Really great to see this. I work in IT and I can't imagine working with devices this old, but I also appreciate the preservation of history. Thank you so much.
I remember 1998 installed next computers at William Morris in Beverly Hills. I remember running. Rg57 cable which was either net cable at the time. The next system was ahead of its time. Well, great show. Downey California ❤❤❤❤
I think you're getting blessed by the algorithm; RU-vid recommended me your content, and I have to say these videos are just awesome. Here's hoping you get more subscribers!
Awesome video. So glad I found your channel! I had a NeXT Turbo Slab that I bought from a local college when they got rid of them. Its hostname was 'trout' and I paid $35 in ~2000. I no longer own trout, I gave it to a friend and don't know where it is today.
I did what I said below this morning, pulled out the cube and slab, figured out how to connect the cube and crank it up. To my amazement it came up after the slowest boot I have seen in a long time. I think the last time I booted the NeXT was about 1992. It is all good so far except it now asking for a Name and PW. This may be fun. I did email my son with a screenshot attached, btw who has a Masters in Computer Science and asked him " the last time the NeXT was booted was before you were born, can you help"
Wow real cool seeing all this stuff, I was around during the 486 processor days and one of my first jobs was to help speed test the first ever Pentium chips that were about to come onto the market. Hope you made a speedy recovery :)
Love for your videos. Reminds by of old 1990s documentaries I watched in elementry and middle school. I'm not sure if ti was intentional or not in your videos, but your glasses hang a little lower down on your nose obstructing your eyes with the camera shot. Also there's a small, but ever-present screen glare reflecting off your glasses.
I remember when the Amiga magazines used to talk trash about NeXT. Which was kind of funny since it cost like 10X more than the Amiga--not exactly the same market segment.
My brother did that upgrade for a mix of about 50 or so SE/30, Classic, and Color Classics. The computers were originally used as part of an interactive art installation in San Francisco, and several people got together and bought the lot to refurbish. [edit] Along with about 5 million recaps.
@@MacintoshLibrarian Oh, no. The installation was taken down ... I think back in 2012 or so. They sat in storage for a good while until they were bought by the group I mentioned. Actually, my brother only intended to help pick them up (he wasn't part of the group that purchased them), but ended up taking them all home since the buyers didn't want to pay for storage or shipping and the only one among them with soldering experience lived in Texas. :/ So, he ended up doing all of them himself. :P They were nice enough to give him a cut of the sales, but still... it was a ton of work he wasn't expecting to take on in the first place. [edit] There might be a picture or two of the computers before we hauled them out. I don't recall if someone snapped photos.
Could you run an Sd extension cable from the Blue SCSI to a suitable hole/gap/port in the NeXTs so you don’t have to crack the case open when you need to swap them out?
@@MacintoshLibrarian It was great. We had about 18 greyscale NeXTstation slab units and two color units. They were bridged (Ethernet-to-AppleTalk) with the other half of the room of about 30 Macs (mostly IIsi and a few SE/30s). Mathematica was a big part of it. At one point we ran out of Macs for an MS Word (5.1!!) class and we were able to run Word on the NeXT machines from the hard drives of the Macs across the room. Good times.
First time viewer. You look like a real-life Velma, dude. That's pretty cool. Oldest mac I've ever owned is the 2006 Mac Pro and used it from 2015 to 2017 as my main PC, then gave it away to a Mac collector friend.
I've always primarily been a Windows user, but I've equally always been interested in the history of all computer technology so this was really fun to watch! You're a great host and I learned some really cool new things. Also the quality of the videos themselves is great & you present the information in a really clear manner which helps a lot! Can't wait to watch more!
Two NeXT videos in my feed in one week! Awesome! As I commented on Action Retro’s video, I started my IT career on NeXT computers. I’d love to have one in my collection again someday.
The NeXT computers were so advanced for the time with an amazing GUI running on UNIX. HP-UX and Solaris didn’t come close. I was fortunate to be able to take math in college using a curriculum designed specifically around running Mathematica on a lab full of NeXTs.
I remember the magazine review of the first NeXT Cube. It first complained about the shockingly high price for a BLACK and WHITE computer. "Why does Steve Jobs always want us to buy a Black and White computer? Does he watch black and white TV at home?"
Great video as always and thanks for the shoutout! Glad my old SCSI setup shenanigans turned out to be useful for both you and Action Retro - I'm glad I put it out there now 😁
I just resurrected the monochrome monitor for my dad's next slab which he used to use as his work computer a long time ago! Sadly the drive is not really working so the scsi conversion you showed is a must and you do a great job showing how to do this! If you have not recapped your monitor I recommend doing so at some point since our monitor was completely dead, my dad thought the picture tube was gone but after experiencing the same symptoms before with other CRT monitors started pulling caps and almost all of them had extremely high ESR values... After changing them all the monitor came right on and the picture was perfect! xD
As a kid I remember reading about the NeXT computers and thinking they were really interesting, but never having the chance to see what they were like to use. Thank you for bringing this amazing old hardware back to life!
I was in college when they first came out. They were trying to sell them through the school for 4-10k depending on the model. For reference, the in state tuition I was paying was about 2k/year. They were cool but I didn’t know anyone that could afford one.
??? I really like your computer to the left of the screen that I'm watching with the happy face :) on the macintosh. How did you do that just curious to know?! 💻 ???
@@MacintoshLibrarian ??? I would really like to have one myself. I want one is my friend. Do you know how I can get one or make one please He is so cute?! 🙏 ???
@@sithlordbilly4206 Use a drawing and animation program to create a set of pictures with different facial expressions and mouth movements, then combine them in to an animation.
I just randomly got your channel recommended and I am blown away by the production quality and all this amazing retro tech! May I ask what got you interested in this specific topic/field?
I cannot post it to the internet archive, it has too much personal data. I am actually reaching out to the previous owner to see if she wants her old files. Maybe i can just copy the applications over to a new image though :)
Ms. Fox made me a believer in the Blue SCSI in a previous video, I love that I can take a copy of the drive and work on it in an emulator and make a backup copy or change the SCSI ID, so easy! Maccy is such a dear sitting quietly and watching time around. Love the channel.
Funny you mentioned getting memes via fax, in the mid 90s we signed up with the local paper to get a weekly fax of a recipe cards that were featured in Sunday food section.
Nice! Glad you're bringing this to your channel. When I was in college, we went to BusinessLand to check 'em out... but Apollo, Solbourne, etc. were better deals. The department ended up going with the "safer" A/UX option on a Mac IIfx!
Side bit of history. The NeXT Cube was the sexiest computer around in its day. Everybody wanted one. In 1989, a gentleman named Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to create what many people still mistakenly believe is the Internet. He created the World Wide Web. The Internet itself existed long before the web. The web was just a new client-server protocol developed by Berners-Lee. "...Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990. Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”.By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating his ideas. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" Much computer history is connected directly or indirectly to Steve Jobs. Full story here: home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
We used NeXT machines for programming and Mathematica my freshman year in college! 1992. Mathematica would hang up if you divided by 0. Literally didn't have a special case written into it to tell you not to do that. But you could "Kill The Kernel" and after 2 or 3 minutes you could relaunch a program! Woohoo! Also, Doom.
I have an irrational fondness for NeXT computers, especially the slabs. In 1993 at university, I was blown away by the high resolution graphics they could display. I never quite mastered using them for anything other than email but I was using them on short time in a computer lab so didn't have much time to poke around them and wouldn't have known what I was doing since I was only used to DOS in those days.
I'm absolutely shocked that the old _Maxtor_ hard drive booted up so you could retrieve the files! I hadn't heard of BlueSCSI before this video, it makes me want to dig through the old _Amiga_ hardware that I've got in the garage and see if I can get one of them running. Thanks for a very fun video!
I have sadly very little interest in Macintosh and NeXT computers generally, but the narration and production quality of this video just reeled me in. Thank you for documenting and preserving!
I know this might sound odd and pandering in some way, but I'm super stoked seeing a woman like me talk so passionately about retro computers! They seem rare in the retro computing space on RU-vid, I only know of the host of Nibble and Bytes who covers the C128. I've never really taken a look at NeXT computers so this was such a pleasant informative video. Thank you! Subbed.
You can make a Linux computer look like a Next Computer with the Window Maker Desktop Environment. I've done that on my Debian computer.. )^_-)/ Many of the commands are the same as well since Linux runs many of the same UNIX commands..
back in the early 90s i wanted one of these machine so bad but they where very expensive and i know my dad would never be able to afford one or at least all at once i also remember they where great for music and has amazing DSP stuff for it and sound etc much like BSD and macOS carries on till this day also i knew their were these "UNIX" machines but back then all i had access to was MS-DOS and i wanted to get into other systems other than using dos or windows.... it was until the late 90s when i was a bit older to know what GNU/Linux was and honestly made a nextstep like clone pc with windowmaker i also remember the openstep projects and gnustep projects as well until they gave up on the open source part of the system when it went back into the mac :(
This video makes me so happy. I still have my ADB Turbo Colorstation from back in the day. You know the HP 9000 712/100 ran NS 3.3 like gangbusters. I am pretty sure that you can buy 712's by the pallet for not a lot of money. :)
I like how the NeXT operating system implemented features that Mac OS 10 uses today. And the NeXT name is a easter egg inside of Mac OS 10. Apple was licensing Mac OS 9 to the companies who made Macintosh clones until Steve Jobs stopped it when he came back to Apple.
Hah! I member those SCSI Seagate Harddisks, impossible to forget in fact. There was one of those with 512Mb back in the day running on a CNC server, the thing was dying and I had to replace it, it sounded like a lawnmower running! But guess what? Unlike any order harddisk in such conditions I was able to read every single last bit of information from the disk and get the data on a new disk , it took an eternity as the disk was running slower than a floppy when it came to read speeds but it WORKED which is what mattered! (that one had a few years by the time this had to be done, meaning the new SCSI disk was much thinner and faster). Had this been an IDE disk of the same era there is not a chance in hell that I would had been able to read anything of it, much less save the whole contents of the disk, without having sent that disk for a data recovery speciality service or the manufacturer itself, which would have costed the price of 100 harddisks and taken even longer than it took to copy the data out of it as is! Ever since that day my respect for Enterprise Class Devices (SAS nowadays) was been untarnished and much increased!
Thanks for the tip about the Previous emulator. I've loaded the ROM file as per your instructions, , but the SCSI disk images that shipped with my Previous 2.6 installation are all 'Empty' (e.g. Empty2800.sd). I've done everything else as per your video, but when I start, I get to 'System test passed' then both sd (0, 0, 0) booting SCSI target 0, lun 0, but then 'bad version 0x0 and the 'NeXT>' prompt. Is there a repository for downloading complete SCSI disk images? Googling hasn't turned up anything...
1:31 The NextStep OS is just Unix. The modern Macs run Unix which was created in 1971, 52 years ago from this comment. It's a testament to how awesome Unix is, and the genius of Steve Jobs for using it for Next. It's powerful, but I confess, the Windows command-line is much more use-friendly for the average person, but admittedly, not as powerful. But those are tradeoffs. With power comes complexity. More options means more confusion.
The Next Cube was a Motorola 68030, but could run multiple CPUs. The Slab was a 68040. The Optical disk was 256Mb, and a floppy disk was external to the cube ( ED or 2.88Mb ). and built into the slab. Please put those magazines into acid free bags. I had the first three issues, but they got stolen, along with my non-working cube, and turbo slab and Next LaserPrinter. :(
![[Labs] Upgrading my NeXT Computers!](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
