We had NextStep on HP's PC 486 machines at school. It had a color screen, disquette, CD-ROM caddy and extra HDD tray free to insert our own HDD for personal storage. Printing on PS printer from it was something of a dream. The couple of NextStep machines (even only B&W) with their high resolution & fancy features or the X-Windows graphics stations (PA Risc) were technically better but less usable : software stack was so much modern with IDE included. At home, we even had on our PC the OpenStep running on NT for ProjectBuilder & InterfaceBuilder so we can do homework. The problem of OpenStep was the lack of software even searching on the Web. On my list of "best OS ever", along with its younger appleish brother BeOS.
More than a few moons ago, I was the sysadmin for the NeXT lab at my local university. Sadly the hardware is long gone, but I still have an original OS package. Thanks for bringing back some good memories!
I think this might become a very underrated video, you've showcased one of the most advanced GUIs ever created, some of the rarely explored features and nuances of the OS, and demonstrated how accessible it is to those without the hyper-collectible NeXTStation hardware. You've done incredibly well here, thank you.
>you've showcased one of the most advanced GUIs ever created Can I have some of what you've been shooting up? I gave up using windowmaker over a decade ago.
@@donpalmera window maker has little to do with NEXTSTEP, other than paying homage to how it looked. This is one of the most sophisticated GUIs and indeed operating systems ever created. The GUI and system icons were painstakingly designed by professional artists. It still looks gorgeous and feels modern even today
It’s a generic VESA VBE 2.0 driver which provides colour with any graphics card that supports the standard. I use it with a GeForce 4 Ti and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and it works great, even supports the DVI output.
This is now by multiple miles my favourite retro UA-cam channel. The quality of production, the quality of the content, the tiny little jokes thrown in ... it just all adds up to something better than you could ever find on television or even the rest of UA-cam.
We rolled the dice on starting a media agency in 1995, running the first generation Pentium 133 and windows 311. Our cutting-edge high resolution QMS laser printer didn't have its Windows driver development finished... we'd have to call the office in the US every few days and complain to them personally to hurry up! Same thing with our agfa scanner, where there was initially no support for 32-bit SCSI interface or an effective Windows driver...
Wow! For some reason, I had no idea it was even possible to use an x86 machine to run NeXT. Very awesome. I still use WindowMaker to this day for the aesthetics ;-)
@@MarkyShaw Same. Had no idea. Looking at this Vs Windows 3.1 it doesn't cease to amaze me how much business strongarming Microsoft must have used to get their inferior OS to dominate.
I agree 100% man. I still like to think what the world *could* have been like if Digital Research, CP/M and GEM would have been the defacto environment for consumers. So close it's scary. MS was definitely at the right place at the right time.
Vincent Ferrari SGI or HP? I walk through NEXTSTEP running on my HP 712/100 here: www.bytecellar.com/2016/03/02/a-quick-tour-of-the-hp-9000-712100-nextstep-workstation/
@@blakespot NeXT never ported their OS to SGI, supported RISC platforms were Sun SPARC and HP-PA. I had a 712/60 and a SPARCstation 20 at work running this and they were beautiful machines. Later on, Pentium-II and Pentium-III PCs took over as the fastest hardware for OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach
In the mid to late 90's there was a desktop for Linux called Afterstep that took its look and feel from NeXt.. It was pretty cool, and my desktop choice at the time... Pretty cool stuff.
OS/2 is pretty slick - it's what I ran on my 486, back in the day, dual-booting pure DOS for a few games that didn't want to run well, mainly Wing Commander 2.
It is important to recognise, that the Amiga was first with this kind of programming toolkit with the Amazingly innovative Cando software from Innovatronics that I distributed in 1989. Although it is interesting to see which came first because Cando was based on Power windows by Innovatronics a year or two earlier :-)
Well, NeXT had a fully object-oriented programming language and frameworks that allowed you to rapidly prototype tailor-made GUI apps and then convert that into the final product with the minimum amount of code. Amiga had nothing like that. Speaking as an owner and programmer of both platforms here. I loved my Amiga, but from a programming perspective, NeXT was in a different league. Then again, it was in a different league for price, too, so perhaps not fair to compare the two.
There were 4gls for Windows at the same time. They were quite expensive. But what they taught me was the drag and drop only gets you to the most basic prototype stage. Beyond that, you have to code, and usually quite a bit. I was using PowerBuilder and SQL Windows at the time, as well as Borland C++, Visual Basic 3, and eventually Delphi. I remember looking into the licensing costs for Motif in the early 90s. It was thousands of dollars per developer for just a set of UI widgets. The bit about "random dlls" is a bit misleading, though. As much as I like *nix-based operating systems, the libs do still go to common locations and often don't cleanly uninstall with the apps that used them. With version numbers typically part of the file/package name, though, at least collisions are a bit less common.
NeXT’s environment doesn’t just let you paint the UI, each object you draw is a fully-fledged class with intelligent behaviour and message passing built-in, so the only code you write is the custom logic of your own app, all system functions such as drawing, window management, printing, file operations and so on are already taken care of by the classes provided by the OPENSTEP frameworks. Unlike other UNIX systems, NeXT lets you package everything into a neat bundle which can be dragged and dropped and launched from anywhere and can then be dragged to the bin for a completely clean uninstall. It’s really a folder with a special .app extension. Modern macOS, which is the descendent of OPENSTEP for Mach, still uses the same paradigm. For more sophisticated software, NeXT provided a built in package manager that let you install and cleanly uninstall the app and its supporting files. All taken for granted today, but it was a revelation in the late 80s compared to other platforms
Have a look at OS/2 next, I was running OS/2 Warp when Win95 came out and took over the world. My friends thought I was crazy back then but it was so much better than what MS was churning out of Redmond at the time.
Nice video, but now you need to get a supported GPU and sound card so we can see a true comparison, including Doom run in 16 bits per pixel instead of 1. :-)
I wonder if NextStep supported 3D acceleration, although that technology was in its infancy back in that year; the Next Cube surely had some dedicated ASICs (and SGI surely was the king at 3D pro graphics)
Close, read about NeXT adventure into the JPEG compression daughter card/chip. Had that seen light of day, things would have been way different, still they managed lots of 'firsts'.
@@markteague8889 The NeXTDimension board wasn't for 3d/games it was for live video input, encoding, decoding, and could have up to 64meg on it. Used the board in my cube to play N64 in a window.
RetroManCave+ I'd be interested in seeing this same system with a supported video card that will show better resolution and of course colour. Potentially fun video.
Well.... I used to run Os/2 Warp 3.0 and MS-Dos-6.22 instead of Win95. Back in 1992/93 I ran Dos only. I did however have Win-3.11 installed when it came out, though installed did not meant that I used it. And when I needed to space for mod-files, then I deleted Win-3.11 again. Os/2 was so much better than Win95, and I kept using it untill I got Win98. MS-Dos-6.22 was a sustem that I kept using untill XP in 2001. Then it was bye bye to Dos, Os/2 and other systems. Ran XP, then Win7 and now I am on my second year, with Linux as my only daily driver OS.
Have to say I agree with you where OS/2 Warp is concerned. I would've loved to see it evolve to greater heights still, which would've most certainly happened if it wasn't for the stupidly aggressive marketing campaign put on by Microsoft. Technically, OS/2 Warp was superior in almost every way; especially the later versions of the system...
@Ron Lewenberg Yup. I liked version 3.0 without network as well. I remember that it somehow felt like AmigaOS, back when I tried it for the first time. There were something about it. Not to say that NT was bad. 4.0 actually felt decent. Win2000 was really nice as well.
@@Patrick_AUBRY I am a gamer. Though I am a gamer stuck in 1985-1995 era. Finished an a500 refurbishment project, on the operational level today. Need to give it a spraypaint and need to find a trapdoor lid. Else it is finished. I recieved it in a non working and rusty state, so I had to make due with what I had. And it is all on a budget. Untill now, I have poured some 70 US Dollars in total, into this machine.
Are you aware of BeOS? (Surely you do) It's a similar concept OS that spawned a little universe of its own... :) It even had the same fallback-to-greyscale feature if videocard was not detected as known.
Marketing defeating common sense, as usual... That's why we can't have nice things. :) Later, some of the people from BeOS Inc. started making Haiku, an open-source OS with BeOS compatibility as the main goal. Development slowed down drastically nowadays though.
Are you sure? According to website, It's based on FreeBSD. Both can run for indefinite periods of time though... :) But what is fun, you are also not completely wrong, because Haiku OS uses a notably big chunk of BSD, namely - network stack. :)
Fascinating video. And I thought Visual Basic was amazing when I was shown it on Windows because you could draw stuff instead of having to enter data into structs. There was a world of computers so much more advanced than I knew about like this NeXT stuff.
Cirrus Logic 54xx and S3 (mostly Trios) were on the vast majority of computers of that time where I'm from (enthusiasts had Tseng, or Matrox if you were loaded). I'm surprised that Packard Bell couldn't run any of the drivers. I watched the video about it, but it doesn't mention what videocard is in it.
Does the Doom source code include blocks of inline x86 assembly? This might explain the performance difference as other architectures run non-optimised code.
Yeah. But HP and Sun stations were really expensive (had HP stations at work). Pentiums were nice, but didn't get "mainstream" until the mid 90s. However, in the early 90s I had a cheap 386DX40 (with FPU) and then a cheap 486. Im thinking more about bang-for-the-buck, not what a rich person can buy. But NeXTSTEP on a Sun. NOW you are talking :)
John Romero told a story about how Carmack walked to the post office to pickup some new-fangled computer he had ordered when they were all living together in that apartment in Wisconsin and working on Doom. I may have the details wrong. But in 1991-92, if the post office had my NeXT and wasn't going to be able to deliver it until after the blizzard let up ... I'm not entirely sure what I would have done. ROTFL
so theorically openstep or one of their succesors could theorically use some old computer to get an nice unix-like destop. but i think that could implement a lot of modern programs into old computers that way. it is nice to try at least. great video.
I sometimes find myself enjoying retro PC content more than modern PC content, if I'm honest. Most of the videos about newer stuff is click bait surrounding the newest graphics cards and CPUs, but this is genuinely interesting stuff
an openstep video would be neat as it ran on sparc hardware as well. as great as nextstep was there was a more amazing “os” at the time: desqview/x. dvx multitasked dos in a window as well as windows 3.0. even more cool it was a fully functioning x server for remote app display and binaries could be compiled to run under dvx with full x support.
this is amazing, I wish it was for DOS like windows so you could have both everything this has and the compatibility with "normal pc stuff" so you could play games
that's great, it looks very interesting to "play" with it, and it seems to be years ahead of its time. it surprised me how easy making a program looks.
I really wish your new videos were like more like these older ones, I really enjoyed watching this. Also, you should bring ncommander back again as a guest star!
A new lab build is in progress which will help. Building the museum has been a dream come true but a huge undertaking, now I have help with that and a lab build planned we can maybe get back to some deep dives in the lab. 2023 should be a good year
I use to have a Packard Bell computer in the late 1990's Neil. Was one of my favorite u=nits that I ever own. Nice to see the name being mentioned on your channel bro. 8^) Anthony..
lol! I love NeXTSTEP! Always did! Love more the interface as the OS itself was too limited for my music and graphics production needs of the time back in 2000. But alas, I do miss it and want to play with it again someday when I have more free time. I love tiles in real life so this OS is right up my alley! BTW, does anyone know about the VOICE/VOCAL synthesizer used on NeXTSTEP?? I saw it demoed in another video of NeXTSTEP OS and have been searching on the internet for a copy. It is abandoneware I am sure but I can not find it? It was used to create realistic and robotic speech synth engines and interfaces. Any clues?? I have not seen anything like it for Linux or Windows yet.. It showed a picture or interface of a FACE and nasal cavity and so on.
5:49 I'm sure you meant to say "graphics oriented" instead of "object oriented". The latter refers to the use of subroutines as reusable objects of code; the former refers to the user interface between you and your final program. Most Windows programs were object oriented because they loaded objects of code from dynamically linked libraries (those pesky .dll files). Not attempting to defend Windows in any way; just wanted to clarify the semantic distinction between graphical widgets and objects.
And you would be utterly wrong. What he's referring to here has nothing to do with graphics. NeXTSTEP is an operating system focused around object-oriented programming using Objective-C. This has nothing to do with graphical widgets, at all. Your definition of an "object of code" makes no sense either. That's not what OOP is. You're describing functional programming, and dynamic linking, not object-oriented programming. Windows at the time was coded almost entirely in C and ASM, neither of which are object-oriented languages.
Excellent as always.. I wish I'd known about NextStep back then. I despised Windows (and still do.. only using it for games). Back in the day I refused to have Windows on my machine - instead preferring my 'tricked out' and highly customized DOS. It wasn't until Win95 that I finally went the Windows route; Even though Win95 was incredibly unstable, for me it was still infinitely more useful than any 3.x variant. Anyway - I really wish the OS wars HAD gone a different way. I personally would have loved seeing a timeline where Amiga and Apple were the top dogs, fighting it out, constantly trying to outdo each other. Imagine what we'd have today :-) Instead we had the "creative types" competing with "big business types." Sigh.
If Apple or Amiga had won the battle the situation would be way worse than what came out of the Microsoft dominance since Microsoft did not tie their software to certain of even their own hardware & software. That's why I'm also glad that IBM's OS/2 didn't make it. Thankfully Linux became very good during the last decade so that Microfts monopoly will hopefully end in the not too distant future.
This is your motherboard as far as I can tell. It appears to use the Cirrus Logic GD5424 or GD5428 VGA controller. www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/430.htm At 2:32 in the video, it clearly shows "Cirrus Logic GD542X-Based SuperVGA Video Adapter" in the list of display driver options. It really would have been much nicer in colour.
Sadly that doesn't work, I did try that driver but it resulted in a garbled mess. It would be cool in colour but I did want to give the true "out of the box" experience
I though you might have missed it, in which case colour could have been an "out of the box" experience, but as it's doesn't work, that's the end of that idea.
May I ask, what these black "INPUT" books (?), that can be seen behind you in the first few seconds (the ones just above the joystick on the table) are about?
What CPU did the Nextstation Color have? Also, if you had a supported driver or a supported video card in the PC it would be colour display and go higher than 1024x768 yes?
NeXTstation colour used 68040 at 25 MHz and the Color Turbo at 33 MHz. The PC versions of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP do indeed provide colour and high res with supported graphics cards. Mine is set to 1600x1200 at 32-bit colour
Yes, but none for my hardware. I add an IDE driver during the install. There's a lot more drivers for OpenStep if you want to try it and you can run it in a VM
Yes, runs nicely on Pentium, P-II and P-III. Possibly P4 too, but you need to avoid PCIE motherboards as OPENSTEP doesn’t support them. Intel 440BX chipset works well for EIDE, otherwise stick to SCSI if you’re using P4. I personally run it on a 800 MHz P-III with 32-bit colour, sound and networking and it’s crazy fast and totally stable. Stick to 512MB RAM max as OPENSTEP has problems with more than that.
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Are you planning to grab a supported video card? Would be nice to see Omni Software applications demoed, along with Lotus Improv and FrameMaker, if possible.
So I said "800x600 maybe." :-) That still felt too high res for what I was seeing so I took a screenshot from your video and a screenshot of NEXTSTEP running on my Mac here at the office (under the Previous 2.0 M68K NeXT emulator) and did a scale comparison. Previous runs the emulated cube at 1120x832, of course, but that doesn't matter for what I'm describing here. I launched the Mandelbrot app and noted that on the non-scaled (actual size) Previous screen, the menu cluster for the app is 95px wide. On the screenshot of your video, I took the width of the bottom menu item (less curvature) and found it to be 80px wide. So I measured in pixels across the screen on the screenshot and found that ~6.75 80-pixel-wide menus could fit across the screen. So I looked up 6.75*95 and came up with 641.25. :-) So, you're running at 640x480 there. I recall this is what happened to me when I tried to install NSFiP 3.3 on my 486 66 after removing the Wingine video card, designed for NEXTSTEP, and replacing it with an ET4000 W32p card. (I bought the system for NEXTSTEP but became frustrated with lack of mainstream software and games (college) and so switched to a gaming card and installed DOS and Windows...I later reinstalled NEXTSTEP to see how it ran on the new card before I redid the whole thing with Windows 95.) I could only get 640x480 in greyscale, as you have there (though I saw the ET4000 listed on the driver list in your vid...dunno). Anyway, here's the image I used to figure this out: i.imgur.com/gOwSoDk.png I'm obviously a little bit of a freak but the 800x600 call I made was bothering me!
no idea where 1024 came from, might be bug/not 100% ported part of nextstep settings utility. its 640x480 in 16 color grayscale mode ;-) Thats the only mode available with default VGA driver. nextcomputers org has a writeup on installing Openstep 4.2 VESA VBE drivers into NeXTStep 3.3 - enables 16bit 1280x1024.
Indeed, default VGA. Somehow reminds me of the 320x480 in 256 colors standard VGA mode MS used for Windows 95 intro screen (and exit text). Lots of colors, and a little more resolution than familiar 320x240! I always appreciated that being an Amiga guy and most renders and high-color images were in some variant of 320x400 mode, interlaced. I got some serious resolution under virtual machine out of OpenStep, I can tell you!! www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/2419063647/in/album-72157604578580203/
"32 bit extensions and a graphical shell on top of a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition."
OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach runs flawlessly using VMware Player on my AMD Ryzen 7950X PC. Fully stable with 32-bit colour, SoundBlaster sound and 100 Mb networking. It’s hilariously fast running an OS which was designed for a 25 MHz CPU on a 5.5 GHz one.
Yes but there are none for the small selection of ISA cards I have. A VESA driver exists for OpenStep if you're thinking of trying it, but for me this was the "out of box" 3.3 experience. Check out the links in the description to see it in all its glory on next hardware.
Hanro50 no. nextstep predates linux. nextstep was based on bsd with the final releases being based on bsd 3.3. when nextstep became osx for the mac the base unix was then based on freebsd.
This is Hilarious. People have been forcing mac os X to run on x86 before apple switched to x86, and even now with hackintoshes, meanwhile it was already done when it was still Nexstep!!!!
we had a bit more modern pacard bell computer. and as IBM was promising that WARP will install on EVERYTHING we took them up on it. (i worked in a computer magazine) and they sent over a man to do the jobb.. he failed. and it was a BIG fail. now i have to say it was a Pacard Bell and those boxes had a RELY bad rep in norway. if you had a problem you had to send it in. and they used old parts to "fix it" so when you got it back the problem was gone and 4 new ones was there. the computer we had was working tho. stil it had so much crappy components that drivers for OS/2 WARP was not possible to get running even tho it then was a old system.
Some copies of OS2 came on 3.5in ED disks (2.8mb). Something to watch out for if you are going to pick up a boxed copy. Pretty uncommon to have the hardware to read those outside of a PS/2.
"Windows... its dominance secured through marketing and business manoeuvres more so than technical excellence" 🔥Shrewd/predatory business tactics are the sole reason Windows 3.x/9x won in the end.
i. I hadn't realised 'til now that the demonstration of Interface Builder given in your video is more-or-less a remake of the demonstration of Interface Builder given by Jobs when Apple bought NeXT, showing off the same features in the same way :) ii. You really should've included at least a link to the story of how _DOOM_ came to be ported back to NeXTStep - blog.wilshipley.com/2013/12/my-doom-20th-anniversary-stories.html - as amongst other things it's an amusing insight into the personalities involved (like Carmack just emailing a programmer the source code after he asked nicely, and then a few hours later an email stating that Id's legal team were freaking out).
Thanks for the Doom link I'll have a read of that. For a longer demonstration which acknowledges the source check out the longer history videos here: ua-cam.com/video/NbZ1M_qw-a0/v-deo.html - Thank you for watching and commenting
If John Carmack can make Doom on a Packard Bell running NextStep OS, then John Carmack is a bigger legend then I gave him credit for, NextStep is a better OS then I gave it credit for, Packard Bell is well... Packard Bell. I had too many Packard Bell systems blow-up in my face back in the day to like anything about them.
So I had a nearly identical Packard Bell back then, and it used a Cirrus Logic onboard video. I don't remember the exact chip mine had, but I do remember it was part of the CL-GD542x series. And the installation for NeXTSTEP had a driver for CL-GD542x. So does your PB have a different chip, or the driver just not work with your PB? I'd hate to think you went without color when it's entirely possible your system was supported.
@Mat no you cant, unless you patch, port, and recompile them one by one by hand
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Windows NT 3.51 would be a nicer option with the upgrades mentioned. It can run up to Office 97 (albeit I prefer Office 95 under NT 3.51) and 32 bit applications, like FileMaker, titles from Adobe, FrameMaker, Xara, Microsoft Money and many others. NT 3.51 is a very nice option for dual booting with MS-DOS or PC-DOS. I have it on my unbranded 486 DX-4 with 32 MB of RAM.
Try "a lesson on how to price your product in the market" - NeXTSTEP was expensive as hell and run horribly on lower end hardware. Something this vid also mostly ignores. ID Software DID make DOOM on NeXT ... on a system that cost 10x as much as a regular PC.
This really needs done again with a supported video card. Kind of unfair demo as I'm sure you'd get the right card if you had this machine! And, yes, at the time of the 486 I was playing Doom and transitioning from an Acorn Archimedes I couldn't believe just how bad Windows was, and especially Word compared to Impression. Sadly, the PC was just getting far more development and my college / uni were PC focused with the engineering software I had to use.
Nice video! But you should really try a more modern version on better suited hardware. I have Openstep running on a board with Intel BX chipset and a Pentium II at 350 MHz. The IDE driver for the BX is much faster and there is a VESA driver, that supports any VESA compliant GPU. Much better experience! Only sound cards are still problematic. Even OpenStep from 1997 supports only ISA sound cards, which I don't have any more...
![[Labs] Upgrading my NeXT Computers!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nuppqSRPW5Q/mqdefault.jpg)
We had NextStep on HP's PC 486 machines at school. It had a color screen, disquette, CD-ROM caddy and extra HDD tray free to insert our own HDD for personal storage. Printing on PS printer from it was something of a dream. The couple of NextStep machines (even only B&W) with their high resolution & fancy features or the X-Windows graphics stations (PA Risc) were technically better but less usable : software stack was so much modern with IDE included. At home, we even had on our PC the OpenStep running on NT for ProjectBuilder & InterfaceBuilder so we can do homework. The problem of OpenStep was the lack of software even searching on the Web. On my list of "best OS ever", along with its younger appleish brother BeOS.
More than a few moons ago, I was the sysadmin for the NeXT lab at my local university. Sadly the hardware is long gone, but I still have an original OS package. Thanks for bringing back some good memories!
I think this might become a very underrated video, you've showcased one of the most advanced GUIs ever created, some of the rarely explored features and nuances of the OS, and demonstrated how accessible it is to those without the hyper-collectible NeXTStation hardware.
You've done incredibly well here, thank you.
Thank you izools, you can find more using real Next hardware here ua-cam.com/video/NbZ1M_qw-a0/v-deo.html
>you've showcased one of the most advanced GUIs ever created
Can I have some of what you've been shooting up? I gave up using windowmaker over a decade ago.
@@donpalmera window maker has little to do with NEXTSTEP, other than paying homage to how it looked. This is one of the most sophisticated GUIs and indeed operating systems ever created. The GUI and system icons were painstakingly designed by professional artists. It still looks gorgeous and feels modern even today
A patch to the last version of OPENSTeP (4.2, I think) included a generic VGA driver with full colour support.
It’s a generic VESA VBE 2.0 driver which provides colour with any graphics card that supports the standard. I use it with a GeForce 4 Ti and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and it works great, even supports the DVI output.
This is now by multiple miles my favourite retro UA-cam channel. The quality of production, the quality of the content, the tiny little jokes thrown in ... it just all adds up to something better than you could ever find on television or even the rest of UA-cam.
Thank you so much, messages like this are very welcome after a busy week and I appreciate you taking the time to watch
We rolled the dice on starting a media agency in 1995, running the first generation Pentium 133 and windows 311. Our cutting-edge high resolution QMS laser printer didn't have its Windows driver development finished... we'd have to call the office in the US every few days and complain to them personally to hurry up! Same thing with our agfa scanner, where there was initially no support for 32-bit SCSI interface or an effective Windows driver...
Wow! For some reason, I had no idea it was even possible to use an x86 machine to run NeXT. Very awesome. I still use WindowMaker to this day for the aesthetics ;-)
Dave's Retro Desktop: haha hell yeah. You ever seen the Christmas easter egg? I was pleasantly surprised one day while computing on December 25th.
@@MarkyShaw Same. Had no idea. Looking at this Vs Windows 3.1 it doesn't cease to amaze me how much business strongarming Microsoft must have used to get their inferior OS to dominate.
Haha. Pardon me while I weep a bit for even having this knowledge.
I agree 100% man. I still like to think what the world *could* have been like if Digital Research, CP/M and GEM would have been the defacto environment for consumers. So close it's scary. MS was definitely at the right place at the right time.
OPENSTEP is just NeXTSTEP 4.x
Love those old-school GUIs.
Window Maker provides a somewhat similar experience on a modern Unix. (Linux, but also *BSD or Solaris)
Facts that don't fit on other videos. Nearly three percent of the ice in Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine.
Animal Facts lemon snow cones 👅
@@fiatlux8828 Lol
Does that qualify as an endangered feces?
If you learn something every day, your day is not wasted. I can go home now. Thanks!
That Packard Bell probably has the Crystal 54xx chip on the motherboard. Mine did (DX2-66 with the amber/brown transparent plastic floppy bay cover)
I ran Doom on a SGI Indy back in the day.
You must have been rich lol.
I always liked NeXT. Very fast and responsive, and performed great. I used it on a RISC based system in the late 90's and it flew.
Vincent Ferrari SGI or HP? I walk through NEXTSTEP running on my HP 712/100 here: www.bytecellar.com/2016/03/02/a-quick-tour-of-the-hp-9000-712100-nextstep-workstation/
@@blakespot NeXT never ported their OS to SGI, supported RISC platforms were Sun SPARC and HP-PA. I had a 712/60 and a SPARCstation 20 at work running this and they were beautiful machines. Later on, Pentium-II and Pentium-III PCs took over as the fastest hardware for OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach
You can run a next-like environment on raspberry pi and Linux. No dps tho :(
John Carmack also used. NextStep for Doom development...This video is the best use of a Packard Bell PC EVER!
Watch the full video :)
I would say OS/2 is the best solution for a 486 Packard Bell PC.
He also used a 1080p CRT from Intetgraph.
In the mid to late 90's there was a desktop for Linux called Afterstep that took its look and feel from NeXt.. It was pretty cool, and my desktop choice at the time... Pretty cool stuff.
I'd love to see you do a similar video with OS/2 Warp and BeOS! Tinkered around a bit with them back when, would love to get your perspective on them!
OS/2 is pretty slick - it's what I ran on my 486, back in the day, dual-booting pure DOS for a few games that didn't want to run well, mainly Wing Commander 2.
It is important to recognise, that the Amiga was first with this kind of programming toolkit with the Amazingly innovative Cando software from Innovatronics that I distributed in 1989. Although it is interesting to see which came first because Cando was based on Power windows by Innovatronics a year or two earlier :-)
Well,
NeXT had a fully object-oriented programming language and frameworks that allowed you to rapidly prototype tailor-made GUI apps and then convert that into the final product with the minimum amount of code. Amiga had nothing like that. Speaking as an owner and programmer of both platforms here. I loved my Amiga, but from a programming perspective, NeXT was in a different league. Then again, it was in a different league for price, too, so perhaps not fair to compare the two.
There were 4gls for Windows at the same time. They were quite expensive. But what they taught me was the drag and drop only gets you to the most basic prototype stage. Beyond that, you have to code, and usually quite a bit. I was using PowerBuilder and SQL Windows at the time, as well as Borland C++, Visual Basic 3, and eventually Delphi.
I remember looking into the licensing costs for Motif in the early 90s. It was thousands of dollars per developer for just a set of UI widgets.
The bit about "random dlls" is a bit misleading, though. As much as I like *nix-based operating systems, the libs do still go to common locations and often don't cleanly uninstall with the apps that used them. With version numbers typically part of the file/package name, though, at least collisions are a bit less common.
NeXT’s environment doesn’t just let you paint the UI, each object you draw is a fully-fledged class with intelligent behaviour and message passing built-in, so the only code you write is the custom logic of your own app, all system functions such as drawing, window management, printing, file operations and so on are already taken care of by the classes provided by the OPENSTEP frameworks.
Unlike other UNIX systems, NeXT lets you package everything into a neat bundle which can be dragged and dropped and launched from anywhere and can then be dragged to the bin for a completely clean uninstall. It’s really a folder with a special .app extension. Modern macOS, which is the descendent of OPENSTEP for Mach, still uses the same paradigm.
For more sophisticated software, NeXT provided a built in package manager that let you install and cleanly uninstall the app and its supporting files. All taken for granted today, but it was a revelation in the late 80s compared to other platforms
Have a look at OS/2 next, I was running OS/2 Warp when Win95 came out and took over the world. My friends thought I was crazy back then but it was so much better than what MS was churning out of Redmond at the time.
Nice video, but now you need to get a supported GPU and sound card so we can see a true comparison, including Doom run in 16 bits per pixel instead of 1. :-)
I wonder if NextStep supported 3D acceleration, although that technology was in its infancy back in that year; the Next Cube surely had some dedicated ASICs (and SGI surely was the king at 3D pro graphics)
Close, read about NeXT adventure into the JPEG compression daughter card/chip. Had that seen light of day, things would have been way different, still they managed lots of 'firsts'.
@@alerey4363 There was a peripheral card designed specifically for the NeXT Cube called the "NeXTDimension" board.
Wouldn't be horribly hard - a PCI S3 Virge or Matrox G200 should work, and a Soundblaster Pro or ESS Audiodrive should do for sound.
@@markteague8889 The NeXTDimension board wasn't for 3d/games it was for live video input, encoding, decoding, and could have up to 64meg on it. Used the board in my cube to play N64 in a window.
RetroManCave+
I'd be interested in seeing this same system with a supported video card that will show better resolution and of course colour. Potentially fun video.
Well.... I used to run Os/2 Warp 3.0 and MS-Dos-6.22 instead of Win95. Back in 1992/93 I ran Dos only. I did however have Win-3.11 installed when it came out, though installed did not meant that I used it. And when I needed to space for mod-files, then I deleted Win-3.11 again. Os/2 was so much better than Win95, and I kept using it untill I got Win98. MS-Dos-6.22 was a sustem that I kept using untill XP in 2001. Then it was bye bye to Dos, Os/2 and other systems. Ran XP, then Win7 and now I am on my second year, with Linux as my only daily driver OS.
Have to say I agree with you where OS/2 Warp is concerned. I would've loved to see it evolve to greater heights still, which would've most certainly happened if it wasn't for the stupidly aggressive marketing campaign put on by Microsoft. Technically, OS/2 Warp was superior in almost every way; especially the later versions of the system...
@@slashtiger1 Os/2 has been relaunched you know. I think it happened in 2017 or something.
@Ron Lewenberg Yup. I liked version 3.0 without network as well. I remember that it somehow felt like AmigaOS, back when I tried it for the first time. There were something about it. Not to say that NT was bad. 4.0 actually felt decent. Win2000 was really nice as well.
@@brostenen Not a gamer here so I used NT from 3.5 to 5.1, now on OSX for more then 10 years.
@@Patrick_AUBRY I am a gamer. Though I am a gamer stuck in 1985-1995 era. Finished an a500 refurbishment project, on the operational level today. Need to give it a spraypaint and need to find a trapdoor lid. Else it is finished. I recieved it in a non working and rusty state, so I had to make due with what I had. And it is all on a budget. Untill now, I have poured some 70 US Dollars in total, into this machine.
Are you aware of BeOS? (Surely you do) It's a similar concept OS that spawned a little universe of its own... :)
It even had the same fallback-to-greyscale feature if videocard was not detected as known.
I held such hope for that OS, sadly it was around for such a short time.
@@WorksOnMyComputer Haiku is its spiritual successor.
Marketing defeating common sense, as usual... That's why we can't have nice things. :)
Later, some of the people from BeOS Inc. started making Haiku, an open-source OS with BeOS compatibility as the main goal. Development slowed down drastically nowadays though.
Nas4free uses BeOS. I built a simple home server using it and have never had a problem. It's been running for over 4 years.
Are you sure? According to website, It's based on FreeBSD. Both can run for indefinite periods of time though... :)
But what is fun, you are also not completely wrong, because Haiku OS uses a notably big chunk of BSD, namely - network stack. :)
I love that the installer has emacs and TeX Live
I have little but bad memories from my time using and programming on OpenStep, back in the day. Objective-C. I objected, all right...
Overdrive chip! 12mb ram! CD rom and 350mb hard disk! My inner 10 year old self from 1994 is very envious ;)
Fascinating video. And I thought Visual Basic was amazing when I was shown it on Windows because you could draw stuff instead of having to enter data into structs. There was a world of computers so much more advanced than I knew about like this NeXT stuff.
Always nice to wake up to another video from Neil with a big ol cup of tea and a big ol muffin too
Cirrus Logic 54xx and S3 (mostly Trios) were on the vast majority of computers of that time where I'm from (enthusiasts had Tseng, or Matrox if you were loaded). I'm surprised that Packard Bell couldn't run any of the drivers. I watched the video about it, but it doesn't mention what videocard is in it.
Does the Doom source code include blocks of inline x86 assembly? This might explain the performance difference as other architectures run non-optimised code.
Another lovely episode. Thank you!
I didn't even know there's a x86 version of NextStep !
Being a lover of Windowmaker, I have to find this :)
Amazing that it ended up on the iPhone and windows couldn’t cut the mustard on mobile devices...
Caveman thanks ! I always was interested in NeXTSTEP.. thanks for the video !
Thanks for watching!
Super interesting video! Allways wondered how a cheap 486 would stack up against the expensive NeXT hardware.
Even better on the Pentiums, better still on the HP and Sun stations, NeXTSTEP really flew on those.
Yeah. But HP and Sun stations were really expensive (had HP stations at work). Pentiums were nice, but didn't get "mainstream" until the mid 90s. However, in the early 90s I had a cheap 386DX40 (with FPU) and then a cheap 486. Im thinking more about bang-for-the-buck, not what a rich person can buy. But NeXTSTEP on a Sun. NOW you are talking :)
I run OPENSTEP 4.2 on a 800 MHz Pentium-III and it’s lightning fast, even in 32-bit colour
John Romero told a story about how Carmack walked to the post office to pickup some new-fangled computer he had ordered when they were all living together in that apartment in Wisconsin and working on Doom. I may have the details wrong. But in 1991-92, if the post office had my NeXT and wasn't going to be able to deliver it until after the blizzard let up ... I'm not entirely sure what I would have done. ROTFL
You should also try rasphody, whioch was a the apple's version of next step during early stages of os x development
It was a beautiful and elegant operating system. Thanks for the video.
Maybe check BSD from that time. It’s with NextStep the mother and father for OSX.
so theorically openstep or one of their succesors could theorically use some old computer to get an nice unix-like destop. but i think that could implement a lot of modern programs into old computers that way. it is nice to try at least. great video.
Basically, steve jobs were tasked to build Mac OS X instead when fired from apple lol 😂
My college only had nexts when I started attending in 1994
I sometimes find myself enjoying retro PC content more than modern PC content, if I'm honest. Most of the videos about newer stuff is click bait surrounding the newest graphics cards and CPUs, but this is genuinely interesting stuff
100% ACK!
I never knew "Doom" was developed on NeXT hardware. Cool video!
As were large parts of _Quake_ :)
an openstep video would be neat as it ran on sparc hardware as well. as great as nextstep was there was a more amazing “os” at the time: desqview/x. dvx multitasked dos in a window as well as windows 3.0. even more cool it was a fully functioning x server for remote app display and binaries could be compiled to run under dvx with full x support.
this is amazing, I wish it was for DOS like windows so you could have both everything this has and the compatibility with "normal pc stuff" so you could play games
You can! When you install it there is the option to retain the msdos partition so you can have the best of both
that's great, it looks very interesting to "play" with it, and it seems to be years ahead of its time. it surprised me how easy making a program looks.
I really wish your new videos were like more like these older ones, I really enjoyed watching this. Also, you should bring ncommander back again as a guest star!
A new lab build is in progress which will help. Building the museum has been a dream come true but a huge undertaking, now I have help with that and a lab build planned we can maybe get back to some deep dives in the lab. 2023 should be a good year
My NeXTStep for Intel never run on a 486-PC. I can’t install ist because the CDs have probably a lot of errors.
I use to have a Packard Bell computer in the late 1990's Neil. Was one of my favorite u=nits that I ever own. Nice to see the name being mentioned on your channel bro. 8^)
Anthony..
same feelings! my first computer was a PB with Windows 95, a radio tuner and all software free to use in fullversion, encarta 97
Great video as always :-)
lol! I love NeXTSTEP! Always did! Love more the interface as the OS itself was too limited for my music and graphics production needs of the time back in 2000. But alas, I do miss it and want to play with it again someday when I have more free time. I love tiles in real life so this OS is right up my alley! BTW, does anyone know about the VOICE/VOCAL synthesizer used on NeXTSTEP?? I saw it demoed in another video of NeXTSTEP OS and have been searching on the internet for a copy. It is abandoneware I am sure but I can not find it? It was used to create realistic and robotic speech synth engines and interfaces. Any clues?? I have not seen anything like it for Linux or Windows yet.. It showed a picture or interface of a FACE and nasal cavity and so on.
Not a Windows fan I see.
Very fun / short video. Thanks!
5:49 I'm sure you meant to say "graphics oriented" instead of "object oriented". The latter refers to the use of subroutines as reusable objects of code; the former refers to the user interface between you and your final program. Most Windows programs were object oriented because they loaded objects of code from dynamically linked libraries (those pesky .dll files).
Not attempting to defend Windows in any way; just wanted to clarify the semantic distinction between graphical widgets and objects.
And you would be utterly wrong. What he's referring to here has nothing to do with graphics. NeXTSTEP is an operating system focused around object-oriented programming using Objective-C. This has nothing to do with graphical widgets, at all.
Your definition of an "object of code" makes no sense either. That's not what OOP is. You're describing functional programming, and dynamic linking, not object-oriented programming. Windows at the time was coded almost entirely in C and ASM, neither of which are object-oriented languages.
I would love to see it in colour.
Now you can run Haiku OS
how good is softpc in nextstep? can you fire up dos games like doom in it?
Excellent as always.. I wish I'd known about NextStep back then. I despised Windows (and still do.. only using it for games).
Back in the day I refused to have Windows on my machine - instead preferring my 'tricked out' and highly customized DOS. It wasn't until Win95 that I finally went the Windows route; Even though Win95 was incredibly unstable, for me it was still infinitely more useful than any 3.x variant.
Anyway - I really wish the OS wars HAD gone a different way. I personally would have loved seeing a timeline where Amiga and Apple were the top dogs, fighting it out, constantly trying to outdo each other. Imagine what we'd have today :-) Instead we had the "creative types" competing with "big business types." Sigh.
If Apple or Amiga had won the battle the situation would be way worse than what came out of the Microsoft dominance since Microsoft did not tie their software to certain of even their own hardware & software. That's why I'm also glad that IBM's OS/2 didn't make it. Thankfully Linux became very good during the last decade so that Microfts monopoly will hopefully end in the not too distant future.
This is your motherboard as far as I can tell. It appears to use the Cirrus Logic GD5424 or GD5428 VGA controller.
www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/430.htm
At 2:32 in the video, it clearly shows "Cirrus Logic GD542X-Based SuperVGA Video Adapter" in the list of display driver options.
It really would have been much nicer in colour.
Sadly that doesn't work, I did try that driver but it resulted in a garbled mess. It would be cool in colour but I did want to give the true "out of the box" experience
I though you might have missed it, in which case colour could have been an "out of the box" experience, but as it's doesn't work, that's the end of that idea.
When you compare the original NeXTSTEP on the original computer it still looks more modern than Windows 8.
May I ask, what these black "INPUT" books (?), that can be seen behind you in the first few seconds (the ones just above the joystick on the table) are about?
Input was a magazine, thats the complete set in binders. It's a great series of programming tutorials and 8bit info from the era
Thanks a lot!
The past teenage nerd in me wouldd be curious to see how it runs on a Pentium machine.
What CPU did the Nextstation Color have? Also, if you had a supported driver or a supported video card in the PC it would be colour display and go higher than 1024x768 yes?
NeXTstation colour used 68040 at 25 MHz and the Color Turbo at 33 MHz.
The PC versions of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP do indeed provide colour and high res with supported graphics cards. Mine is set to 1600x1200 at 32-bit colour
@@little_fluffy_clouds A great operating system.
Get a Tseng ET video card and do another in-depth video!
Or a Diamond Stealth 64 Video VRAM, with the S3 Vision968 chip. Supported by almost any os on pc ..
wasn't it possible to add extra video drivers after?
Yes, but none for my hardware. I add an IDE driver during the install. There's a lot more drivers for OpenStep if you want to try it and you can run it in a VM
I spy a copy of RDR with that ps2 in the background. Sorry, that subject is on my mind...
very cool! would it run on a pentium too ? i would love to see the nextstep maxed out on the fastest possible system..
Yes, runs nicely on Pentium, P-II and P-III. Possibly P4 too, but you need to avoid PCIE motherboards as OPENSTEP doesn’t support them. Intel 440BX chipset works well for EIDE, otherwise stick to SCSI if you’re using P4.
I personally run it on a 800 MHz P-III with 32-bit colour, sound and networking and it’s crazy fast and totally stable. Stick to 512MB RAM max as OPENSTEP has problems with more than that.
Are you planning to grab a supported video card? Would be nice to see Omni Software applications demoed, along with Lotus Improv and FrameMaker, if possible.
There seems to be plenty of interest so I'll keep an eye out. Alternatively OpenStep offers a lot more compatability
I’m rather sure that’s not 1024x768 you’re running at on the PB. 800x600 maybe.
Very possible Blake, the settings page shows 1024x768 but it may be off
So I said "800x600 maybe." :-) That still felt too high res for what I was seeing so I took a screenshot from your video and a screenshot of NEXTSTEP running on my Mac here at the office (under the Previous 2.0 M68K NeXT emulator) and did a scale comparison. Previous runs the emulated cube at 1120x832, of course, but that doesn't matter for what I'm describing here. I launched the Mandelbrot app and noted that on the non-scaled (actual size) Previous screen, the menu cluster for the app is 95px wide. On the screenshot of your video, I took the width of the bottom menu item (less curvature) and found it to be 80px wide. So I measured in pixels across the screen on the screenshot and found that ~6.75 80-pixel-wide menus could fit across the screen. So I looked up 6.75*95 and came up with 641.25. :-) So, you're running at 640x480 there.
I recall this is what happened to me when I tried to install NSFiP 3.3 on my 486 66 after removing the Wingine video card, designed for NEXTSTEP, and replacing it with an ET4000 W32p card. (I bought the system for NEXTSTEP but became frustrated with lack of mainstream software and games (college) and so switched to a gaming card and installed DOS and Windows...I later reinstalled NEXTSTEP to see how it ran on the new card before I redid the whole thing with Windows 95.) I could only get 640x480 in greyscale, as you have there (though I saw the ET4000 listed on the driver list in your vid...dunno). Anyway, here's the image I used to figure this out: i.imgur.com/gOwSoDk.png I'm obviously a little bit of a freak but the 800x600 call I made was bothering me!
no idea where 1024 came from, might be bug/not 100% ported part of nextstep settings utility.
its 640x480 in 16 color grayscale mode ;-) Thats the only mode available with default VGA driver. nextcomputers org has a writeup on installing Openstep 4.2 VESA VBE drivers into NeXTStep 3.3 - enables 16bit 1280x1024.
Indeed, default VGA. Somehow reminds me of the 320x480 in 256 colors standard VGA mode MS used for Windows 95 intro screen (and exit text). Lots of colors, and a little more resolution than familiar 320x240! I always appreciated that being an Amiga guy and most renders and high-color images were in some variant of 320x400 mode, interlaced.
I got some serious resolution under virtual machine out of OpenStep, I can tell you!! www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/2419063647/in/album-72157604578580203/
hehe, what does Thomas do again?
Correction : Windows 3.11 is not an OS. It is just a DOS GUI application
"32 bit extensions and a graphical shell on top of a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition."
This is the first Hackintosh. If only it were so easy today to run OSX / macos on a current PC, without resorting to hacking.
Nextstep slowly degenerated into what macosx is today.
love your videos.
18 people are Amiga users.
Can that x86 NeXTSTEP release run in emulation on a modern x86 PC, in VirtualBox or whatever?
I think it can but OpenSTEP will give you better results
OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach runs flawlessly using VMware Player on my AMD Ryzen 7950X PC. Fully stable with 32-bit colour, SoundBlaster sound and 100 Mb networking.
It’s hilariously fast running an OS which was designed for a 25 MHz CPU on a 5.5 GHz one.
yeah but can it run Crysis
Couldn't you have installed (or even make) a third-party video-card driver?
Yes but there are none for the small selection of ISA cards I have. A VESA driver exists for OpenStep if you're thinking of trying it, but for me this was the "out of box" 3.3 experience. Check out the links in the description to see it in all its glory on next hardware.
NeXTSTEP -> OpenStep/OPENSTEP -> Cocoa/macOS
Wasn't this OS based on Linux?
I think they later swapped the kernel for bsd one in later releases.
Hanro50 no. nextstep predates linux. nextstep was based on bsd with the final releases being based on bsd 3.3. when nextstep became osx for the mac the base unix was then based on freebsd.
k
THIS! IS! AMAZING! :D
This is Hilarious. People have been forcing mac os X to run on x86 before apple switched to x86, and even now with hackintoshes, meanwhile it was already done when it was still Nexstep!!!!
Haven't used NextStep since I sold my (faulty) next Cube about 24 years ago. I didn't know that was possible on a 486 machine. Fascinating, thanks.
I was going to close the tab and get back to work but NeXTSTEP on a Packard Bell I cannot resist!
Is it possible to install OS2 warp on the same hardware?
I would have thought so, I'll give it a try one day if I can get a nice boxed copy
I have a boxed copy....
we had a bit more modern pacard bell computer. and as IBM was promising that WARP will install on EVERYTHING we took them up on it. (i worked in a computer magazine) and they sent over a man to do the jobb.. he failed. and it was a BIG fail. now i have to say it was a Pacard Bell and those boxes had a RELY bad rep in norway. if you had a problem you had to send it in. and they used old parts to "fix it" so when you got it back the problem was gone and 4 new ones was there. the computer we had was working tho. stil it had so much crappy components that drivers for OS/2 WARP was not possible to get running even tho it then was a old system.
Some copies of OS2 came on 3.5in ED disks (2.8mb). Something to watch out for if you are going to pick up a boxed copy. Pretty uncommon to have the hardware to read those outside of a PS/2.
such a shame the amiga OS was never given the same kind of development as windows/macOS
Ironically....Workbench got a new release this week :D
yeah i saw guru Bills video. amazing.. :)
No way. I'm so going to UA-cam search for that. I wonder what it looks like now?
You could do this?!
"Windows... its dominance secured through marketing and business manoeuvres more so than technical excellence" 🔥Shrewd/predatory business tactics are the sole reason Windows 3.x/9x won in the end.
NextStep runs on x86 architecture?
Yes
This is why Apple had to buy next step and turn it into OS X.
i. I hadn't realised 'til now that the demonstration of Interface Builder given in your video is more-or-less a remake of the demonstration of Interface Builder given by Jobs when Apple bought NeXT, showing off the same features in the same way :)
ii. You really should've included at least a link to the story of how _DOOM_ came to be ported back to NeXTStep - blog.wilshipley.com/2013/12/my-doom-20th-anniversary-stories.html - as amongst other things it's an amusing insight into the personalities involved (like Carmack just emailing a programmer the source code after he asked nicely, and then a few hours later an email stating that Id's legal team were freaking out).
Thanks for the Doom link I'll have a read of that. For a longer demonstration which acknowledges the source check out the longer history videos here: ua-cam.com/video/NbZ1M_qw-a0/v-deo.html - Thank you for watching and commenting
Mr. Softy?
If John Carmack can make Doom on a Packard Bell running NextStep OS, then John Carmack is a bigger legend then I gave him credit for, NextStep is a better OS then I gave it credit for, Packard Bell is well... Packard Bell.
I had too many Packard Bell systems blow-up in my face back in the day to like anything about them.
I run Windows 95 on a 486 with close specs of yours ;)
It also Run Quake!! On single digits fps hahaha
So I had a nearly identical Packard Bell back then, and it used a Cirrus Logic onboard video. I don't remember the exact chip mine had, but I do remember it was part of the CL-GD542x series. And the installation for NeXTSTEP had a driver for CL-GD542x. So does your PB have a different chip, or the driver just not work with your PB? I'd hate to think you went without color when it's entirely possible your system was supported.
Yes I tried the only Cirrus driver included and the result was a garbled mess unfortunately
NeXt was kind of Linux done right back on it days
Honestly, windows 3.1 is probably more useful than this, as the software library is much, much bigger.
Is it? NeXTSTEP is mostly POSIX compliant BSD UNIX. You can run thousands of applications on this, even Windows 3.x ones.
@Mat no you cant, unless you patch, port, and recompile them one by one by hand
Windows NT 3.51 would be a nicer option with the upgrades mentioned. It can run up to Office 97 (albeit I prefer Office 95 under NT 3.51) and 32 bit applications, like FileMaker, titles from Adobe, FrameMaker, Xara, Microsoft Money and many others.
NT 3.51 is a very nice option for dual booting with MS-DOS or PC-DOS. I have it on my unbranded 486 DX-4 with 32 MB of RAM.
@@mattl_ Which is why Windows won and its a lesson on market share over quality. Same can be said for Windows vs Amiga.
Try "a lesson on how to price your product in the market" - NeXTSTEP was expensive as hell and run horribly on lower end hardware. Something this vid also mostly ignores. ID Software DID make DOOM on NeXT ... on a system that cost 10x as much as a regular PC.
Have this been a thing back then? I mean early hackintoshing?
Well yes, but it wasn't hacking, it was officially supported
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Apple sold OPENSTEP 4.2 for Intel machines for several years.
Matt Lee openstep also ran on sparc. in 98 i had openstep on a multiproc maxed out sparc20 that destroyed all my real next hardware in performance.
This really needs done again with a supported video card. Kind of unfair demo as I'm sure you'd get the right card if you had this machine!
And, yes, at the time of the 486 I was playing Doom and transitioning from an Acorn Archimedes I couldn't believe just how bad Windows was, and especially Word compared to Impression. Sadly, the PC was just getting far more development and my college / uni were PC focused with the engineering software I had to use.
good vid, liked & sub
Nice video! But you should really try a more modern version on better suited hardware. I have Openstep running on a board with Intel BX chipset and a Pentium II at 350 MHz. The IDE driver for the BX is much faster and there is a VESA driver, that supports any VESA compliant GPU. Much better experience! Only sound cards are still problematic. Even OpenStep from 1997 supports only ISA sound cards, which I don't have any more...
No doubt there is a lot more to explore but in this instance I was keen to experience "out of box" 3.3. I'll see what I can do. Thanks for watching
Kind of be funny if Bill Gates buggered off to create a company to make Windows NT.