV years ago. The previous owner had been stuffing a matchstick in to keep the set on.
I "fixed" it by opening up the switch and forming part of a paperclip to replace the latching hook. Wonder how many other such bodges are out there.
11:00 Yeah, slap that hard drive!
Now this is NeXT level!
19:09 I already knew it was like that, but to watch that beach ball spin, which of course belongs in the 21th century and macOS (right?) feels like sorcery.
0:10 sounds exactly like what Michael Scott did in the later seasons of The Office, when he quits and starts his own paper company only to be bought back out to be manager again🤣🤣
You forgot to show the spinning beach ball that all Mac users know so well. This is where it started.
I had a few NeXT stations back in the mid 90s. You will do yourself a world of good by hunting for the color turbo version of the machine. It has a faster cpu and allows up to 128MB of ram which makes a huge difference in performance of things like Doom.
Your monitor not working is due to it being the lesser version of the color options. You have the Phillips version. There is a SONY version that uses a 17 inTriniton tube with shadow mask. They can be bright and crisp even after nearly 30 years. Before I got rid of mine in 2008ish, it still looked better than most crt displays on the market.
You should also look for the Intel compatible version of the OS, OpenStep 4.2. You have to be careful with hardware, but it runs on a lot of period correct Intel machines. It benefits from being able to run on faster hardware plus the display resolution is adjustable.
I wish I still had mine. Also, the original Cube had one of the first consumer grade video capture cards, the Dimension, and my roomates and I used one to capture video way back when, before RUclips was a thing.
Take care of the Next and it will outlive you. They were huge achievements in engineering and a product of a time when Steve Jobs appreciated that computers were tools and needed to be both easy to use but worth the cost.
Anyone else wondering where Whiteboard guy is? Starting to think Action Retro did something...
I miss the whiteboard guy, he was a part of the channel.
@@lokelaufeyson9931 🤣🤣🤣
Man I’m shocked how modern this looks, Jobs really nailed this OS with his team.
That t-shirt is fabulous! I need one!
Only one screw for the case and one screw for the hard drive?!?! And only one question of the setup screen?!?! 😱😱😱😱Computer companies today should take note! This is how you build a computer!
Nobody can say he was in it for the money at least...
Used his severance to compete with the company that fired him, absolute chad move.
I would keep the crt since it’s nostalgic and cool but I understand your decision, crts are heavy, and the plastic just can’t support the weight anymore, I would try to get a case mould to maybe make a new case for the crt
In the Mail app there is an email from Steve Jobs and he actually SPEAKS. I'm not kidding.
Wishing I would have bought a NeXTstaion color! My mono NeXTstation leaves a bit to be desired sometimes!
Dell LCD displays work pretty well.
Wasn’t the Mac LC the same sort of time, that comes apart super easy too.
Ah, I see you are young, that hard drive sounds 100% normal.
What plastic are you printing in? I was hesitent to use PLA because it has a bit lower heat tolerance, but maybe I never need to worry about that?
I was wondering when you were going to post your next video
I really want to know more about Macintosh Librarian. :D
You can tell you're chatting with NeXT veterans when they tell you are thousands of games on Linux (half of them don't have sound) :D
It just tears me up how all the great machine are literally cracking and falling apart if even move them (or open to replace caps). :-(
It's funny how Steve founded Apple, then they kicked him out only to come crawling back to him later.
I'm starting to think that when Apple bought NeXT, the very first day Steve Jobs entered the Apple building a portal opened and the Steve from our reality went somewhere else and a Steve Jobs from a mirror evil dimension walked out. Contrast this nice, easily serviceable good boi of a machine with the it's-a-bitch-to-just-open-it Apple hardware that he developed later at Apple. It's night and day!
I have the same screen😂 use it with my SGI ❤
He didn't rage quit... he was fired. :)
I remember a mathematics professor I had in the US (at LSU) in 1993 or so who had a NEXT (cube I think). Is that possible, or do I remember it wrong?🤔😏
I wonder if its possible to upgrade it by using an Amiga accelerator like Terrible Fire or something similar, maybe even a variant of Pistorm modded for the Next machine.
I enjoyed the dang it joke.
Aww vi skills are so cute.
The weird thing is understanding that articles like this about the NeXT systems are part of that "retro computing" thing that's trendy now
Born to break computers
1:56 in _when,_ did you say?!
1:57 it's 1988... not '98
I was in Amiga Community then, but we looked at these machines, they were nice, but NO Gizmatrons available, like Video Toasters, ETC, Well Debian came out late 93?, I remember using/playing with it on a Amiga 2000 in 1994 & on anyway, ANYWAY ... I wonder if you can Update it with a Modern Debian ?
P.S Feral Repairs, A Sharpened Matchstick, shoved into corner of Broken Switch while Holding it ON, will jam it, had to do that temporary fix to broken switches before ..
A dime or thin washer would probably also work to jam the power button. Had the same problem with a Commodore 1084 monitor and used a penny to temporarily jam the power button.
@@dbranconnier1977 As a Former Commodore Dealer I can Inform you that Power Switch on ANY Commodore Monitor Failing was a Common Issue, but on 1084s (Great monitors) Very Common... ;) PS.. But I might have only seen the Broken ones ...
whats the storage capacity of the massive hdd
If you had put an RGB fan in that precious machine, I would have disliked the video.
Rumors said that Steve is still trying to lift up that NeXT cube
Ironic that you chose a Samsung LCD, since they're rivals with Apple in the cellular market.
Seeing the Next Station pinging Cloudflare's servers just conjures this mental image of a being that has been gone for a long time, reawakened and calling out into the void to receive a stunning response from something gigantic, eldritch, and powerful.
Dude. He's such a noob. He had that super expensive monitor that had one broken switch. Instead of fixing it, he uses a way worse screen. All he knows how to do is buy stuff. He never fixes stuff. He's not really taking care of it. Back in the day a real technician would fix that.
Why did I manage to visualize every single sentence in my mind and provide sounds for them? This is some Cyber Lovecraftian horror that goes beyond human comprehension
@@feederx08 the important words are "back in the day" when the plastic wasn't brittle as a potato chip and wouldn't start breaking if you looked at it the wrong way, it's better to leave it by itself than fix it
First time I've seen a screenshot of a NeXTstep was in Game Developer magazine in early 90s. They had a picture of John Carmack's NeXT desktop with a IDE, dock bar and DOOM running in a window. I've dreamed about having a computer like that ever since!
now you have a million times more performant computer with an UNIX-like operating system on your pocket
@@redstone0234 And yet, there's no userland to be seen.
Now you can safely say that you took the NeXT Step!
Boooo!! 🍅🍅🍅
Oh Brother this guy STINKS!!
😂😅
I regret reading the comments
Bwahahaha!
"It's only one screw!" Actually, that's the most Steve Jobs thing I can imagine, except that the screw would be in some pattern where only he owns the bit for it and has to personally close and open every single computer himself
I imagine he lowers the lights and plays Barry White when he does it
And charge you 500 dollars for that.
I literally am like Windows all the way, however, even I have to admit that apples anti-consumerism is largely Tim Cook's fault; though it started, ironically during the time that Steve Job was exiled from his company
@@stitchfinger7678 😂
@@skeleton_craftGaming na, they have always been anti-consumer. Remember them trying to copyright rounded corners and swipe to unlock? Plus the crippling of the file system access and deliberately blocking flash video and sideloading. And don't get me started on that abomination that is iTunes and it's forced requirement or the fact you needed a Mac and expensive developer licence to do anything interesting with the thing and they still crippled it and made it awkward.
The answer to when OmniWeb was released on NeXT was right on the screen at 20:03 - "OmniWeb was originally developed by Omni Group for the NeXTSTEP platform, and was released by Lighthouse Design on March 17, 1995 after only one month's development time."
It was still updated for macOS till recently as well
Huh! I use OmniGraffle all the time for network diagrams, floor plans, wood cut sheets, and lots of other stuff it was probably never meant to do. I had no idea they went back that far.
6:20 The SGI Indigo² also required a sync-on-green monitor. (I too watch LGR.)
I remember worrying about sync on green or whatever the other sync was back in the day and it seemed every monitor worked with every computer and video card.
SyncMaster for the win, every, single, time! :) NEC Multisync is always a good choice too!
You beat me to it! Was going to write just that!
Back in 1990-91, I was a physics graduate student who had a Sun SPARCstation sitting on my desk. A postdoc down the hall had a NeXTcube on the desk. I must admit to being intrigued. The operating system looked really cool.
I hear that ctrl-alt-rees is a really awesome guy
Indeed
ctrl-alt-rees is a Hoopy Frood! He's just this guy... 🤣🤣🤣
just wanted to say that monitor fits the rest of the set surprisingly well considering the age difference, looks pretty cool
I always liked Openstep. :) It just feels good and solid. A bit odd with the paneling, but nothing TOO out there. :)
Lightly buffing the screen with a magic eraser can remove surface scuffs. Also, I wonder if a line doubler would help or even know what to do with the signal. Something like a Retro Tink or Open Source Scan Converter. They're both part of the retro video game scene so people can use old consoles on new tv's. Might be worth looking in to.
Or perhaps if Pi Zero's become available again using the RGBtoHDMI could help?
Magic Erasers are abrasive. Bump the plastic and it'll look sanded.
I never really thought of it but Michael Scott in The Office really did EXACTLY what Steve Jobs did.
Oh, how the turntables have...
4:10 lol me every time I sit there hitting my head against a kernel panic bug
Hahaha
The multiple languages thing in the welcome screen lasted well into the OSX era, I have not installed a current-gen machine, but even the setup has parts that live until today.
i always wanted a nextstep computer when i was a kid back in the early 90s i really love these machines even though i never used one lol
You can use a Mac for that
At the Navy lab I worked in at the time, they bought a Next computer. It screamed NOT BEIGE! As I said they bought one. That says it all. No one wanted another one. Some decent work done on it, but a Mac II CI was a better buy
Also, no. The Cube was 1988, not 1998. :p
I would say NextStep is definitely more BSD Unix, than MacOS, mainly due to it using the Mach kernel. Though there are equally convincing arguements to say it isn't a Unix
The monitor power switch should be easy and cheap to replace, get one from a reputable electronic components supplier, ie not some Chinese guy on Ebay. That is, assuming Steve didn't have the original switch hand-made in Venice by special artisans, or illiterate Nepalese monks who don't know what electricity is.
A bit of superglue should hold any cracks. Assuming Steve used ordinary human plastic etc etc.
I realize there's less than three years for Windows 10. Boy, that's going to hit like a truck. I'm going to upgrade my Dad's computer in June and my Brother's in January 2024. My Brother doesn't use his much. Plenty of time to switch.
I'll have to show my Dad how to get use to the new right click menu. Or I'll get one of the third party apps to get the start menus and windows 7/10 features back.
I remember 10 being a little slow and slightly buggy upon release. It got better as time went on. It got a little slower on a hard drive. I used it with an optane module. I did eventually purchase my first SSD. Since 2019, all my PCs, even my Windows 98 rig, have an SSD.
The fresh sounds of ware and tare from a long time of love and effort plus a privacy power button on the monitor, now we are all ready to take our neXt steps toward a more brighter and more positive future. I have a 21 inch CRT hunk of glass and plastic at home and its a special feeling when you want to move the CRT screen but the 75 Hz refresh rate makes me forget about the weight quick.
another computer to add to the PS2/Atari Falcon/PC microbox style cases I see
Regarding the black border around the screen. That’s the way it was. Macs were like that too. The full resolution/dimensions of the OS was always a little smaller than the display, so you always had that black border. We would adjust the monitor picture controls to stretch it out.
I run OpenStep in VMFusion. It’s an odd little OS. Has the chess app, as well as the screen grab app still in macOS.
I almost won a used nextcube from a user group liquidation… many many years ago. They had a lottery to buy it ;(
Of course I should've expected that, but the first screen of NeXTStep OS setup is basically exactly the same as in current macOS - language choose, with "Welcome" in different languages...
They just went from there 🙂
A Steve Jobs story that I heard is that when he came back to Apple he refused to use the Mac the company provided him, opting for a NeXT. He only allowed an Apple back into his office once they got NeXTStep running on it.
I'm so into RGB, I have it in my car, but even I thought I might throw up at someone putting RGB in a NeXT machine
!
That's a really cool computer. Very clean interior design, especially for the 90s.
irony of this computer being so easy for the end user to open and service, what with the direction apple went, being next to impossible to take apart and fix without taking it to a apple store, great video
The Noctua fans don't have enough flow for the NeXTStation. Be sure your new fan is still moving enough air!
you scrolled right past the release date on wikipedia! it was even in the search results
I have fond memories of pizzaboxes and cubes in college, although I don't recall any color turbos. I think Steve felt bad about dropping out from my Alma Mater and granted them a bit of NeXT kit out of guilt. They weren't unix enough for the unix heads (who used tektronix X-terminals or decstations) and not approachable enough for normal folk (who used powermacs) so it was easy to get time on them in the computer lab, and I spent a couple years with a cube as my primary workstation. We didn't have OmniWeb so I would fire up the X server and use Mosaic from one of the decstations when I needed it -- even in B&W it was usable in the mid-90s.
A co-worker of mine in the late 90s used a turbo cube with the display PDF accelerator as a workstation at home, and it was quite usable until javascript and flash started taking over the web.
Around the same time, a classic 25MHz cube followed me home when they were being junked, but I never had desk space for it, and NS3.3 was not super usable in the early 00s web land, so I ended up giving it away to a local restorer. After replacing some failed DRAM, (makes me hurt for those plastic sockets,) he was able to get it booting once again.
I miss the NeXT keyboard, mouse, sharp (2BPP) grayscale display, and the usability of NeXTstep itself. The "shelf" was a very handy visualization of cut & paste, and I half expected it to show up in OSX. My only major complaint with the NS UI was lack of true focus-follows-mouse, since the right mouse button (yes, NeXT had a two-button mouse,) brought up a context-sensitive menu so switching between windows of different apps required a mouse click. I thought it was worth the tradeoff at the time, and used windowmaker on the non-NeXT systems to keep a little of the flavor.
I feel like the NeXT platform itself suffered from under-development and was capable of a lot but was stunted by SW development focus on other platforms. The UI usability blew contemporary unixes out of the water, and MacOS at the time was ridiculously crash-prone. In retrospect I think audio tools like sound designer (later pro tools) would've been a great match to NeXTstep and NeXT hardware, making full use of multitasking and the 56k DSP. But Steve went back to Apple, 68k lost to PPC, and while vestigial bits of NeXTstep ended up in OSX, it was more focused on providing a clear pathway back to MacOS rather than unix and NeXTstep.
I don't know if NeXTstep source code will ever see the light of day, but a port to a coldfire or FPGA-synthesized 68k running at > 100MHz to 1GHz range seems in the range of technical possibility, while retaining binary compatibility. NeXTstep was also ported to multiple other architectures, and I know use of the multi-arch "fat binary" format (MACH-O?) was also used on OSX during the PPC to Intel transition, so a native x64 port of NeXTstep also seems an available path...
Would definitely like to see an FPGA setup happen
Fun to imagine what it was like to use one of these back in the day. Great vid!
Love the look of this machine, especially on the inside. Very tidy
I wish I had room for more computers. The quirk factor is so much more diverse than consoles
First thing that stands out to me is the black mouse cursor. Almost makes it look like MacOS.
Fun fact: the internet networking technology was pioneered on a NeXT…
Yes, at 2:36 he mentions that Tim Berners Lee ran the first web server on one.
Back in college, the campus computer lab I frequented had a few dozen PS/2s, a few dozen Mac's, and over in the far corner, half a dozen NeXT workstations. They had waiting lists where you signed up for an hour of time, up to twice a day, on the machine of your choice. I very quickly learned to use the NeXT since there was NEVER a wait and they never kicked you off - people were simply spooked by these odd black boxes and stayed far, far away from them.
Nice to see you get this one in working order again. It's always been one of my wish list machines as well.
You should do a collab with NCommander 95. He builds all sorts of software from source for old Unix machines. I wonder what kind of trouble you guys could get into together...
why take out a working hard drive that to me... sounds like a normal high hour drive? like if it aint broken dont fix it. and if its got bad sectors partition them out and get years more use out of it!
NeXTSTEP is quite an interesting OS. Later versions were available for x86 workstations, so a late 90s PC can run it no problem.
I managed to get it running on my PC by connecting an IDE hard drive to a modern PC with USB, installing OPENSTEP with a virtual machine and putting the drive into the PC. Installing it without a VM might be even more complicated than the Windows NT 4.0 installation process. Since SD card options are much more available today, the whole process should be way less complicated now.
It was quite useless since NeXT didn't have much software support and the driver support for PCs is terrible. Good luck even getting it to display color if you don't have a well-known mid-90s GPU.
What gpu we talking
@@patrickazz5430 I can't remember anymore, but I think it's an ATI Rage II, or some later model.
Sold them for a few years. Programmers in the financial markets loved them but the Motorola 68030/40 chip couldn't do CAD. If it could, they would have sold millions of them.
DOOM does not work well on this computer because he wrote not on it, but on the HP 9000 712. NextSTEP was released, including for this computer, and it is they that can be found in the photographs of ID Software of that time. In particular, there is a rather famous photo where American McGee sits at HP 9000 712.
1:57 I'm looking at Google and it says
"What computer was made in 1988?"
"NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of US$6,500 (equivalent to $16,100 in 2022), aimed at the higher-education market."
NeXT's first computer was released not in '98 but '88 (and i see multiple sources saying this too)
At first I was surprised about a Steve Jobs computer being so easily opened up, but then I thought it through some more and realized that it makes total sense for NeXT's professional-oriented primary demographic, being so opposite from Apple's intended demo (especially in the "Jobs' Revenge" era).
The battery on that is easy to find a replacement for, it appears to be the same chemistry as a coincell just in a 2/3A cylinder configuration, a readily available CR123A camera/flashlight battery should fit.
You know it's really an understatement to say that $4999 in the 90s is ~$10k nowadays. That's because this kind of money is by definition discretionary spending which means that if not spent, it is probably invested in some asset(most likely stocks) and the equivalent in today's values is enormous.
MAN YOU GOT A NeXT !!! stoked4U
1:27 "finest Unix machine 1990s had to offer" - ahemm ... what about SGI?
I have a 68040 that came from a friend's NeXT station. I used it to upgrade my Mac LC630 to a Quadra 630. The LC630 came from factory with a 68LC040 that lacked the FPU. I still have this Mac but it doesn't boot up anymore, the CMOS battery is dead.
Just standing here in the comment section waiting for you to throw an iPod at me, if not a NeXT computer 🙋🏻♂️❗️👏🏽
This computer reminded me quite a bit of Apple’s Quadra 610/PowerMac 6100 and its slim desktop CPU - with the difference that in case of de Macs there were two latches instead of a single screw…
LOL at that LCD, a similar model (white) did a great stand in for a CRT when said CRT died attached to a very key computer for a ship that I was an engineer on. The computer it was attached to was a 486 that served as the ship's engineering plant monitoring and alarm system - having a working monitor was key as dos based Telemechaniwur Monitor77 ran a very weird resolution.
As you said - the plastic may be brittle
Perhaps be a bit more gentle with the keyboard 🙂
Thanks for the info though.
PS - I have a Cube and 2 x Slabs
A powerful hardware for 1990, but the UI is ugly and inefficient, like it is common with unix-like systems.