[XCSSA] NextStep

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

I have a B&W turbo NeXT pizza-box "slab" with a fairly bright NeXT 
monitor  (some of them have gone hopelessly dim because of poor CRT 
elements) mouse and keyboard.  All black.  It's a 68040.  The original 
cube was much slower, 68030 IIRC, and required floorspace.  (There might 
have been a later 68040 cube upgrade.)  Also, the bitmapped (relatively 
unaccelerated) color display version, very pretty though it is, can also 
slow things down a lot, even with a slight bump in clockspeed they gave 
it.  (33Mhz vs 25, or something like that.)  Most NeXT's were probably 
B&W.  The hardware is some of the coolest looking computer hardware ever 
made, and the coolness is more than skin deep.  There's the incredible 
multi-voltage heat-sinked power supply, and CPU/DSP/Audio/Video/SCSI 
work-of-art mobo.  No generic beige box with third party cards here!

I can see, however, why this wasn't a big market success.  Even this 
turbo model is very slow.  Also, I don't think the GUI is particularly 
intuitive, and a lot of icon mind-space is devoted to fairly useless 
things, while the actual important things you might want to do are quite 
cryptic.  As with any OS, what ultimately counts is the applications. 
 Since it wasn't a big market success, there weren't a lot of 
applications, and they tended to be quite expensive, and the machine 
itself (and accessories) were astronomically expensive by today's standards.

There is a terminal app with the original BSD Unix utilities, but the 
mapping to GUI stuff is not immediately intuitive from the shell level. 
 I'm not very patient with this kind of thing, and I found it extremely 
frustrating on a "casual user" basis.  Perhaps if I was forced to spend 
a month with it, I'd have it down, and be bragging about how much better 
it was than anything until OS X, which evolved from it.  Probably from 
the programming level, if you had time to figure it all out, to 
understand all the Objective C classes and such, it's more intuitive 
than OS X, because it's no doubt considerably simpler, a living 
prototype built out of all the coolest hardware/software available, 
uncomplicated by mass market and compatibility considerations.

I installed the final version of NeXT OS (3.x?) from factory sealed NeXT 
CDROMs.  I think it has the Objective C compilers and classes and 
everything; the "developer" edition.  I think the manuals are on disk, 
since the flimsy setup paper manual is thin and nearly useless.  Also 
you can find the all important SysAdmin manual online.  I think I have 
an electronic copy of that somewhere, at least the all-important 
installation and networking chapters.   Without that, you'll never get 
anywhere, because remember that it's all unique and pre-historic.   I 
put it all on a newer bigger than factory SCSI harddrive.  Also I got a 
CDROM of applications from someone.  They're a mixed box of chocolates, 
but probably nothing you'd actually want to devote yourself to.  I think 
some include Objective C code.  Some may have been archived by some 
archiver I never figured out.

You can have all the NeXT stuff I've got for $100, pick-up only. 
 210-662-0572.  As various eBay sellers like to brag, it's collectible! 
 I spent double that for the slab itself on ebay, then there was finding 
a working NeXT B&W monitor (I found that in Austin), and the latest 
factory sealed developer OS (ebay) .

What I'd like to have for my museum of most collectible computer 
antiques would be an original Xerox Smalltalk system, of the kind that 
inspired Steve Jobs to build the Mac.  Though, I understand that was 
very slow also, which, in combination with the $40,000 price tag, killed 
it.  But I've always thought the ability to reprogram nearly every 
element of the OS and GUI itself through Smalltalk in real time would be 
the height in coolness.  You can read all about it in the cool Smalltalk 
books.  There've been many ripoffs and clones, but it's been said none 
were as good as the original.

Charles