Re: Best HW to run NextStep?

[Lele Gaifax]

>>>>> On Mon, 18 Jun 2001 09:35:05 +0200, Laurent Julliard 
>>>>> <Laurent.Julliard@xrce.xerox.com> said:

    LJ> I'm becoming more and more addicted to the Objective C/
    LJ> GNUstep environment and I must confess that I completely miss
    LJ> this part of the computer industry history where NEXTstep was
    LJ> full of promises and then the period when OpenStep was
    LJ> developed by Apple and Sun.

Yeah! And maybe the whole world will slowly notice the injustice done!

    LJ> Anyway I'd like to run the NeXTstep OS again on some sort of
    LJ> hardware just to get a flavor of what the original was. What's
    LJ> the best solution for that:

    LJ> A - Find a NeXT station (cube or pizzabox) that still
    LJ> works. Is this reasonable? What version of NeXTstep runs in
    LJ> these machines?

Any version of NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP, at least till version 4.2. Remember
that those are beautiful machines, but very slow compared to today
standards... 

    LJ> B - While visited the Apple site I realized that NeXTstep
    LJ> (actually OpenStep I guess) was ported to Sun SPARC platforms
    LJ> and also to Intel platforms. The hardware seems to be easy to
    LJ> find but I have several questions on that: B.1 - Can the Intel
    LJ> or Sparc version be considered as "compliant" with the
    LJ> original flavor?  B.2 - Where can I find (CD/download) the
    LJ> NeXTstep OS for these machines?

Yes, although it's a matter of your definition of "original
flavor". For example, I almost completely replaced the original NeXT
machines with "modern" PCs: the hardest part was to find out a
supported configuration (in particular the SVGA part). For the
application, it was a simple recompilation. This was done from my old
NeXTStation Turbo, running OpenSTEP 4.2 but with the older NS 3.3
development environment, producing a MAB executable containing both
motorola and intel code! This alone, compared to the DLL nightmare of
some other "modern" OS.... :-)

So, at least if you don't get a NeXTStation almost for free, or if you
are not particular interested in its hardware, I'd suggest trying with
a PC. You will miss the very fast graphics capabilities(*) of the black
hardware, but on the whole you will benefit of the much faster CPU.

ciao, lele.

(*) Even compared to a Pentium III with a Matrox G200, I consider my old
NeXTstation turbo graphic engine *much* faster. Too bad it takes an hour
os so to recompile the application :-/
-- 
nickname: Lele Gaifax   | Quando vivro' di quello che ho pensato ieri
real: Emanuele Gaifas   | comincero' ad aver paura di chi mi copia.
email: lele@seldati.it  |               -- Fortunato Depero, 1929.