, I have a question for the Community with NeXTstep 3.3 being quad fat .... how to difficult was it to add the support for different processors ,
The reason I ask is quadras of the same era had almost an identical architecture including 68040 25Mhz processors as the NeXT stations proven by Daydream and Darkmatter causing a NeXT to boot up as a MAC,
I've often wondered if NeXTSTEP could actually run on a quadra 68040 with some tweaks , I'm guessing probably NeXT boot roms in software sort of a reverse Darkmatter and may be it would have worked.
,
I've heard rumors there were actually a few NeXTStations floating around that had mods a 601E or 603 Processor upgrade running on them , not sure if it was socketed directly or on an xlr8 your mac daughter card , if true I'm guessing they had it in the NeXTSTEP 3.3 code to id a Power PC chip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_700https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_660AV as NeXT shut down its plant in February 93 , I'm wondering if any of the hardware guys moved over to Apple
The source has a lot more going on with the m88k, I'm pretty sure the NRW was the direction, and it was a LOT further along than that blank machine suggests, just like those unofficial 'brick' at apple with dual processor 88k's that apparently boots. Libc, objc cctools, and cc all have m88k support.
That said, could it run? sure. Just as a cisco 7000 RSP could run NeXTSTEP, you don't need a frame buffer, a serial port and RAM would be enough, just as an Amiga 3000 could run it as well. The best 'fit' outside of NeXT was the Atari Falcon, 68030 and the same DSP to boot! ..
but why wasn't it?
NeXT had a dream of selling hardware, and Quadras simply were too numerous, and too cheap compared to next hardware. the NBIC ended up being snake oil, as NS 3 had to go to non NeXT hardware, and ran fine without it.
It was political.
let me add, darkmatter, and many other mac emulators of the day injected drivers into macos and trapped calls to hardware to emulate stuff.. that isn't going to work for nextstep, but rather a port will be needed, in much the same way they ported it to the i386, sparc and hppa...
If it were 1994 it'd get a lot of excitement, just like the darwin stuff, although I guess overall considering how badly apple mismanaged darwin I guess we'd end up here anyways
One class of machines that might be able to run early NeXTstep releases are Sun workstations. I remember a picture in one of the books on Apple or NeXT showing a Sun 3 workstation on a developer's desk at NeXT. Hm, time to dig into the NeXTstep 0.8 kernel to see if any support for Sun machines is still in there? :)
One major difference between Sun 3 machines is that Sun used its own MMU design (no 68851 was available at the time the first Sun 3 came out, the Mac II had the same problem) with the exception of the 68030-based Sun 3x machines (e.g., Sun 3/80) - but these came to market in 1989...
-- Michael
Update - there is a 1991 Usenet thread in comp.sys.next.programmer mentioning that NeXTstep was developed on Sun 3 machines:
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.sys.next.programmer/8RiJ7XD8psA/Uu744KxJIAAJ
Hey Rob. I actually own a mint condition Quadra 660av that I purchased a few years ago for sole purpose of installing NetBSD mac68k. This was part of my NEXTSTEP m68k GCC porting effort. After some tinkering I abandoned this idea because even with full source code available for NetBSD the community was unable to address some of the fundamental issues and limitations on the 68k Macs.
For example, NetBSD mac68k can only be started from a running System 7 or System 8 by running a MacOS application. This, I understand, is because no-one has figured out how to properly set-up the hardware independently and outside of MacOS.
Another example is SCSI: it is so slow in NetBSD that it is crippling. Furthermore, the interrupt load it puts on the CPU causes the clock to drift, resulting in system time slowing by minutes per hour under heavy IO load such as compiling.
There is just way too little low-level hardware information on those machines in order to make them useful for anything but MacOS.
Quote from: "t-rexky"
For example, NetBSD mac68k can only be started from a running System 7 or System 8 by running a MacOS application.
To be fair, even A/UX needs MacOS to lauch it.
Unfortuantly you have the AV variation, so you can't compare A/UX to NetBSD.
Quote from: "neozeed"To be fair, even A/UX needs MacOS to lauch it.
Unfortuantly you have the AV variation, so you can't compare A/UX to NetBSD.
That I did not know...
Yes, unfortunately the m68k Mac hardware is getting more and more difficult to find. When my machine turned up on local Kijiji I could not resist purchasing it despite some of its limitations. It was from the original owner, with all the parts and boxes of software. Everything in absolutely mint condition and not even any signs of yellowing. I of course re-built the power supply and the main board with new electrolytics so it should be good for another 10 - 20 years.
Actually looking at MachTen, it sure could have. Actually I'm more surprised MachTen didn't get more people on the platform, as it really is a Mach 2.5 + 4.3 BSD on MacOS.
And the kicker is that it will run without a MMU.
But yeah as proved with all the ports, there honestly wasn't anything special about the black hardware, in that NS could run on anything else.
I emailed them asking if they were willing to license or sell the product.. no reply.
Thread revival!
I worked on a Quadra 700 back in 91 when I worked for Ultimate Technographics. They were awesome machines. One phillips screw to remove cover. Another one to remove the disk tower and release all internal parts. It was a great design, good form factor. Awesome Mac performance for the time.
There aren't many Macs of that era I'm fond of, despite having worked on them all my life. But the Quadra 700 surely is in my favorites from the 90s. Strangely, I dont have one in my collection.
Hello NeXT Community: I thought you all would get a kick out of this and hopefully you all will hear from the man himself. The "Professor" aka Studebaker Joe just bought a NeXT Cube from me that will be used in a Computer display he is setting up at the MIT Media labs. So some of his past projects with cohorts include having NeXTSTEP up and running on a Centris 610 . Also Dec Alphas ! Fun times talking with him and he plans on making a trip out here with a Centris in tow, to see if we can get it to replicate this unicorn activity lol as it would truly be hackaday stuff .Apparently tweaking a few registers is part of it.
Looking at the configuration , it is very interesting Mac Quadra Centris 610 was launched the day after NeXT shut down the hardware production line,
all those NeXT hardware engineers went somewhere fast... February 10 , 1993 and limited production run through October 21, 1993 :)
68040 20Mhz processor and
bus runs at 40 Mhz models ,
up to 64Mb of ram ,
1Mb Vram the supports right for resolution ,
SCSI DB25
ADB lol I'm going to fall out of my chair if we get it to work.
It probably won't be a speed demon lol but still pretty damn cool imho.
Quote from: Rob Blessin Black Hole on January 22, 2024, 09:22:32 PMI'm going to fall out of my chair if we get it to work.
Do you know how he managed to do this - did he have access to the NeXTstep kernel source code (I would be very interested in his patches then) or was some other magic involved? :)
My guess is he had a 3rd party boot loader that let him kick to a formatted next boot kicker with some custom flags that kicked to a next volume.
Quote from: cuby on January 23, 2024, 06:09:23 PMDo you know how he managed to do this - did he have access to the NeXTstep kernel source code (I would be very interested in his patches then) or was some other magic involved? :)
Hello Cuby: He just joined the forums as Spacerat ?lol:) and he is retrieving his custom 2FX box from the attic, as it will blow minds ,his pet project in his tenure at Thinking Machines. Yep he apparently has it running NeXTstep as well and with nubus expansion boards , multiple processors and actually has a lot of cool Steve Jobs stories , this is going to be fun as he will have photo's and hopefully a video, I really want to see this for sure!
Quote from: zombie on January 23, 2024, 09:39:06 PMMy guess is he had a 3rd party boot loader that let him kick to a formatted next boot kicker with some custom flags that kicked to a next volume.
Bootloading is the simple problem here, unfortunately, though parsing the Mach-O executable format still requires some effort.
A regular NeXTstep kernel has none of the device drivers required to run on a 68k Mac - the hardware is significantly different to a Cube or slab. Back then, there were no device trees to dynamically configure the kernel at boot time and if there were, the driver problem would persist.
So the kernel would be able to start up on a Mac and crash immediately. The only way to run an unmodified kernel would be to set up some sort of hypervisor to emulate the NeXT devices, but that would have a significant performance impact on a 68040, since back then no hardware acceleration for virtualization existed (e.g. shadow page tables or a separate hypervisor privilege mode).
It will be neat to hear how he did it and see the actual modded 2FX. He had the luxury of being able to tear apart the eprom and design custom chips whilst at Thinking Machines so I think it will make an amazing tread to hear and see the super modded 2FX . He has to go into an attic and move a lot of the ex's stuff. She has not been fired up since 96 , I'm looking forward to it. Cuby , he says you are spot on as well and it was a heroic effort to create the one of a kind heavily modded 2FX.
Quote from: Rob Blessin Black Hole on January 24, 2024, 03:13:25 PMIt will be neat to hear how he did it and see the actual modded 2FX.
Really looking forward to this - I hope we can get some pictures of the machine? Let's hope it was not killed by a leaking battery...
Please understand i suffer from dyslexia really bad ! When come to english so if something to messy not make sense please ping me I will do my best to explain or help. !
Hello all SpaceRat here,
I was able to to this by hacking bios and has intimate info about mac bios from wotking at Thinking Machines on there CM2 & CM5 with Danny hillis the father of SMP processing. Worked on alot skunk projects then.
So being between projects and NeXT anounced they ditch HW I was like F*CK! Bying then a syop specialist aka security engineer now.
We where 200% unix shop so NeXT ,Sun, HP Risc and lastly piece o 'Shite apple Unix!'
So I found this ould MacII fx old to us at the time. I Revamp it using the 030 0n bus. the I put a new 040 30 hz in pds slot then pop bios chip mad mods pop that bad boy in went from there. after gotteeing one ththese chees rocket bourds up we had laying after we comited and they drop hardware. this my fix until we could get next run on sun and HP
Cheer,
SpaceeRat
And yes I collect Studebakers and Ferries ans restore the current have am 1963 Avant Studebaker Suoper Charged and modified as well hurst 4 on the floor. Just sold my old Madena Spider from 2000. So I play around with alot cool stuff.
My other hobby if I collect Vinyl Jazz/Rock/Clacsical etc... ovr 10 k albums
Use a ClASSÉ pre and amp, simaudio CD Transport, SOTA Turntsbl /vacuum clamp , Martin Logan Electro stats / Summits X , MIT Cables, Grahm tone arm and Clear audio Gold Cart
Cheers
Space
Quote from: SpaceRat2k on January 24, 2024, 05:43:45 PMhttps://lowendmac.com/1991/radius-rocket-and-stage-ii-rocket/
SpaceRat2k well you are in luck as we speak dyslexic geek here :
Thinking Machines cool stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation modeled after NeXT Cube !
Your saying your "personal mainframe" at Thinking machines was an early special order nameless model lol from Jobs himself
and you may have modded the NeXT dimension board after upgrades specifically the i860 and traces on the motherboard.
Let me think where have I seen Personal Mainframe before oh wait, I pointed you at an old thread
on the forums and please tell the story of that particular special order cube er mainframe from 1987 and what you
developed on it at tms like you told me, very cool believable , do you still have that custom OS lol fro 87 holy crap.
About the later smext morse toad lol ahem psssst , I know nothing, well there is secret squirrel interest in s'mores.
Quote from: Rob Blessin Black Hole on January 24, 2024, 07:57:04 PMdo you still have that custom OS lol fro 87 holy crap
...that would be... insanely great! (a IIfx is waiting to be modded here ;D)
Here's a recent article that dissects the Radius Rocket firmware image which was loaded into the card's RAM at startup:
https://eharmon.net/retro/macintosh/rocket/rom-extraction/ (
https://eharmon.net/retro/macintosh/rocket/rom-extraction/)
Hello Cuby: Spacerat is in the ICU ! Hopefully he will be back soon.
Quote from: Rob Blessin Black Hole on February 09, 2024, 01:55:31 AMHopefully he will be back soon.
All the best wishes to Spacerat for a speedy recovery! *fingers crossed*