Hello folks,
I do dearly love my black hardware but for more everyday operatione I find my Sun SPARCstations to be really useful. Certainly more modern Intel Pentium-class boxes will run NS more quickly, but I have a sweet spot for non-Intel hardware... And it's about time I do a bit of advocacy for running NextStep on Sun SPARCstations and HP PA-RISC machines.
These workstations have some of the sweetest designs ever created, and the faster versions run NextStep REALLY well - pretty much well enough for everyday use (except for a web browser - Omniweb 2.7 runs fine but has problems with modern websites, and Java/Flash don't exist for NS). The hardware is cheap and I thought I'd try to draw more attention to it before it all disappears into junkyards (at least those that connoiseurs like many folks reading this forum don't already have running in their computer room!)...
So, I am willing to LEND OUT an original NeXT CD containing NextStep 3.3 to folks who have, or are interested in putting together, Sun or HP hardware. PM me and we can work out mailing the CD around.
Have a look at my 2 posts titled "A Guide to Sun Hardware for NextStep", Parts 1 and 2 in the Sun/HPPA forumof this website for the basics of all the Sun hardware required. I leave it to the rest of you to write something similar for the HP 712 and 7x5 (x=1,2,3,or 5) machines...
Cheers!
that is a very kind offer and one i would certainly consider. and i dont know if this in the spirit of your post, but is there any sun hardware that can compete with the industrial design of the next?
Quote from: "weps"that is a very kind offer and one i would certainly consider. and i dont know if this in the spirit of your post, but is there any sun hardware that can compete with the industrial design of the next?
Did'nt the same design firm work on both the NeXT systems, and some of the sparc systems as well?
Chef
Answer my own post, thanks to Wikipedia for the link. It was FrogDesign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_design_inc.Chef
I have SS's running NS3.3, but no HPPA systems. Any suggestions on what kind of HP systems are the easiest to find in order to run NS? This way I will have all three architectures that NS/OS can run on.
Chef
I've only a Sun Ultra 5 (but the 400mhz Version :D ) - i suppose it wouldn't run NS :?
Sparc 5 (no ultra). Does that work?
Quote from: "ash"Sparc 5 (no ultra). Does that work?
The 70mhz version and the 100mhz version. The 170mhz version has a Fujitsu Sparc chip that is not NS friendly.
No Ultras, Sun/3, whatever - only sun4m architecture machines. These include the SPARCstation 4,5,10,20 and Voyager. The 4,5,10, & 20 are slab designs only slightly larger than our beloved NeXTstations. The SS10 is the oldest design, not quite as 'cool' on the inside but will also run the fastest SuperSPARC CPU's available. The innards of the SS4,5, & 20 are VERY elegant: everything fits so very nicely - HD's on nice trays, CD-ROM & floppies pop in easily - and you almost never have to remove one thing in order to work on another component (only possibility is when replacing the BootPROM or NVRAM chips, which might have an SBus card above them). SBus expansion boards and MBus CPU modules do require a bit of strength to shove them into place, but this does mean they're very well grounded to the chassis... So I do believe that the design of these machines is on par with NeXTstations. And of course, with the common availibility of 75 & 85MHz SuperSPARC-II MBus modules (easy to swap in & out) with 1MB Level II caches, you get a pretty fast system...
Please do have a look at my "Guide to Sun Hardware for NextStep" posts in the Sun/HPPA section of this forum - it answers most of the questions y'all might have in order to put together a setup of Sun HW for running NS... The hardware really is dirt cheap these days, and many modern monitors can handle the composite sync signal output by the graphics systems of these workstations.
Cheers!
As I noted earlier, I'm leaving it up to other folks to write good a good doc. describing the basic components for an HP setup that will run NextStep or OpenStep. I will note that the workstation models that can run NS/OS are the 712 and the 7x5 (where x=1,2,3, or 5) and the graphics (often called 'video' in the PeeCee world) output requires the monitor to accept an SOG (Sync-on-Green) signal, same as for NeXT hardware that does color graphics.
http://www.openpa.net/index.html gives good info. concerning these HP workstations.
A good eBay starting point would be:
http://computers.listings.ebay.com/Networking_Workstations-Terminals_W0QQfromZR4QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQsacatZ11217QQsbrsrtZdQQsocmdZListingItemListCheers!
Okay... so I got a SPARCstation 10 yesterday, put a 2 GB drive in it (it has 128 MB of memory), and I just need to get it in place and set up.
I'm guessing that you are advocating NS 3.3 on this system rather than OP 4.2... right? I don't think that there was much (other than OmniWeb 3.1 and Create 5.2.1) that I use that required OS 4.2.
I would love to get a copy. I have a sparcstation 20 that I was going to pop openbsd on, but if i could get nextstep on it, I'd be very happy :P