The NeXTSTEP Build
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- čas přidán 10. 05. 2024
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Today we're exploring the world of "white hardware" NeXTSTEP machines by building one!
Special thanks to guest star @MacintoshLibrarian and Maccy!
LINKS:
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NeXTSTEP 3.3 on Internet Archive: archive.org/details/NeXTSTEP3...
🍎 NeXTSTEP Install Resources: shawcomputing.net/resources/ne...
(Amazon links are affiliated links)
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com/shop/actionretro
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#Apple #Rhapsody #ThinkPad - Věda a technologie
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The Mac Librarian rules, she knows her stuff👍
He*
The only time I ever met Steve Jobs was early in my career when I was at Apple in 1989 and was attending Educom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Steve Jobs was there promoting NeXT which was a pretty new company at the time. It's amazing that modern Apple's success completed depended on a series of decisions leading to Steve Jobs' ouster, him founding NeXT, deciding to pivot toward a processor agnostic version, getting acquired by a desperate Apple in 1996 which allowed Apple to develop OS X on PowerPC since NeXTStep was easily portable. The software legacy lives in not only in MacOS but every iPhone, iPad and everything else Apple makes.
1:13 Actually not just black, but “NeXT black”, a color still in Sherwin Williams’ systems that you can still get them to mix for you. (“KEM AQUA 600T & 600S, F73WXB7530-4386, NeXT BLACK” is apparently what to order.)
Ok now I am curious-I want to go get this made. Wonder if it can be sprayed onto an old PC case? More curious: how did you know this information?
What the fuck Sherwin Williams.
@@JapanPop It’s something I read somewhere ages ago, but has been corroborated multiple times over the years, including people actually ordering the paint to restore their NeXT systems with! (Google the order numbers above, you’ll find examples.).
I imagine it can be sprayed on a PC case, but might require a primer for good adhesion. I’m sure Sherwin Williams could advise on what to use.
Useful info for future reference! How rich does the color stay if it gets watered down for, say, airbrush or spray paint usage? Replying to this to get notifications just in case. ;)
@@tookitogo excellent! Thank you!
That NeXT case sticker angle is driving me crazy 🤣 Truly a cursed build
10000% triggering!
I felt a computer cry out in agony.... so I knew it was Sean.
And you can now run GNUstep/Windowmaker in modern Linux/BSD machines. I've used the original ones in University. Amazing machines.
Whenever I have a spare PC I can use as a mod platform, I use windowmaker on it for shiggles.
It does irk me though, because some of the applets no longer work. And the amount of work required to get weather applets to work is atrocious.
@@zadtheinhaleryou can technically use anything as a dockapp afaik
I like how the NeXTSTEP bootloader looks almost identical to the OSX86 bootloader that was used in the early days of Hackintosh.
I think that's because both NeXT and the early Hackintosh bootloaders used a fairly stock version of the open source UNIX/BSD bootloader; I might be wrong though.
@@anno0001 Early in the Mac OS X days, Apple would publish the base CLI-only system they called Darwin as open source, which could also run on standard PCs. Early Hackintosh distros used that bootloader!
Yayyyy great work featuring the Mac Librarian!!! :)
She's awesome!
Ahh yes. The reverse Hackintosh.
Please also make a video on the Window Maker Window Manager which would be a great follow up video to this one.
Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment, although it can run stand alone. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface.
Oddly, the GNUStep site says WindowMaker doesn't use GNUStep itself
Honestly, I'll watch anything with Sean, Miss Fox and Maccy.
I do not understand how this channel is not 250k+ subs yet. While other channels do the same unboxing videos or regurgitated tech news, this channel consistently pumps out original videos filled with amazing shenanigans. Keep it up!
You should put a NeXTSTEP environment side by side with a Linux install that has WindowMaker installed. If you enjoy NeXTSTEP's feel, you'll love WindowMaker.
The catch with white-box NeXTs really comes down to storage. You can use SCSI or IDE, but solid-state storage for SCSI seems limited to narrow SCSI-2 right now. IDE is a lot more flexible, but there's only one IDE controller under NeXTSTEP that supports any of the Ultra ATA modes - the Intel PIIX controller, and it only goes up to ATA-33. So, ATA-33 is as good as it gets without writing a custom driver. That limits what hardware you can usefully use.
So, the "ultimate" white-box NS machine, that I built long ago but alas no longer have, was configured as such:
Intel 440BX motherboard
1GHz Tualatin Pentium III CPU
768MB PC133 SDRAM
ESS Audiodrive ES1869 ISA audio card
Matrox G400 Max 32MB AGP graphics card
Adaptec AHA 2940 SCSI card
Plextor 32x SCSI CD-ROM
Yamaha 8x8x24 SCSI CD-RW
SanDisk 8GB Ultra-ATA CF card x2
Intel EEPro/100 PCI ethernet card
Standard floppy disk drive
PS/2 keyboard and mouse
NEC LCD2070VX 1600x1200 LCD monitor
and OPENSTEP 4.2!
Well I have a new goal now lol
The G400 is actually a little fiddly - you'd be better off with an S3 Trio64/V2 or an ATI Rage Pro.
Adaptec 2940U2W works in Openstep, I think it was the 78XX SCSI driver? I had to add my card's PCI ID to the config table but it works great. AFAIK this is the fastest storage you can get in Openstep (80 MB/s Ultra 2 Wide); the 29160 does not work with that driver.
Oh, that's pretty cool. Are there useful SCSI SSDs that can actually make use of those transfer rates? The low maximum speeds of BlueSCSI and SCSI2SD are what made me favor ATA33 CF cards instead.
@@logansorenssen I'm not aware of any; I last used a 10k RPM SCSI hard drive with it. A SCSI to SATA bridge + SATA SSD might be interesting...
When this was happening, my client got me a Sparcstation 1 and helped me arrange an Intel box. Due to the hardware requirements, the Intel box had to go through a custom builder - there were a lot of pretty specific bits at first. When it arrived, it was an INCREDIBLE let-down. The Sparcstation was like lego blocks built by NASA, everything chunked together firmly, and you could run the thing over with a truck. The Intel box was a i486, and it was a rat's nest of random junk, you still had a mouse card, for heaven's sake. EISA bus, sigh. My next NS/Intel box was a Pentium 133, which was a TREMENDOUS improvement, with lots of onboard facilities, and you had PCI bus for Ethernet and SCSI (don't recall when IDE got reasonable to use for booting). The P133 was quite adequate for client use, but a bit pokey for development, but it showed an interesting future. The Pentium Pro was when things really landed, IMHO.
I cannot emphasize enough how terrible building a workstation on a 486 was. It was like trying to build a space shuttle out of spider carcasses and spit.
2:48: Minor correction - "One of the strangest things about NeXT slabs is that they need to connect to a monitor and mouse through a separate device called a sound box."
This only applies to the color slabs. The grayscale-video slabs connect directly to the original grayscale MegaPixel display with one cable, and run sound, keyboard, and mouse through the monitor. You only need the sound box when using a color slab or you want to use a non-MegaPixel display.
Sean, That motherboard might just be the most awesome Socket5/7 motherboard ever created. It’s an Intel Advanced/EV (Endeavor).
This board actually has onboard video, Creative SoundBlaster sound (with GoldFinch support to get AWE32-esk compatibility, PS/2 mouse support, COAST cache and/or onboard cache, and loads more, which are all optional on this board. I’m still looking to find a Socket 7 version with all of the features installed. I’ve never even seen it yet. However, this board has sound AND video AND a COAST module slot, which is a heck of a lot more than I’ve ever seen. I’m uncertain if it has Socket 7 or Socket 5 though. This board is so great, even OEM’s used them in their builds (Dell for instance).
Best of all: the hardware is immensely compatible with DOS and Windows versions of the time.
I am sooooo jealous right now! When I started college our comp sci lab had a bunch of NeXTs in them. Have wanted one ever since.
Smh that nextStation looks like Playstation2
It does actually.
Legitimately.
uh, you got that very backwards.
Yep next station came first
idek, what nextStation is but yea.
Hello from Brazil my dear WindowMaker 🇧🇷
I follow you both and seeing such collaborations makes me smile big :)
Thank you for introducing me to Macintosh librarian! Always love finding more retro computing content
Sean: "I installed NEXT!"
Sean's girl: "what's NEXT?"
Sean: "oh, i dont know. ill probably just mess around with it for a bit."
Sean's girl: "Mess around with what?"
Sean: "NEXT!"
Sean's girl: "what's NEXT?"
[infinite loop]
Oh man, this video gave me PTSD RE: SCSI devices, getting SCSI IDs right, termination,... LOL
It is actually possible to install at least OpenSTEP with IDE driver. Not sure about this version of nextstep, though.
I managed to install OpenSTEP on my Windows 98 PC some years back. It did in fact work off a PATA hard drive. Everything worked except graphics, my ATI 3D Rage Pro did not work because they only supported the PCI version. So I was stuck with the generic driver which didn't let me change the frequency of the display.
Installation was quite simple, all I did was install it in a virtual machine, get the drivers going and wrote the virtual disk image to a hard drive.
@@masterkamen371 I managed to install OPENSTEP 4.2 on a PIII wirh EIDE drives and an AGP video card. The trick is to use the generic SVGA video driver which I used to get color and 1080 x ? . Unfortunately there is a point of no return on the video resolutions, so it's try this one, no? rinse and repeat, try another. Apparently it depends on the capability of your graphics card to mesh with the generic driver. It now seems very useable and I was able to install some of the freebies from Shaw computing. If only I could suss out the networking problem!?!
Don’t forget about Window Maker…
..my first Windowmanager under Debian Linux in late 1998.. many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
I still run WindowMaker on some modern linux boxes.
6:15 Aside: "AHA" likley means "Adaptec Host Adapter." SCSI "controller cards" were originally termed "host adapters," presumably because they put a host (computer) on a SCSI bus.
"Originally" termed host adapters? With the more modern SAS (serial attached SCSI) interface we always use the term HBA (host bus adapter). We don't call them controller cards (presumably) because that name doesn't indicate whether or not if it has hardware RAID.
Love your videos!
NeXT machines are... So frigging goofy I love em
I just set up your Openstep 2 gb image in PCem this morning, a few hours before this was posted. Talk about having a good sense of what your subscribers are interested in!
NextSTEP was the best ever desktop from any time.
Aaaah, good old Unix boxes ❤
I built an Intel 486 DX2/66 beast to run NeXTStep in 1995. Had so much trouble with getting the right setup, eventually got it to work. This was of course back when you often had to set interrupts and I/O memory addresses for each card via switches or jumpers. Not every collection of hardware was willing to fly in formation. During that time I also got Windows NT working; it installed out of the box.
Loved NeXT but whoosh, by the time it was feasible, it was over. I'm profoundly grateful that it continued to evolve. I now have a fantastic MacBook Air M1, and a hulking Windows 11 tower. And a Linux server. Wild.
13:30 This was the same you could say of Linux at the time... you had specific video cards for X11, specific Adaptec host adapters... makes sense for the time that NextSTEP [drivers] would also target a [small] subset of x86 hardware.
Neat adventure! Thanks for showing it off... the rest of us were using Linux 0.99 instead about this time! :)
That megneto-optical drive takes me back to my intern days. They were used in the electron scanning microscopes to save off data and images but were very finicky, as I recall. One of the internal groups figured out how to get the microscope's computer on the network and had it copying the files to a server. So many good memories.
My Japanese homestay had Fujitsu MO drives on an NEC PC-98 system in 1994. I thought I had seen the future. We had a pinnacle MO drive in the labs at university in 1995. Cool tech.
I bought a copy of the NextSTEP for Intel system back in the day, only to discover with I did not know, that it required a bootable SCSI CDROM drive to install. I didn't have the money for this, so it just sat on the shelf. 😞 I did enjoy reading the books though.
OMG those internal hard drives on the cubes give me nightmares of being the sysadmin for an IBM tower server running AIX.
Interestingly, NeXTSTEP 3.3 works perfectly with BlueSCSI, both v1.1 and v2, on a SPARCstation 10.
That next sticker should have been applied to the case at a 45° angle.
Sean, may I suggest for a future video an update on how the most legendary computers featured in your channel are doing? The cursed Mac, the dual 2ghz G4s mirror drive, the cube, etc. Hope you like the idea.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Window Maker X11 window manager. If you simply want to try out the NeXTSTEP UI on the latest Linux distributions, that's the way to go. I applaud your effort and patience with such antiquated hardware though.
I use window maker on my computer all day, every day, and it's absolutely nothing like real nextstep. It's inspired by the aesthetic but works completely different in every way.
There's a much closer attempt for fedora called nextspace, but the development stalled due to the war in ukraine.
Openbox also can use dockapps, but not as well
Oh! I have wanted a NeXT since the 90s. So envious…
That NeXt tshirt in an apple at around 0:28 is so great! I was disappointed to not see it in your shop.
Who else regrets getting "SCSI 4ever" tattoos?
Just tattoo an "i" in front of it. "iSCSI 4ever" 😄
Don't forget to ask your tattoo artist to ink a terminator next to it!
How about the guy who got the Windows Logo tattooed on his shoulder?
For better or worse, Windows is still around.
@@logansorenssen so's SCSI - it's embedded in the USB mass-storage spec.
I used to build these beige ad hoc monsters for AT&T Wireless' development division. I still have original CDs somewhere. Wouldn't mind building a new one at some point.
I really loved NeXTSTEP/OpenStep back in the day. The fastest machine I ran it on was an 233Mhz K6 back in 1997/8, with 64Mb RAM and a Matrox Millennium II graphics card. Perhaps surprisingly, it was easier to get running on the system than the Linux distributions I was playing with. OpenStep 4.2 at 1600x1200 on my 21" monitor was rather nice, and in a lot of ways still felt more advanced than OS options like Windows NT or OS/2.
The Intel version of NeXTSTEP wasn't that short of software. I'm sure some early applications were never ported from 68k, but most were multi-architecture. You could definitely run Doom on your Intel NeXTSTEP system.
@MacintoshLibrarian is one of my favorite youtubers. I love this collab!
I loved NextStep Computers.
"I don't have one, but I know someone who does...." I thought she was Emily Hopkins for a split second
Ahh, Rhapsody... I mean NeXTSTEP! NeXTSTEP!!!
1:49
330 MB hard drive. (That is 229 1.44 MB floppy drives in a few years from this.)
That thing is HUGE.
And today, we are able to get a TB storage device on a thumb drive.
Insane. Makes one wonder what will be available in 10, 20, and 50 years.
McIntosh librarian! I remember seeing one of those next systems in your background in a video
I loved this video! I've had fun getting NeXTSTEP running on my Slab and Cube via SCS2SD boards once their original spinning-rust drives died, but I haven't tried with a BlueSCSI yet. My next (pun intended) project for this platform will be getting NeXTSTEP running on my HP PA-RISC workstation, which should give the full NeXT experience, but with even LESS software to run. Fun!
As long as it's got gcc, you should be fine
Nice!
You need to choose your hardware carefully to install and run OPENSTEP for Mach.
I’ve built a vintage PC just for running it. Pentium-III on a 440BX motherboard, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti AGP graphics card using the VESA VBE driver, SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA sound, Intel 100 Mb PCI Ethernet, Adaptec SCSI with an IOmega Jaz drive and CompactFlash to IDE boot disk. It works flawlessly and runs like greased lightning. As a bonus, I can boot into other vintage operating systems such as BeOS and Win2K Pro.
what motherboard is that and would it work with a k6?
Arhhhhh, what you've just done, amounted to many happy Sunday afternoons during the early to mid ninety's - frustratingly installing Window 2 (that came on 8 * 5 1/4 floppies), but version 3 came on very very many more 3 1/2 inch beasties, Windows for Workgroups even more again, happy floppy days indeed.
BTW, we couldn't even get near that next level stuff, so we had to consent ourselves with GEM, and a little known thing called Linux, and that never worked.
This vid takes me back to those halcyon days, well done indeed.
Oh my god she's so cute how have I never seen her! **subscribes**
The Retro Computer Museum in Leicester UK has a copy of Intel NeXTstep.
Deja vu, the dual Pentium 200 MMX I've been playing with OPENSTEP on is in the same chassis as your 75!
First web browser was developed on NeXT. Also had Mathematica.
IMO you shoulda installed a magneto optical drive, but I guess its absence makes more sense. Seemed like back in the day, that was the first thing people got rid of as soon as they could.
That PC chassis. Do you happen to know the name of it? We had those in school, been trying so hard for ages to find one :)
N.E.X.T. was directly serene I didn't have a clue it existed until this year.
N.E.X.T.는 직접적으로 평온했어요. 올해까지 그것이 존재한다는 것을 전혀 몰랐어요.
Next is not an acronym, and wdym by serene in this indtance?
@@stanb1455 Basically I was saying the type design of the computer was good and serene and honestly I don't have clue if Next was a acronym directly ye.
Could a NeXTStep Cube casing be used to house a custom PC/Mac build?
I liked it when you had more humor and funny comedic reliefs scenes. It made the channel personal , separate, and very unique from the other nerd tube distros.
Make more glorious haha in your videos!
Still have an Adaptec 2940 card from my 2000s era PowerComputing clone-Mac
You can run it on a virtual machine quite well. That said - its dated. In its day however it was revolutionary, being full Object Oriented and Extensible. It was the machine that built the World Wide Web prototype at CERN. It was the OS that - when merged into Apple problematic internal effort became OS X and saved the company from near bankruptcy. It originally shipped with Pixar Renderman and was the first "end user" usable Unix Workstation class machine that could do full multimedia (including voice mail and chat) with its built state of the art in DSP. So it may have been a commercial failure for many logistic reasons but it raised the bar and created a course correction/tangent that moved the industry into a better direction. There is a video on CZcams where two developers face off creating an "in-house" app. The speed and fluidity of doing it (due to OOP) was just revolutionary. Features of the end user available App Builder also worked their way into other DEV environments.
hey! I have a question. I installed the latest ubuntu on my 2019 macbook pro and the track pad, wifi, b;uetooth and keyboard are not working. I am using external devices. Please help me out!
I swear I saw that NEXT logo way back in the day. Maybe my dad's old PC collection had something like that
BTW you can install this all on a Dell Pentium 3 laptop with IDE no problemo. I keep several first-generation Inspiron 5000 laptops coz they run everything pretty fast, including OpenStep 4.2 + Rhapsody DR1. They were $30 each last year on eBay haven't kept track since. There is also a dock for those.
It’s interesting that it didn’t like the v1 BlueSCSI on white hardware. I’m pretty sure that’s what I have in my NeXT slab, and it works fine. You should be able to find Doom for Intel NeXTstep. I definitely remember playing on white hardware back in 1993.
Also, Steve Jobs would not like the placement of that NeXT logo decal. Not at the proper 28 degree angle. 😆
bought a non working 486DX2-66 on eBay last year, listed for repair only... turns out it was a NextStep installed system !! it was quite a nice surprise. ALR X Evolution AT PC, there was nothing to repair !!
I thought the NeXT computer sounded cool, but of course I couldn’t afford one as a private individual.
I remember reading that NeXTSTEP for Intel required 120MB of disk space. That would have been almost my entire hard drive at the time, and that was the biggest hard drive I’d had up to then. I think I was running OS/2 at the time.
I hope in a future episode you will try next step or open step on an HP PA risc workstation.
Have NeXTStep 3.3 running on a SparcStation 20... install was a lot smoother (less drivers to worry about).
I got a AHA-2940W in my closet. I also got a P75 mobo. I guess I'd need more than that to run NeXT, tho. Like a SCSI cd or hd. And a AT power supply. lol
Did you try to just change the resolution and colour settings? It might have been you just needing to select from a list. Then again, don't know anything about NeXTSTEP, except that I've used it's decedent since 2001.
So far I remember Next did not had color !! OR does it had ?
What’s the name of Mac Librarian’s pet computer? My wife is loving it
During the pivot to software company phaser of NeXT they also made a runtime OpenStep which allowed running next apps on unix like OS and Windows NT in a similar vein to Java. It would be cool if that was still around making current macOS Cocoa based Apps multi-platform.
*phaser phase
It was called OPENSTEP Enterprise (often abbreviated OSE)
14:19, "All of that effort... for what?" Mightn't one ask that question about any retro computing project? Why did Adrian Black recently repair yet another 128K Mac motherboard? It's not as if there were any practical uses for them or museums scrambling for yet another 128K Mac. Why does Usagi Electric collect and rebuild proprietary minicomputers? Does anybody really want noisy, power-hungry behemoths that only run proprietary software and required a service contract and a small office for the computer company's technician to keep it running back in their heyday? Of course not. When it comes to retro, you do it just to do it. The fun is in the journey, and the thrill is when you see that antiquated tech work again -- although in your case, that is usually in very unconventional ways, which is exactly why people love your channel. So, keep 'em coming, Sean. At least some of the world really does want to see what you'll do next! (NeXT?😉)
Okay, so, how do you mount the images so you can install it in UTM? Windows XP, sure that's easy… this seems hard.
It's more likely than you think!
I just really like the GUI of NeXT for some reason. Could never get wmaker to play nice with everything I need though
I have the original box woth media. Tired to do an install on a 486 about 20 years ago but the x86 floppy said it was corrupted. Tired later on a VM but no success.
Nice colab.
You can still use the BSD UNIX system on it :)
I wonder if you could run AmigaOS 4.1 on the Next hardware?? that might be something fun to try!
That's PPC only, isn't it?
Amiga A1200 tower?
I can’t stop looking at the goofy little SE/30.
10:24 - Emacs (6.4 MB)
What alien technology did they use to make it so small? 👀
Old repository
I have a successful OPENSTEP 4.2 install running on a PIII with color & reasonable resolution, but I have a few questions. The install seems to set up the HD as an 8 gig partition, but if I boot the machine from a Linux live cd it does not see any partition at all!? What gives?
And of course since I am not running the traditional Unix network setup networking seems unreasonably complicated. Are ther any simpler solutions? Any of you gurus have any thoughts or answers?
I Guess its Time for a Dual-Boot Apple Rhapsody Test....
Compared with other contemporary operating systems at the time, NeXTStep was from another galaxy. It would have been cool, if you would have installed the development tools. Some features (e.g. InterfaceBuilder, EOF) are still ahead of what Microsoft delivers today.
NeXT is just awesome. 🙂
Dows that machine have the FDIV bug?
someone should make a NEXT Cube Mini, just like that x68000 Mini that came out
A working OS is always a plus, plus to me, even if is limited, cos with knowledge one can build upon it for a hobby and for fun. Cool hardware build, tho, thanks! 😺🥰🖥️⌨️⭐️💎
Was it based off of linux or unix?
Nextstep desktop enviroment on linux is interesting
Yes, it can!