Hey Guys,
Recently acquired some sweet next hardware. Right now I have 5 Cubes, 2 Gray monitors, 1 Color monitor (from Turbo Color Nextstation) and a Cube Laser Printer.
I cleaned and set up one of the cubes and it boots to the desktop just fine. The Optical drive will accept a cartridge but of course it doesn't read anything. The only way I have found to Eject the cartridge after works is typing EJ in the cmd ~ prompt.
But anyway, the question I had had to do with what should two n00bs that are gonna go through these machines and make 2 or 3 perfect Cubes know. I already can see that some of the cubes have ethernet and some only have the thin cable.
What kind of drives did these things come with and is there a way to put in a quieter (more modern drive) and remove the fan? The fan doesn't seem to cool the Chips, just the drives?
Then of course, what are the usual reasons that the optical drives fail? Is it possible to make 2 working ones with the parts from 5 non working ones? If we get it to work will it boot the NeXTSTEP 1 or NeXTSTEP 2 cartridges I have or do we still need an external Floppy Drive?
So again. I know its a lot of questions, but I did a lot of searching here and didn't find the answers to these questions. My friend and I are pretty skilled with OS X and computers but have never set hands on this glorious black hardware.
Oh and not that it helps much, but here are some photos I took of everything:
http://gallery.me.com/jbergier/100104http://gallery.me.com/jbergier/100112
Welcome to the club and mice collection you have.
As for the MO drives, we have a whole thread here in the forums devoted to repairing the drives which seem to be problematic because multiple issues ranging from dust to capacitors that are leaking.
Quote from: "pentium"Welcome to the club and mice collection you have.
As for the MO drives, we have a whole thread here in the forums devoted to repairing the drives which seem to be problematic because multiple issues ranging from dust to capacitors that are leaking.
thank you for the response,
I looked some more this morning for that thread but I am unable to find it. I am searching the forums for "cube optical drive" Would it be under a different title than that?
It's in the NeXT Work Logs and is the second thread from the top.
Here is a link (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=922)
Thanks, I'll look that thread over.
I got NFS on my OS X server set up and got My Cube to connect to it.
I found out one is running NeXTSTEP 3 with a 68040 and 16MB of RAM and 349MB HD
The other is on 3.3 with a 68040 and 16mb of ram and a 750mb drive.
I could not get Omniweb to work on the Nexstep 3. Is that to be expected?
It runs fine on 3.3.
Anyway, it looks like this forum will be extremely helpful
Quote from: "jeffberg"Hey Guys,
Then of course, what are the usual reasons that the optical drives fail? Is it possible to make 2 working ones with the parts from 5 non working ones? If we get it to work will it boot the NeXTSTEP 1 or NeXTSTEP 2 cartridges I have or do we still need an external Floppy Drive?
It's possible to repair the drives: I have 3 working drives now that I have rebuilt from a bunch of other drives.
As for NeXTSTEP 1 & 2, they will only boot on the '030 machines, and they're somewhat fussy about drives.
Are the 030 machines differentiated externally by having only the thin ethernet and then the 040 machines have twisted pair ethernet and thin ethernet?
I'm sorry for all of the silly questions guys. I searched google on this site with site: and I searched the internal search for multiple terms. cube monitor turn off cube monitor sleep cube display sleep.... etc
my simple question is... is there a way to turn off or have the cube's monitor automatically turn off? I realize on normal hardware of that age there was no auto off function on the monitors, but at least there was a power button. the only way to turn off the monitor on this beast seems to be to turn the whole machine off.
You can dim the monitor but that is pretty much the best you will get.
Quote from: "pentium"You can dim the monitor but that is pretty much the best you will get.
hmmm, was that the solution at big companies at the end of the day or would they just shut them down?
Do the monitors have a history of burning in?
They do burn in, all of my B&W monitors came with some level of burn-in when I've got them. Of the four that I've owned, the static NeXT logo in the dock was always present as a shadow, even with the machine off.
The best thing I've found with the B&W's is to run a screensaver(!) that blanks the screen when I'm not using it. To be honest I haven't left the machines running all the time in recent years since I don't use them as much as I did back in the day.
when I still had my turbo mono set up, I used the screensaver program "BackSpace" with its blank screen plugin to blank out my monos display. I was lucky enough to have an extremely bright, very sharp, and NO burn-in mono CRT.
I still run BackSpace on my color turbo, but I'm using a Dell Trinitron CRT with it that has a power button, so it doesn't matter much.
sdinet, I think, it selling mono to VGA video cables, so you could hook your mono to an LCD or a normal CRT if you had a soundbox for it.
p.s.
nice haul! :P you are pretty lucky, I want to get another cube at some point. I have grand plans :)