NeXTStation

I miss my 11/83, which was connected to my network through a SLIP connection to a Power Mac running Yellow Dog Linux and connecting to the Internet via dialup. It was the late '90s, and it shared my small apartment with a DEC AlphaServer running VMS, an HP 3000 running MPE, an IBM System/36, an IBM AS/400, a Wang OIS, a SparcStation 1, and a NextStation. I miss them all. I do still have an external SCSI TK50 in an MicroVAX 2000-style lunchbox enclosure (complete with carrying handle) in good working order, though, and have toyed with the idea of installing a Raspberry Pi in the enclosure alongside the tape drive to emulate a VAX.

Congrats! I have strong nostalgia for the ones I worked on and owned in the 90s. Using those machines felt more like living in the future than any tech I've experienced since, including the iPhone.

In 1990 you could have up to 4 displays on a NeXT Cube + 3 NeXTDimension 32bit colour boards. These were 1152x864 32bit colour displays at a time when people were using 80x25 16 colour text (likely, wordperfect/Lotus 123), or /maybe/ 640x480 16 colour graphics in windows 3.0. NeXT had full ipv4 support from the start. Unicode wasn't a thing until after Apple bought them. One experiment I've done on my own NeXTStation turbo was run equivalent applications on both a NeXT and a modern Intel mac pro. Mathematica, email, Framemaker/affinity publisher all take roughly the same time to load and execute similar tasks. Yes you can't do 3d, video, or AI on a 33 year old NeXT, and the image files would be smaller, but beyond that you could easily do your day to day work on such a system. It doesn't feel old at all.

Thanks Fabien! Also I love all your retro work. I have a NeXTStation Turbo Color that's my retro pride and joy. Have you seen or been involved in any of the Demoscene activities? It's amazing the graphics that people are able to squeeze and abuse out of older hardware. Off topic, but folks might enjoy Poems for Bugs, a talk where Linus Åkesson talks about cycle accurate coding to exploit GPU bugs in the C64. https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/poems-for-bugs/inde...

BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc. I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed. sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it. It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008. 33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D ... wish I hadn't sold it. Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed. My BeBox! https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762193739…