Around the early ninetees, Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple Computer and formed another company called NEXT. It would produce top of the line desktop computers along with a ground breaking operating system and API for developing applications. I remember once going to Lisbon on a field trip from school to a computer fair. There was a booth showing these machines and accessories. It was a black booth, very dark inside, it was scary for a teenager. Anyway I read about it on magazines. My dad bought Byte magazine regularly.

So around the end of september of 2020 I got a Monochrome slab on ebay. I then had to find a keyboard and mouse for it. To connect them I had to buy a custom board made by a guy in the USA, that sold them also on ebay. And a monitor cable to go with it. And a board that replaces the hard drive and takes SD cards as a hard disk. I already spent some 500 euros on this old "toy".

Now I going to connect it to my internal network and study the operating system and the environment, just to get to know stuff done back in the 90's that are present on today's systems.

2021-08-15 : Update

I now own :

• One turbo mono slab with 8MB RAM
• Four mono slabs each With 8MB RAM
• One cube with 64MB RAM (not yet arrived in the mail)

The guy that sold me three of these mono slabs, also has SCSI to SD adapters, so now and in the future all my NeXT machines will have SD cards for hard drives, much faster and replaceable. I already had a crack at developing some software on it. With the developer tools, I made a desktop app to manage files with key-value pairs.

Below is a screenshot that I took on the actual NeXT machine, while I was writing the game manuals from Hero's Quest 1 and Space Quest 1.

2021-10-13 : Update

My NeXT Cube finally arrived in the mail. I'm so happy with it. What a beautiful machine. Here are some pictures :

It has a Motorolla 68040 CPU, 64 MegaBytes of RAM, and the hard Drive is a SCSI to SD adapter. It currently has a 16 GB SD card in it. I has NextStep 3.3 installed.

Because I setup a NetInfo domain with one of my slabs (the Turbo One that was on the desk before), I immediately got my home directory mounted through NFS. All the code I am developing is there. I just copied the CVS binaries over from the NetInfo controller to the Cube, so I can use the CVS repository mounted through NFS from my home server.

Now I have to setup a backup plan for the home directory (the code is already being backed up on the server), but I want to have it anyway, there are other files in there. Just setup a cron job to make a tarball and ftp to the file server and the NAS.