Back again. A progress report.
Every day is a new adventure with my new NeXTStation.
First of all, I have lots of floppy disks in the basement, and found a package of black 1.44 MB Apple floppies. They each and all showed up on the Shelf as a floppy icon with a little Apple on it and all initialized perfectly.
Also found a external SCSI drive with cables. This worked fine decades ago with my 68040 Quadra 950 and 840av, so I had hopes that it would be compatible with the 68040 NeXTStation.
I gather that the the rule to be safe is that I should never turn on a SCSI device while the NeXTStation is already running, so I connected the SCSI external CD-ROM drive to the NeXTbox, turned it on, and then turned on the NeXTStation. Once it was all powered up and I got a Desktop, I opened the CD-ROM drive and plunked in a disk.
It works perfectly.
Apple CDs show up with a interesting little CD icon on the Shelf with a little Apple on them. No bite out of the side of the apple, but cute. Non-Apple CDs have a slightly different icon. The contents of the disks are Macintosh-specific, and so of no use to the NeXT, but at least I have a verified CD-ROM drive that is recognized by and works with the NeXTStation.
I understand that if I want to install software onto this NeXTStation I am very likely going to have to very likely burn the software onto a CD using my Mac Pro and then start up the NeXTbox as root, stick in the CD, and run NeXT utilities to locate, decompress and install the archived software...
Is that the drill ?
A desktop publishing program will be the first order.
Mike
There are many ways to get Stuff onto the NeXTs. I used a network connection to a file server, SCSI ZIP drive (USB ZIP drive on the Mac side) and an SCSI2SD.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I know that at this point (and for the foreseeable future) networking this NeXTStation into the home network is far beyond me and I will be making do with what I have on hand. I did make an effort to locate a USB floppy drive and one may be here on Wednesday... or not.
If no USB floppy drive shows up, I'll be copying files, documents and application installers onto CDs to carry them over.
Installing apps on the NeXTStation is not a priority right now: it is more a source of amusement and amazement than utility. I have other (and newer) computers to do the heavy lifting.
Mike
Setting up a network is pretty easy, you find many threads on the forum taking you step by step. It's way more practical than burning CD-ROMs.
Quote from: "Mike"I did make an effort to locate a USB floppy drive and one may be here on Wednesday... or not.
A (USB) floppy (drive) has not enough capacity to be useful.
Quote from: "paolo.bertolo"Setting up a network is pretty easy, you find many threads on the forum taking you step by step. It's way more practical than burning CD-ROMs.
Hah !!
Easy for you to say.
I'm just a beginner at this stuff, having had a fully-functioal NeXTStation for about a week, all told, and do not want to make any silly or stupid mistakes by jumping in over my head and making changes to the system that I do not know how to recover from.
Baby steps for now... but thanks for the vote of confidence.
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At this point one of the greater mysteries is that
everyone on this NeXT forum seems capable of correct spelling and proper grammar, and of writing in complete sentences that obey the rules for capitalization at the beginning and punctuation at the end. Weird...
I think, Mike, it is because most of us are old and predate Twitter, texting and such like language abominations :roll:
Really glad that you got the CD working!
I will also post something about capacitors in response to your questions.
THE old SCSI CD player I found in the MacJunk room (compatible with my old Quadra 950) seems to like the NeXTStation. Today I downloaded the five Peanuts ISO disk images and burned them with the Disk Utility using the Mac Pro (information about this procedure found on this forum elsewhere) and they work just fine with the NeXTStation.
I have no doubt that with the right cables this CD player will connect just fine with the NexTStation if it can take audio in.
It worked OK with the FWB CD-ROM Toolkit under Mac OS 7.6.1. I have an early Jimi Hendrix CD that really needs to be heard from the NeXTStation.
Quote from: "Mike"
It worked OK with the FWB CD-ROM Toolkit under Mac OS 7.6.1. I have an early Jimi Hendrix CD that really needs to be heard from the NeXTStation.
When you do a NeXTSTEP network install as part of the code it says in text," Excuse me while I kiss the sky" then starts installing .
Quote from: "Rob Blessin Black Hole"Quote from: "Mike"
It worked OK with the FWB CD-ROM Toolkit under Mac OS 7.6.1. I have an early Jimi Hendrix CD that really needs to be heard from the NeXTStation.
When you do a NeXTSTEP network install as part of the code it says in text," Excuse me while I kiss the sky" then starts installing .
Thanks.
Always good to get help from the professionals...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4370787/Purple004.MOV