The NeXTSTEP Build

Get 20% off DeleteMe US consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/actionretro and use promo code ACTIONRETRO at checkout. DeleteMe International Plans: international.joindeleteme.com/

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.

The Mac Librarian rules, she knows her stuff👍

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.)

And you can now run GNUstep/Windowmaker in modern Linux/BSD machines. I've used the original ones in University. Amazing machines.

I felt a computer cry out in agony.... so I knew it was Sean.

I like how the NeXTSTEP bootloader looks almost identical to the OSX86 bootloader that was used in the early days of Hackintosh.

That NeXT case sticker angle is driving me crazy 🤣 Truly a cursed build

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.

Honestly, I'll watch anything with Sean, Miss Fox and Maccy.

Ahh yes. The reverse Hackintosh.

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!

Yayyyy great work featuring the Mac Librarian!!! :) She's awesome!

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!

Don’t forget about Window Maker…

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.

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.

Smh that nextStation looks like Playstation2

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.

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.