Here's a question for some NeXT alumni:
What's the hardware difference between a NeXT Station and a NeXT Cube?
Are there significant performance or upgrade differences?
Why are the cubes so much more desirable and thus more collectible?
With a little research on lowendmac.com...
http://www.lowendmac.com/next/nscturbo.htmlhttp://www.lowendmac.com/next/nextdimension.html...I found that the NeXT Station Color Turbo out specs the NeXT Dimension Cube in tems of hard drive, ram expandability, and processor performance. (2.6 MFLOPS compared to 2 MFLOPS) The only specification I see that differs is the color depth with the addition of a separate graphics processor.
What's up with this?
-EC
Cube is upgradable to turbo (33MHz), space for a full-height drive, three expansion slots allowing for four-headed operation and even multi-seat with a little work. People who bought cubes early also ended up with transferable licenses to things like Mathematica (which I still use today).
Thanks for the reply Cubist.
Four headed operation as in four processors?
What is multi-seating?
What was the advantage to a "full hight" drive?
Thanks for you patients.
EC
4 headed means you can have 4 displays on it.
Multi-seating means (to me) that many people share one computer and a full-height hard drive is as double as high as that one in the NeXTSTATION, which means that a full-height drive offers higher capacities than half-height drives.
If something is wrong, correct me please.
Multi-seat means you can have 2 motherboards and 4 displays on one cube, though you have to tweak the backplane for that.
The full height drives were pretty much the normal size drive in the days of the cube. The 'standard' sizes were 330MB and 660MB FH, and for the slabs, there were a variety of 3.5" drives, from 150MB up to over 1GB (I think 1.2GB was the largest standard size offered??).
One of the cool things about using a NeXT multi-headed is that you can seamlessly mix mono and colour displays.