- More photos of the former NeXT offices and factory can be found in Stanford’s Douglas Menuez photography collection:
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-in...
An interesting observation is that quite a number of Sun-3 workstations can be seen in these pictures. NeXTstep was originally developed on 68k-based Sun machines, version 0.6 was running on Sun hardware according to blackholeinc's Rob Blessin. The first NeXTstep version for 68k NeXT hardware still supported executing SunOS a.out binaries in addition to Mach-O ones.
- Great, thanks for the link!
I still use a recreation of the Flying Toasters After Dark module on my current Mac - https://github.com/robertventurini/FlyingToasters
- ...2024!
- Can you please stop spamming this site? This has absolutely nothing to do with the topics discussed here.
- There's also a 1:1 replica of the Mac Plus mainboard by the same creator: https://github.com/max234252/MacPlus-Reloaded
DosFox posted his progress getting the board to work on Mastodon: https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/26/an-engineer-has-b...
Some of the parts for that board are a bit hard to find today. Amazingly, the components that are most difficult to find (at least here in Europe) are the angled 30-pin SIMM sockets…
(I also posted this on the related hackaday comment thread)
- Interesting... I found one (negligible) problem: The "Compiler sources and objects exported files in Lisa TEXT format from dc42 disk images made with AppleSauce" file (http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/lisa/Lisa%20Pascal%20sou...) seems to be an empty ZIP file (download size is 22 bytes).
Also, some stuff seems to be unimplemented in the compiler, e.g. the GlobalOptimize function, which is called from some locations in pas-MISC.TEXT.txt, does nothing:
PROCEDURE GlobalOptimize(VAR fstmt: pstmt; thisprocpn:pn); BEGIN {GlobalOptimize} END; {GlobalOptimize}- > seems to be an empty ZIP file
Same here. But the converted files are ok.
> some stuff seems to be unimplemented
As far as I understand, the provided files don't represent the latest compiler version. So maybe a later version had a better optimizer. But it's good to have the sources anyway, so I can use it to clarify language issues for my forthcoming Lisa Pascal compiler/transpiler.
- Not really surprised. Depending on what phase in the compilation process things called it may have been decided that an optimizer wasn’t worth the effort or too ambitious for the time budget.
- Small mistake in the article: "Incidentally both the Playstation 2 and the Sega Dreamcast utilize MIPS CPUs".
The Dreamcast uses a Hitachi SH-4 CPU instead of a MIPS CPU.
- A flashback to the good old times when OS X tried to be the best Unix workstation available and not just a bad copy of iOS… for me, 10.4 on PPC as well as 10.6 and 10.9 on x86 were the preferred versions. Good to see that pkgsrc still supports 10.4!
- The TT was severely underpowered as a UNIX machine when it came out (and not that inexpensive) - a Sun 3/60 had comparable features already in 1986 (I had a TT which I sold since I couldn’t get my hands on Atari System V and then got a 3/60 which I still own). By 1992, the second generation of RISC machines by Sun, DEC and others was on the market which significantly outperformed the 68030.
- A fascinating video about a perfect recreation of an original compact Mac case (using 3D printing) with modern internals running VMac mini - including adapters for original keyboards and mice and an auto eject floppy drive!
- More
I know this era is gone - neo modern box building on a sprawling campus creating a life changing technology that the world doesn’t yet know it needs. Todays developers and engineeers rebel like they are being caged like an animal to be in such an evironment.