I'm back today with the next instalment of the NeXT Land Journey.
A month or so has passed since I began looking into the NeXT Cube, and although the first post was last night, I'm trying to keep this blog linear as things happened.
A lot can happen in a month, unless you are UK customs (more on that later).
So, upon searching the internet, forums and a few usenet groups I started to find out more about the cube and it's OS.
Information is a bit thin on the ground for these machines, as not many regular people as far as I can see actually had them, they were used a lot in research and education, and most notably by Tim Berners Lee, who created the first ever web browser and the world wide Web as we know it today, using a NeXT cube at CERN.
I found out that CERN has recently resurrected the first website made by Tim, and believe it or not the actual cube that served as the first webserver, doing what web servers do, serving web pages!
You can find the first website ever here:
***The First ever website***
On my travels through cyberspace looking for information, I came across a few very good fountains of knowledge where all things NeXT are concerned.
The first was a forum, dedicated to NeXT hardware and software called nextcomputers.org
This is where I found out that there are different types of NeXT hardware and operating systems.
The Motorola hardware is affectionately know as "Black Hardware" with the Intel and other hardware being known as "White Hardware"
The NeXT Step Motorola based operating system went up to version 3.4, and was later superseded by Open Step which ran on more types of hardware and was literally opened up for all to use, this signalled the OS becoming more of a set of API's that could be used on other hardware.
Sadly NeXT was only around for 3 years or so before it was taken over by Apple as we know them today.
There is a whole back story about the takeover, but I will briefly summarize:
Jobs and Woz started Apple, Apple's board eventually kicked Jobs out, Jobs went and created NeXT, Apple started going down the pan, Apple re-hired Jobs and bought NeXT off him, and then used NeXT hardware and Software concepts to create OS X and the Macintosh computer as we know it today.
In particular, the Mach kernel, Unix and the BSD subsystem were all used, and still are to this day.
As a side note, I noticed many of the NeXT system notification "sounds" are present that are still in OS X even now.
There's a whole lot more to it, but you can research that yourself ;)
Right, back to the travels......
The second fountain of knowledge I came across was a man called Rob Blessin, who runs a site called Blackhole Inc
Rob was, and still is a NeXT systems integrator, and keeping the NeXT torch burning by still actively providing information, and actually still selling hardware components and parts, along with original and backup copies of the OS and ROM images.
Here is a video of the London 2012 olympics opening ceremony, opened by Tim Berners Lee, using a NeXT cube (that he tweeted from to open the ceremony) that was integrated by Rob Blessin.
How very cool is that!
I'd hit the motherload, So what was I to do with all this new found knowledge and supply of NeXT upgrade parts?
Coming up
How to blow a months wages and the snail like pace of UK customs.
And, less talky more pictures.
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