NeXTSTEP Release 3.0J

[Brad Collins]

I was going through a bag of old CDROMs that had been sitting in
storage in a house in the jungle near the Mekong river for the last
couple of years (sounds like the beginning of a novel, doesn't it).
Along with old Cisco, Solaris, Irix and early releases of half a dozen
linux distros I found an original copy of NeXTSTEP 3.0J. (the Japanese
edition done together with Canon) it still has the original extended
NeXT floppy with CR-ROM Tools that came with it.

I was one of a handful of people in Hong Kong to own a NeXT Colour
slab which I ran into the ground.  I learned Unix on that box.  I
still have a screenshot of OmniWeb which we used in an early Web site
for my old company.  

When NeXT began to go under I bought a second box for parts when the
dealer (Jardine I think) held a fire-sale. Later I managed to find a
shop in Osaka a few years later which had a pile of NeXT hardware
which helped to keep it running even a few years after that.

Even though towards the end it was slooooow compared to the shiny new
SGI Indy I later had sitting next to it, I kept it going till it
breathed it's last.  I read somewhere that the CIA went to even
greater lengths to keep their NeXTs running (what is it about spys and
black boxes:).

Windowmaker and GNUSTep are well on the way to bringing the old magic
back to life and go beyond to realize it's real potential. NeXT
wasn't around long enough to really see what it could have done.  I
hope this time it will.

Anyway, I can't seem to mount the disk on any box I have around
here.  Redhat says there are too many file systems....

My question is, beyond fond memories, is there anything of value on
the disk in terms of legacy code which might have been lost and might
still be useful to anyone today?  

I wish I could dig out Webster.app and the Oxford.app and bring them
back to life but I'm sure M-W and Oxford wouldn't be too happy...

If there is anything of value, does anyone have any suggestions on
how to mount it?

b/

-------
Brad Collins 
brad@chenla.org
Bangkok, Thailand