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Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

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Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#42

The 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.

[deleted]

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#43

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

What about https://gnustep.github.io/ ?

edit: GNUstep provides the foundations for a portable desktop environment, but delegates this task to other projects, like:

- The GNUstep Application Project: http://www.nongnu.org/gap/

- NEXTSPACE: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

- Etoile: http://www.etoile-project.org/

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#44
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know which era of chip you're thinking of, but when I was a kid listening to MP3s, it was the late 90s, and I had a Performa 5200 with a 75 MHz PowerPC 603 (or possibly 603e); it had a FPU, like all PPC chips, and IIRC like the final series of 68k that Apple used, the 68040 which Wikipedia says was also used in some models of NeXT machine — my problem was MacOS and how it multitasked (cooperatively), making M…

Yeah, I listened to mp3s on my Performa 5260/120. I actually could notice the difference playing 96kbit vs 128kbit mp3s, in how much it affected the computer's performance. Luckily all I was probably doing at the time was chatting on Hotline so it didn't matter TOO much... haha

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#45
post #3

Author 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…

It was also the one with surviving documentation, https://www.nextop.de/

Take your copy while it is still around.

Great Website by the way.

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#46
post #16
post #3

Author 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.

Besides the sibling comment, that was kind of Smalltalk like, in the sense how code navigation and code editing was implemented.

You can also get a glimpse of it on the famous NeXT vs Sun commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#47

Other JS based in browser OS emulators https://copy.sh/v86/ https://webvm.io/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ ( https://github.com/jsdf/pce ) https://www.pcjs.org/ (lots of hardware and OSes) ( https://github.com/jeffpar/pcjs ) https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/BasiliskII-wo...

For the Oberon linage,

https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#48

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

Are there aspects you miss in modern UIs?

Everything.

Clear visibility and contrast for all UI elements. Consistenty throughtout the system. Scrollbars that stay visible. Borders of windows clearly visible. Clear differentiation between buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons. No useless animations that make you miss clicks, take you out of the flow. Predictability and reliability of all UI components. Big icons designed for recognizability, not to look good on a screenshot/presentation.

In Windows we used to have themes... Wouldn't it be nice to be able to still customize window border thickness given our large resolution screens and precise mice? Now the task bar is huge, but can only be a single line, there is never enough text on task bar icons, windows explorer taskbar icons can't be reordered, yet if you try to quickly select an explorer icon in the taskbar, the entire group of windows explorer windows offers to be moved. We have rounded corners for the windows, but to resize diagonally you have to find the pixel where corner would be if the corner weren't rounded.

You know what takes the cake: In VSCode Nuget Gallery the search field is now entirely invisible in light theme. You literally have to click on the white space next to the filter button to reveal the search field. This his how it looks on my machine:

https://imgur.com/a/QPqIrod

Re: Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side

#49
post #3

Author 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…

Hey there, this is an off topic question but I recently picked up a Next computer (the slab) with a monitor. I am a complete newbie in this world and just getting my feet wet. Did the community ever find a solution to the 'dim monitor' issue? Thanks for this slick release.
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