Prior to my time there, my university issued DEC alphastations to CS students. By my time they had moved on to Windows 2000/XP + Linux. So one saturday I popped into the university auction and picked up an DEC Alphastation, a NextStation turbocolor and a couple of Sparcstations. About $5-20 a piece. I was super tempted to get a SGI Origin. No one was bidding on it but the logistics of moving and powering a supercomputer was out of my scope. I power up the Alphastation and imagine my luck, it's my professor's old workstation!
Right after NextStep, they really need to get Apollo Domain/OS (not HP-UX) on the HP 9000/425e. :) Apollo innovated a lot, and rethought or created the network OS, display system, SCM and CI/build servers, etc. There are ideas you won't see elsewhere, or that only reappeared decades later.
If they don't have SunOS 4 with SunView on one of those SPARCstations, that's another neat one to have in the collection. Architecture-wise, a Sun-3 (m68k-based rather than SPARC) would also be nice, and were often used with "shoebox" drives, to complement the pizza box. There were also some neat Sun-386i models, though those were minitowers, not pizza boxes.
Since the theme is "Pizza Box computer", DG actually advertised the less-known m88k-based AViiON as "Mainframe in a Pizza Box", IIRC. If you've read Soul of a New Machine, "AViiON" looks like "Nova II".
The last release of NeXTSTEP was in the 90s. It’s fascinating how many of the concepts that are still the same, or similar. DNS, TCP/IP, NFS, FTP, resolv.conf, tar, ICMP... Some of them are outdated, but still. The Unix paradigm has held up well IMO.
NeXTSTEP was hardly related to UNIX, as in culture.
Sure it had POSIX and was partially built on top of BSD, but that was just to get a foothold on the UNIX workstation market.
NeXTSTEP was all about Objective-C frameworks, including at the device driver levels, and the same culture is at play at Apple and NeXTSTEP derived OSes.
Being an UNIX is just a story to sell and get people into the platform, nothing else, specially valuable when one is either a startup getting into the nascent workstation market, or a business close to get insolvent.
I went through pizzabox.computer and the personal blog, etc., but found no way to contact other than a twitter handle that hasn't updated in about two years ...
If you're here, I would like to donate funds to you, and these pizzabox endevours, with no strings attached. You can email info@rsync.net to reach me.
About 95-99% of the program logic remained the same, however, there's naming differences (functions, classes, selectors), type changes (NeXTSTEP APIs used C strings & floats, Cocoa uses NSStrings & CGFloats), and missing functionality that had to be reimplemented (Display PostScript functions, Storage class).
I originally expected to have to recreate the NeXTSTEP UI resources by hand in Cocoa, as Xcode's Interface Builder can't read NeXTSTEP nib files. However, Xcode's IB does read OpenStep nib files (as of Xcode 2.5 & earlier - not sure if recent versions can still do this), and OpenStep's Interface Builder can read NeXTSTEP nibs, so it just took opening & saving the NeXTSTEP nibs to OpenStep nibs in an OpenStep VM.
If the developer used proper MVC it should be as simple as bolting on a GUI with interface builder. A lot of Next Step code has been in Cocoa for a long time (if you see NSObject, NSFoundation, etc. that's all NextStep).
I still have an old Sun SPARCstation IPC somewhere at home. I haven't turned it on for over 15 years so I have no idea if it's still works. Good times.
I had one of these with NeXTSTEP but a while after a RAM upgrade it let its smoke out. I wasn't ever able to get it all back in so I threw the whole thing away.
