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

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

#41

Post by rodgerd »

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?

1. They were the original Silicon Valley startup.

2. They were very innovative in a lot of the areas they touched. Instrumentation, which was their core business, but also printing, plotting, portable computers (I own one of their mid-80s HP-UX portable computers), touchscreens (the HP-150, for example).

3. Quality was hugely important. That 35 year old workstation still powers up. I have a similar vintage plotter that still works. HP laser printers were an absolute gold standard. Everything they made was the absolute highest build quality.

4. They had an rmarkable culture. For example, Hewlett and Packard mandated that managers would sit in an open area, while their engineers and scientists would have offices. This was based on what now gets called servant leadership - the idea that the manager needed to be available to facilitate the staff, not the other way around. Employees could freely borrow equipment for personal projects.

Sadly, all of that was flushed away starting in the 90s.

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

#42

Post by mauvehaus »

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.

Don't know about the logic analyzers, but I played tetris on an HP scope in a lab on campus years ago.

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

#43

Post by trilinearnz »

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

Anyone know to what extent was the original Quake was developed on Next as well? I recall the BSP map processing taking place on a networked group of HP Next boxes (like the OP), but think the tooling that was eventually released was all DOS-based.

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

#44

Post by drivebyubnt »

rodgerd wrote: post #41
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?

1. They were the original Silicon Valley startup. 2. They were very innovative in a lot of the areas they touched. Instrumentation, which was their core business, but also printing, plotting, portable computers (I own one of their mid-80s HP-UX portable computers), touchscreens (the HP-150, for example). 3. Quality was hugely important. That 35 year old workstation still powers up. I have a similar vintage plotter th…

HP also was a leader in device ergonomics. Their devices were pretty and easy to use, as well as reliable.

I don't think anyone had offices. It was all cubicles. (I worked at HP Labs in the 80's and met both Bill and Dave a couple of times.)

One cool thing HP had was "lab stock" cabinets on every floor that were full of free-for-experimentation ICs and other components. I think it's likely that the Apple I and Apple II computers were designed using components taken from those lab stock cabinets. (The story is that Steve W. tried to get HP interested in producing the Apple computers, but they just wouldn't go for it.)

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

#45

Post by bluedino »

trilinearnz wrote: post #43
bluedino wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anyone know to what extent was the original Quake was developed on Next as well? I recall the BSP map processing taking place on a networked group of HP Next boxes (like the OP), but think the tooling that was eventually released was all DOS-based.

The map tools ran on NeXT:

http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/quake_ed.html

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

#46

Post by p_l »

pinewurst wrote: post #40
p_l wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume Minnow didn't use Model B addressing, then? My understanding was that Minnow was important step towards miniaturization of the PDP-10 line, in tandem with Jupiter (IIRC?) which spearheaded high cpu speed initiative...

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

#47

Post by twoodfin »

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

Modern Mac OS => iOS + iPhone, and with that addition to your list you’re looking at literally trillions of dollars annually that owe their markets to innovations that grew from NeXT.

I’m sure some of them would have happened anyway in some other form, but that’s still pretty amazing.

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

#48

Post by FullyFunctional »

qubex wrote: post #4
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…

NeXT was working on a Motorola 88110 (later revised to Motorola 601) RISC processors., but NeXT abandoned the hardware business in 1993 before they went to market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation?wprov=sf...

A shame the mc88120 never made it to market. It was designed as a 2-3 way superscalar out-of-order processor with a lot of impressive ideas (considering the time).

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

#49

Post by pinewurst »

p_l wrote: post #46
pinewurst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume Minnow didn't use Model B addressing, then? My understanding was that Minnow was important step towards miniaturization of the PDP-10 line, in tandem with Jupiter (IIRC?) which spearheaded high cpu speed initiative...

Apparently I’m wrong about the address limits but it’s running on a really narrow microarchitecture with very limited (probably deliberately) performance.

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

#50

Post by vondur »

mschaef wrote: post #20
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…

> 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…

Didn’t NeXt get sued by Apple and had to abandon the lower end market where they would have competed against them?
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