Love the UI.
We still don't have a full and polished NeXTSTEP replicate after so many years. The closest thing is probably https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#22The NeXTStep 2.0 email was fun to read! Then there's an audio clip of Jobs giving the spiel himself! > 1990s: Interpersonal Computing / Mission: Improve group productivity and collaboration / In the 1990s, competitive advantage will come from improving the productivity of groups and teams of people. We need to transform Personal Computing into Interpersonal Computing-and your NeXT computer was designed to do exactly…
>The idea of networked technology & connected computing was & is so cool. I'm not sure what exactly here offers that though?
It was talking about the features of NeXTMail. It might not be obvious if you weren't using computers at the time, but email in the 1980s was just text. NeXTMail allowed fonts, formatting, pictures, and audio. All normal features of email now, but not then.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#23I saw this kind of UI (bit more colorful) back in the 80s while reading some catalogs from HP. It was in USSR. After I first saw it I absolutely loved it and had spent next 3 month writing low level assembly graphics and was able to replicate it in my programs written for generic PC. Implemented threading inside program as well.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#24Author of the post/creator of the site here. To save everyone the click, NeXTStep 3.3 is probably the best release to try out: https://infinitemac.org/1994/NeXTSTEP%203.3 (it was the last release that ran well on the original NeXT hardware, OPENSTEP 4.0 and later were mostly focused on Intel support). If you'd like to play the NeXT version of DOOM and explore a few other apps, they're in the "Infinite HD" drive (you…
Yep. That’s the version I run on my “Turbo Slab”. It’s always kind of amazing what a 33 MHz 68040 was capable of whenever I fire it up and fool around.
Boy, I’d love nothing more than for some team at Apple to take the NS 3.3 source code and port it to an RPi 400.
They could even punt on the multi core aspect. Just port the drivers and get the frame buffer to work with the raw DPS server.
Do with NS what the Squeak team did with Smalltalk.
That would be such a wonder. I’d buy that for a dollar.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#25god I miss my NeXT hardware. I used one as a daily driver till ~2008ish. sniff Shouldn't have sold it.
I’m curious how you used it as a daily driver back then. Did you use it for internet access? Granted, JS was less prevalent back then, but I’m not sure what browser you had available. What about listening to mp3s while doing something else, could the m68k manage or are you just not doing those things normally?
In the 680x0 days we all tossed a CD into the drive and played that. Or put it in the multi-disc cd changer nearby, sometimes along with a few other discs carefully chosen for maximum sonic whiplash when you put them on shuffle.
Or maybe you put a mixtape in the tape deck.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#26Author of the post/creator of the site here. To save everyone the click, NeXTStep 3.3 is probably the best release to try out: https://infinitemac.org/1994/NeXTSTEP%203.3 (it was the last release that ran well on the original NeXT hardware, OPENSTEP 4.0 and later were mostly focused on Intel support). If you'd like to play the NeXT version of DOOM and explore a few other apps, they're in the "Infinite HD" drive (you…
Any hope of getting more software onto these? I'd love to play around with some ancient versions of proto-XCode.
That would be Project Builder and Interface Builder. Project Builder was kind of a graphical make tool and Interface Builder was the real star of the show, it was the graphical user interface builder. And there was Edit for source code editing.
There were sold as separate product, NeXTStep Developer that had all the development tools, but if you bought the education version of NeXTstep the developer tools came bundled.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious how you used it as a daily driver back then. Did you use it for internet access? Granted, JS was less prevalent back then, but I’m not sure what browser you had available. What about listening to mp3s while doing something else, could the m68k manage or are you just not doing those things normally?
Not OP, but if it was anything like Macs running on similar hardware - MP3s was not viable, simply not enough grunt. Also most (all?) MP3 decoders relied on a FPU unit to function. But CD's where fine.
NeXT had a Motorola 56001 DSP (coprocessor) that could decode MP3 in realtime
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#28Is this a "cycle accurate" system? (For assorted values of "accurate".)
That is, is what were seeing with this similar to what we'd see on real hardware, or is the browser the determinant of performance.
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#29The NeXTStep 2.0 email was fun to read! Then there's an audio clip of Jobs giving the spiel himself! > 1990s: Interpersonal Computing / Mission: Improve group productivity and collaboration / In the 1990s, competitive advantage will come from improving the productivity of groups and teams of people. We need to transform Personal Computing into Interpersonal Computing-and your NeXT computer was designed to do exactly…
>The idea of networked technology & connected computing was & is so cool. I'm not sure what exactly here offers that though? It was talking about the features of NeXTMail. It might not be obvious if you weren't using computers at the time, but email in the 1980s was just text. NeXTMail allowed fonts, formatting, pictures, and audio. All normal features of email now , but not then.
The ambition certainly felt bigger than email from what he was saying & how he said it!
The object oriented ideas that arose shortly after this 2.0 seem nebulous to me now, buts it's clear there was something happening, that this meant a lot. That it meant computing interoperability & components. I have no idea the provenance here, but https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/9... in 94 at least starts to hint at the bigger current. (Not just email!!!)
Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
#30Author of the post/creator of the site here. To save everyone the click, NeXTStep 3.3 is probably the best release to try out: https://infinitemac.org/1994/NeXTSTEP%203.3 (it was the last release that ran well on the original NeXT hardware, OPENSTEP 4.0 and later were mostly focused on Intel support). If you'd like to play the NeXT version of DOOM and explore a few other apps, they're in the "Infinite HD" drive (you…
I dont know if it's just me but the way mouse acceleration "works" is driving me bonkers.
You can reduce the mouse speed a bit using Preferences.app.
The fundamental issue is that there’s two acceleration curves being applied (the guest OS’s and NeXTStep’s). I experimented with the unadjustedMovement option (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/req...) but it didn’t seem to help (and if anything, made things feel even harder to control)