NeXT
Veteran Member
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.Monitors
What is the difference between a N4000 and N4000A?
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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