Kai's Adventures in NeXT Land: Kai's Adventures in NeXT Land

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Hello World,

I was recently kindly donated a NeXT Step NeXT Cube by a colleague at work.

It's a late 1992 2nd generation model, with the Motorola 68040 CPU running at 25Mhz, with a respectable 8MB of RAM, and a 5.25 600MB SCSI winchester drive.

Up until this point, I had only ever really read about the NeXT systems and OS, although we did have one at my college, it used to sulk in a corner and I don't think it actually worked.

So, follow me now as I go down the rabbit hole to find out what I can about this mythical beast........

I collected the cube, its monitor and printer from my colleague and was truly amazed that it was all still in it's original packaging, a true collectors gem if ever there was one!

Once I got it home I started of course, by admiring the design of this thing, its made of magnesium, and fully strips down fairly easily, and you can even remove some really long screws and the outer cube splits into 3 pieces. (but I haven't been brave enough to do this yet!)

I found this in the box....

Conveniently NeXT supply you with a specially branded torque wrench for removing the back panel of the cube!

Let's dive in.......

Here it is with the back cover removed, and the fan disconnected.

(I have omitted the boring cleaning photos highlighting the removal of a decade or so's worth of dust)

Time to pull out the innards and investigate further....

That's the main board gently sliding out, another hat tip to the designer, everything is literally on rails making it a pleasure to work with.

I later found out that all slot in boards connect to a common backplane that supplies the power and provides the data busses.

Aaaand it's out, is this what giving birth is like in cyberspace?

Look at all those lovely shiny Motorola chips, they really don't make them like they used too!

Here is a brief explanation of some of the components on the board: (Thanks to Rob Blessin for the image, more on him later).

Warning! Hardware porn.....

So, After a good cleanup and checking all the RAM, ROM and other socketed chips for for good contact, would it still power up after all this time and recent fiddling shenanigans?

Find out after the break.....

coming up