The NeXTSTEP Build 

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The Mac Librarian rules, she knows her stuff👍

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

Ahh yes. The reverse Hackintosh.

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

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!

Hello from Brazil my dear WindowMaker 🇧🇷

NextSTEP was the best ever desktop from any time.

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.

Oh man, this video gave me PTSD RE: SCSI devices, getting SCSI IDs right, termination,... LOL

Don’t forget about Window Maker…

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

Thank you for introducing me to Macintosh librarian! Always love finding more retro computing content

Aaaah, good old Unix boxes ❤

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.

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]

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.

That next sticker should have been applied to the case at a 45° angle.

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.

I follow you both and seeing such collaborations makes me smile big :)

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.

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.

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!

OMG those internal hard drives on the cubes give me nightmares of being the sysadmin for an IBM tower server running AIX.

@MacintoshLibrarian is one of my favorite youtubers. I love this collab!

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.

Who else regrets getting "SCSI 4ever" tattoos?

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.

Love your videos!

Interestingly, NeXTSTEP 3.3 works perfectly with BlueSCSI, both v1.1 and v2, on a SPARCstation 10.

That NeXt tshirt in an apple at around 0:28 is so great! I was disappointed to not see it in your shop.

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'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 loved NextStep Computers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh! I have wanted a NeXT since the 90s. So envious…

Ahh, Rhapsody... I mean NeXTSTEP! NeXTSTEP!!!

"I don't have one, but I know someone who does...." I thought she was Emily Hopkins for a split second

It's more likely than you think!

Deja vu, the dual Pentium 200 MMX I've been playing with OPENSTEP on is in the same chassis as your 75!

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.

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.

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!

The Retro Computer Museum in Leicester UK has a copy of Intel NeXTstep.

I can’t stop looking at the goofy little SE/30.

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.

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 RU-vid 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.

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!

Nice!

I Guess its Time for a Dual-Boot Apple Rhapsody Test....

I always thought nextstep was a music genre

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.

What’s the name of Mac Librarian’s pet computer? My wife is loving it

Still have an Adaptec 2940 card from my 2000s era PowerComputing clone-Mac

Nice colab.

You can still use the BSD UNIX system on it :)

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. 😆

I swear I saw that NEXT logo way back in the day. Maybe my dad's old PC collection had something like that

10:24 - Emacs (6.4 MB) What alien technology did they use to make it so small? 👀

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 wonder if you could run AmigaOS 4.1 on the Next hardware?? that might be something fun to try!

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.

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 :)

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 !!

Have NeXTStep 3.3 running on a SparcStation 20... install was a lot smoother (less drivers to worry about).

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?😉)

I hope in a future episode you will try next step or open step on an HP PA risc workstation.

NeXT is just awesome. 🙂

It's such an ugly yellowed beige. I love it!

The NeXT sticker not at its intended angle is really messing with my OCD.

So far I remember Next did not had color !! OR does it had ?

As much as BlueSCSI is obviously a wonderful piece of kit, you could pretty much put together a drinking game for this channel as to what the root cause for the inevitable hang / crash at the 75% mark is caused by at this point...

And we complain about the new iPad Pro with M4 and iPadOS. We should be thanking our lucky stars how far we are. You order new iPad Pro, pick it up, sign in with your iCloud, files, images, sync, browsing the web, streaming video in a pip, share play with family friends, taking notes, lay down on your sofa or bed while doing it. Its moments like this you have appreciate Apple for pushing the boundaries.

With all due respect, the sticker should be angled at 28 degrees. Just like the dock icon.

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.

Display postscript, and all the type of Adobe Type Manager, but in. Printer was 400DPI. Thanks to Macintosh Librarian.

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.

what motherboard is that and would it work with a k6?

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

I just really like the GUI of NeXT for some reason. Could never get wmaker to play nice with everything I need though

Hard to pay attention to a Next cube when there's an Octane in the background :)

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?

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.

but does the mac librarian have matching die cast magnesium cube earrings?

Young Steve Jobs has a remarkable resemblance to Tom Cruise.

But now the real question is: Can one of those old NeXT work stations run Haiku? :p