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NEXT computers hook up and after boot help

Monitors
What is the difference between a N4000 and N4000A?
The original N4000 had no internal microphone. The N4000A shipped with the 68040 slabs and cubes, weighed less and had an internal microphone. They are otherwise identical. The mono monitors have zero power management capabilities so even when the screensaver was running the tube was always lit and wearing the cathode down. The tubes are also not a common monochrome tube, so there's a lot of mono monitors out there that are very, very tired that cannot be replaced because of how the monitor is both the video display and the break-out for the various audio and peripheral I/O connections. Thanks, Steve.

You have one spare cube power supply and the non-NeXT looking power supply is from a Silicon Graphics Octane. You also have an extra Magneto Optical drive. Unless it's been recapped it will not work.

Your stack of NeXT CD drives all require a CD Caddy to put the disc in. That I recall you cannot boot any NeXT system from the CD directly and require a floppy drive and the boot floppy that came with the install media.

Looking at your stash of cubes you have a bunch of Mix and Match. Some have 68040 CPU boards AND older 68030 boards. I don't think that was ever a supported combination (With hacks you can run multiple CPU boards in one cube but it's hard on the power supply) so I think they were just storing boards in extra cubes. You have one NeXT Dimension board, which was the color video option for a cube.

The keyboards available from NeXT were "ADB" and "Non-ADB". You seem to have one of each. Most cubes and the mono/color slabs were typically non-ADB. Turbo Color slabs were normally ADB.

Sound Boxes are the digital guts out of the mono monitors that handle the peripherals and audio I/O. They were only used with NeXT machines that had color monitors.

You have a small variety of cartridge media. The NeXT branded optical disk is what would go into the previously mentioned spare drive you have. That drive would go into a cube and as mentioned, the initial machines would boot and operate exclusively from that and it was REALLY really slow. Thanks, Steve. The Maxell and Verbatim branded cartridges are not NeXT however I dunno, perhaps previous owner had an extra MO drive attached? The drive NeXT shipped was very early and not compatible with any later optical disk standard. The SyQuest cartridge likewise is just a SyQuest cartridge.

Keep in mind that NeXT had a number of models over their lifetime.

NeXT "Computer" (cube with a 68030 CPU and an N4000 mono monitor)
NeXTCube (cube with a 68040 CPU and an N4000 mono monitor, AND a NeXT Dimension, Y-cable, sound box and a color monitor if you ordered it)
NeXTstation (pizza box with a 68040 CPU and an N4000A mono monitor)
NeXTstation Color (pizza box with a 68040 CPU, Y-cable, sound box and a color monitor)
NeXTstation Turbo Color (Pizza box with a 33mhz 68040 CPU and a color monitor)
NeXTCube Turbo (cube with a 33mhz 68040 CPU and an N4000A mono monitor, AND a NeXT Dimension, Y-cable, sound box and a color monitor if you ordered it)

At the very end NeXT started porting NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP to x86/SPARC/PA-RISC and blew the pants off all their old 68K hardware in terms of performance. I have a 233mhz Pentium 1 running NEXTSTEP 3.3 with a Diamond Viper Pro PCI video card and to the benchmarks it's no contest and a fraction of the cost.

Color monitors use the weird connector with the three coaxial connectors in them (the proper name is "13W3"). Mono monitors used the cables with 19 pin connectors. The 9 pin cable would be used to attach NeXT's 400dpi laser printer.

The Panasonic BR-2/3A lithium batteries NeXT used are ultrastable. They last decades and I have never seen one leak but you DO require a good one to be installed for a NeXT machine to work (assuming you don't also have to recap the system as well)

NeXT Computers was Steve's "angsty teen" era where he was trying to tell everyone he was the sole success for Apple rather than an ingredient of it and that he could take that and build a new empire. Poached some of the best engineers in the industry, hired one of the best design firms at the time and was so hyper-focused on the product even the power cables were custom with little NeXT logos on them. There is no denying NeXT made an absolutely beautiful line of computers and peripherals. Managed to blow a fairly large amount of cash and ship computers that were too expensive and exclusive for private users and academics and too slow for most scientific users. Their take on adding color to a computer was a hilarious and incredibly late attempt to introduce a new standard and through the 2000's most NeXT hardware was relatively ignored beyond a curiosity. At it's bottom I couldn't sell a boxed and unused mono NeXTstation with a fresh install, N4000A monitor and the laser printer for $250 BIN on ebay. That was early 2011. After he died later that year it was rediscovered as a forgotten era in Steve's bold* and ambitious* ideas that should be collected and cherished like a historical artifact.

(IMHO, Steve's a douche. He's neither bold or ambitious. He's a salesman who sold products on very misleading information and people to this day hold him to a concerningly high regard, given how many skeletons we openly know are crammed into his closet.)
 
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I went through the box of manual and other NEXT stuff. The schismatic stuff was for Apple computes. not NEXT. Sorry.
I found NextStep OS docs and disks that match the cover in the above thread. But that owners guide was not included.
Thanks for those pages above. That will help A LOT.

I too a lot of pictures. I'll group them in following posts.
Which Apple computers do you have schematics for? They might still be relevant for the community.

Most important info has been mentioned, you'll probably need to replace the caps in many of the devices if you plan on using them

Good luck / fun
 
powerlot
WOW thanks!!!
That answers A LOT of questions. I think I can get my head around what to hook up and try.
Can I move the CF /SCSI adapter to different computers without having to make any "BIOS" type changes? Or is an OS install specific to each machine due to it's configuration?
I have OS 3.2 & 3.3 with boot FD and CD's
Several of the cubes do not have FD's. They seem to have a CD-Rom and the removable HD. How would the OS be installed?
As you alluded too, each cube should only have one motherboard. Correct? So I appear to have more MB's than cubes?

Recaping is not a problem to do. It is just determining the values and parameters of the old part, then finding and ordering a correct replacement. I have lots of mis-ordered caps from past projects. To wide, wrong lead spacing, to tall, to narrow, wrong type (ceramic/vs tantalum), wrong value, pf vs uf and misplaced decimal points, etc

When I get back to the house where all this is located this weekend I will have lots full trying correct combinations to see what works, and not.
I want to get a best solid system working for myself and then pass along the rest.

The Apple books with schmatics are alrady archived in seveal places. Nothing new once I looked closer.
Again many thanks!!
 
Can I move the CF /SCSI adapter to different computers without having to make any "BIOS" type changes? Or is an OS install specific to each machine due to it's configuration?
I've never worked with flash-based disk emulators but usually once they are setup and formatted on a machine, they retain said data exactly how it was written and will look like a normal drive to any computer, until you change the drive settings in the emulator.

NeXTSTEP can accept large disks but filesystems are limited to 2gb per partition if I recall (this was still a lot of space in 1991)

Several of the cubes do not have FD's. They seem to have a CD-Rom and the removable HD. How would the OS be installed?
You have a PLI Superfloppy. That is a 2.88mb floppy drive with a SCSI interface that was sold specifically for NeXT systems. I've never used one but they were a popular method to kickstart the setup process.
A trick I did back before I got a floppy drive for my cube was to perform the setup on a mono NeXTstation, then when it completed and had to reboot I pulled the drive and took it and the CD drive and connected them back to the cube to continue where I was setting the system up. the NeXTstations were basically a NeXT Cube but with no expansion slots, so the OS install is interchangeable without any configuration changes.

As you alluded too, each cube should only have one motherboard. Correct? So I appear to have more MB's than cubes?
Correct. 68030 boards only have coaxial ethernet. 68040 boards have coaxial and twisted pair ethernet. Since you have multiple turbo systems I'm curious if you also have a turbo 68040 board for a cube hiding in there. those were the fastest model they ever made. visually the layout looks very different from the previous two revisions of the board.
 
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NeXT Computers was Steve's "angsty teen" era where he was trying to tell everyone he was the sole success for Apple rather than an ingredient of it and that he could take that and build a new empire. Poached some of the best engineers in the industry, hired one of the best design firms at the time and was so hyper-focused on the product even the power cables were custom with little NeXT logos on them. There is no denying NeXT made an absolutely beautiful line of computers and peripherals. Managed to blow a fairly large amount of cash and ship computers that were too expensive and exclusive for private users and academics and too slow for most scientific users.

Funny enough the "truly personal computer" was popular at the NSA and related agencies, since the rapid application development enabled by Interface Builder and later, the database connection tools, allowed them to quickly build apps (since some apps simply can't be bought off the shelf for those agencies).

However the Jobs hubris bit, in that NeXTStep was not fully POSIX compliant and Jobs refused to pay a few engineers to rectify this; making all purchases of NeXT machines for FedGov have to be specially approved, while meanwhile anyone with budget could buy SPARC systems.

The famous Reality Distortion Field couldn't overcome the Fed bureaucracy :LOL:
 
powerlot
WOW thanks!!!
That answers A LOT of questions. I think I can get my head around what to hook up and try.
User NeXT answered most of them, so thanks there as well ;)

I once tried writing a hard drive image and running it from a BlueSCSI.. it kinda worked but there were tons of file system errors. So it's probably best you format it directly from the machine you'll be using it in.
 
Funny enough the "truly personal computer" was popular at the NSA and related agencies, since the rapid application development enabled by Interface Builder and later, the database connection tools, allowed them to quickly build apps (since some apps simply can't be bought off the shelf for those agencies).

However the Jobs hubris bit, in that NeXTStep was not fully POSIX compliant and Jobs refused to pay a few engineers to rectify this; making all purchases of NeXT machines for FedGov have to be specially approved, while meanwhile anyone with budget could buy SPARC systems.

The famous Reality Distortion Field couldn't overcome the Fed bureaucracy :LOL:
Indeed. I could not understand that: I wound up writing and compiling enough POSIX bits to allow NeXTStep to continue to compile sendmail and BIND (it was my mail server) but the lack of official support was just plain annoying.
 
That's a pretty astonishing haul, @KLund1 , congratulations! I recently became a 'cube' owner and have managed to get my nextdimension equipped machine up and running without too much fuss. It's been a fun project. Please let us know how you get on!
 
Difficult to say. For me, yes, it’s worth it as the cube is the machine I wanted, not the nextstation. But a cube and a nextdimension is altogether an absurdly expensive purchase, so ‘worth it’ is not easily answered for all cases!

If I could ever get hold of a cube turbo motherboard then I could rest easy, but I imagine they’re harder even than the nextdimension to buy these days and probably similarly priced! But I can live in hope :D
 
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The Color NeXTstations have only 12-bit colour, so if you want "true colour" then the NeXTdimension is the only way to do it with black hardware. I don't happen to notice a vast difference in the everyday experience of using the machines; many colour applications seem to have been designed to accommodate the 'station's capabilities. Then again, I'm not doing a lot of image editing or desktop publishing etc. with my NeXT machines.
 
Color on a NeXT, especially was really bizarre how they marketed it.

img6.gif
(This was a prototype board. Note the C-Cube MPEG chip. This photo got used in a lot of marketing literature)

Nextdimension1.jpg <---(click to enlarge)
(This was the shipping product. The hardware MPEG glue was dropped but an expansion header was added so they could try and tack it and other upgrades on later)


The Dimension no matter how you look at it is a technical powerhouse for being a color video card, considering all it does is render and accelerate Color Display PostScript. You got a local i860 RISC chip A/D, D/A and support for gobs of additional board resident memory specifically for the i860, on top of dedicated framebuffer memory. It's basically its own system.....that as a developer you couldn't directly interact with.
For reasons I don't really understand, an app developer can only talk to the Dimension through an API and cannot directly program the Dimension to take advantage of the hardware. You are locked into the ROM microcode. As a result it did okay with 2D color and shapes and Steve would proudly demonstrate how it was able to handle transparent and semi-transparent images but as soon as you touched on 3D geometry it fell on its face and if you tried video it only got worse. There's a demo out on Youtube where Steve is talking about the video capabilities of the Dimension and sheepishly mentions that the Star Wars clip you see on the screen is in fact streaming real-time from a laserdisc player. Even with the power of a 68040, a ton of ram and a separate i860 with its own ram a NeXT could not capture and store video even at a then impressive 15fps 320 x 240. They did prototype additional MPEG hardware but it was abandoned. All you got was single-frame capture.
(on a tangent, this is probably one of those times where Steve demanded something of the hardware, the engineers could only deliver so much, Steve was forced to eat crow and ultimately one or two people were probably fired because he was so full of himself to admit he was asking too much)

When they abandoned the cube for the slabs and added color, Most of what else made the Dimension such an interesting board was gutted to bring the costs down, considering the MSRP on the Dimension was around $4000, on top of paying $7000+ for the Cube.
 
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*nod* Thank you for that data. I remember the C-Cube failure, it seemed like an excellent step up from say an Indigo Elan, but ultimately it didn't go anywhere. (sigh)
 
Wow, that's also good stuff, glad the developers are finally talking about the details now that there is no one left to enforce NDAs :-)

It's been a year or so since I have fired up my TurboColor and my original beta NextStation (CPU has the "sample" written on it) Both good systems. And I think a mono turbo slab as well.....
 
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