A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#31

Post by smacktoward » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #22

mschaef wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. There were a bunch of dropped balls there. To rattle off a few: * They targeted academic institutions first, which very much constrained their market, and didn't align well with the $6,500 base price. Which turned into closer to $10K once you bought a disk and printer. (Slightly more than $20K in…

And as somebody who wrote NeXT software for a number of years, they never really aimed to solve anybody's problem particularly well. If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which isn't surprising given that Jobs started right after getting forced out of Apple, and took a number of Mac folks with him. But as you say, $6,500 was way too much for the Mac's strongest market, education; that's like $…

> I've heard of multiple schools that ended up with NeXT labs where almost nobody used them.

My university was one of these. We had a huge lab filled with shiny NeXT cubes... which, for reasons unknown, was owned by the communications department.

Just try to imagine the befuddlement of a bunch of early ‘90s journalism majors who have just been seated in front of Unix workstations. No matter what you imagine, I guarantee the reality was worse.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#32

Post by p_l » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

flyinghamster wrote: post #23

smacktoward wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc. Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment Ne…

I always wonder what personal computing might have been like had DEC not so greatly feared cannibalizing their mini/mainframe business. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already way too late. If Digital had played its cards differently, x86 might have been just a footnote. I found it very ironic that the biggest market for PDP-11-compatible micros was one not actually open to DEC: the Soviet Union.

Soviet Union even made pocket computers that were electronically (not just software!) compatible with PDP-11 peripherals, if you dared to open the case and solder a connection.

There are also rumours that around 1980, there was a design at Digital that could have led to a PDP-10 workstation, but Digital wanted to kill PDP-10.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#33

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #16

ajross wrote: post #2

Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…

I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc. Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment Ne…

A place I worked replaced its Suns with Dells. I couldn't believe they would do such a thing, since each Sun had to be replaced with three Dells to do the equivalent job.

When I asked about it, the answer was simple: Three Dells were cheaper than one Sun.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#34

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

flyinghamster wrote: post #23

smacktoward wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc. Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment Ne…

I always wonder what personal computing might have been like had DEC not so greatly feared cannibalizing their mini/mainframe business. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already way too late. If Digital had played its cards differently, x86 might have been just a footnote. I found it very ironic that the biggest market for PDP-11-compatible micros was one not actually open to DEC: the Soviet Union.

Another massive market for PDP-11's was McDonald's. They ran the cash registers in a lot of the restaurants.

I knew a guy who earned a living rehabbing PDPs that had done service in McDonald's. I guess they weren't always located in the best place in the building because said he spent most of his time cleaning the dried soda off of circuit boards.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#35

Post by saagarjha » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #30

ajross wrote: post #2

Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…

Three great things came out of NeXT: Doom, the WWW, and modern Mac OS

(Mac OS X/OS X/macOS. I normally let these slide, but here it’s important which one you’re talking about.)

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#36

Post by hermitdev » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #27

at-fates-hands wrote: post #7

As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?

HP was the top-shelf electrical engineering instrument company. Every top-tier lab would have HP equipment. Aspiring computer-makers wouldn't be able to afford it and would lust after it from a distance. This probably includes young Steve Jobs. HP built plotters and printers because their customers wanted hardcopies of what they saw on their instrument screens. They built computers to control the instruments and calc…

When I was in college, studying EE, we had HP oscilloscopes and digital logic analyzers. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was the logic analyzers that had an easter egg that if you held down a specific set of buttons while powering on, you could play Tetris on it. I also remember the oscilloscope being so sensitive, that without any leads connected, it could detect the signal of someone walking by it.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#37

Post by jjoonathan » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

hermitdev wrote: post #36

jjoonathan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP was the top-shelf electrical engineering instrument company. Every top-tier lab would have HP equipment. Aspiring computer-makers wouldn't be able to afford it and would lust after it from a distance. This probably includes young Steve Jobs. HP built plotters and printers because their customers wanted hardcopies of what they saw on their instrument screens. They built computers to control the instruments and calc…

When I was in college, studying EE, we had HP oscilloscopes and digital logic analyzers. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was the logic analyzers that had an easter egg that if you held down a specific set of buttons while powering on, you could play Tetris on it. I also remember the oscilloscope being so sensitive, that without any leads connected, it could detect the signal of someone walking by it.

Yep! Their legacy continues today. Here's HP (sorry, I mean Agilent, sorry, I mean Keysight) dropping a 110GHz real-time oscilloscope:

https://youtu.be/dB5rg_TqmD8?t=32

I'd like to think that if Bill and Dave (Hewlett and Packard) were still alive they could still take pride in their T&M legacy, even though it's the DRM-hobbled one-quarter-full printer ink cartridges that wound up with their names on the front.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#38

Post by pinewurst » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

spitfire wrote: post #3

ajross wrote: post #2

Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…

Probably because Jobs knew M68K already and had relationships with Motorola? Just a theory. NeXT did have a working M88K[1] system, that booted and ran. The case was a slightly taller version of the NeXTStation. Then they killed all hardware. However the pa-risc systems were the best you could run NS/OS on. Intel might be faster but it was a pain to setup. 712/100 just ran and ran smoothly. [1] http://www.nextcompute…

The Motorola relationship is how Jobs got a decent price on the 68030/56001 bundle. It was intended as a sort of mutual offset against the coming RISC processors known to be the competition.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#39

Post by pinewurst » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #16

ajross wrote: post #2

Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…

I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc. Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment Ne…

I wouldn't call another 5+ years of growth "right at the twilight". NeXT launched a 68030 box near simultaneously against the SS1 & DS3100. Both had faster follow-ons, goosed by the then-amazing HP PA machines (720/730). They (Sun, DEC, HP) raced each other til the Intel machines caught up. NeXT was never a player, despite Jobs attempt to define himself as the winner in the self-defined "academic workstation" segment.

Re: A Quick Tour of the HP-9000 712/100 NeXTSTEP Workstation (2016)

#40

Post by pinewurst » Tue, Mar 10, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #32

flyinghamster wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder what personal computing might have been like had DEC not so greatly feared cannibalizing their mini/mainframe business. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already way too late. If Digital had played its cards differently, x86 might have been just a footnote. I found it very ironic that the biggest market for PDP-11-compatible micros was one not actually open to DEC: the Soviet Union.

Soviet Union even made pocket computers that were electronically (not just software!) compatible with PDP-11 peripherals, if you dared to open the case and solder a connection. There are also rumours that around 1980, there was a design at Digital that could have led to a PDP-10 workstation, but Digital wanted to kill PDP-10.

It wasn't a rumor, it was the KT20 "Minnow". It was a workstation sans display. Given the memory addressing limits there were reasons why it was stillborn.