19 Jul
2000
19 Jul
'00
10:09 a.m.
Mike,
I won a lot at the auction for $15. Under the pile was
a 1988 NeXT Cube =
(fist year of production after six years of umm, development), matching =
NeXT laser printer, and keyboard, and mouse. Trading the rest of the =
cart off got me also a 21" radius monster for free that I niavely hoped =
I'd be able to use with the Cube.
Cha-ching! Nice score.
I rushed home with my new MegaPixel, fondiling it along
the way, and =
immediately hooked everyting up. Power! ...Well, it boots. I get to =
the NeXT rom monitor ver 1 rel 46 and can exercise the machine from =
there. It doesn't have the floptical in it and a 'b sd' boot command =
returns a read capacity error on the scsi hard disk. With the rom =
monitor I can boot to an ethernet attress or scsi target. Is there =
anyway I can get a disk image of ole NeXTStep on a compatible scsi drive =
and can I use something like an Apple scsi CD-ROM with it?
You can use an Apple CD-ROM, my cube works fine with an Apple 300 external.
It's possible... Right now my optical is intermittent (just needs cleaning,
I hope?) but once I get it cleaned I have:
- Optical disk which says NeXTStep 1.0 on the package. I haven't tried
booting this disk, so I can't promise that's really what's in it.
- 380 M original Maxtor hard drive from my cube. That's now out of the
cube to make room for a floppy + 3.5" 540M hard drive combo in a custom
bracket. (which hard drive is also getting a wee bit flaky, I think.)
I've backed up the 380M drive to optical, so what I could do when I take
the system home to work on it is boot the NS 1.0 optical, build the 380M
hard drive from the optical, and ship you the 380M drive. It should be
bootable in that configuration. (I'd take as an even trade a known-good
3.5" SCSI drive with capacity greater than 540 Meg, which I'd then use to
swap for my flaky drive, but that may not be a good trade for you. Or you
could just agree to keep html out of your posts :-) . ) I won't be able to
work on it until next weekend at least, though. Sorry about that.
Alternately, hit http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n70038 and
surf from there; Apple was upgrading for free to NS 3.3 for any existing
machine. (I'd do this anyway if I were you, just to get a current copy of
the OS, whether you want to keep the machine original or not.) You'll get a
CD. It is possible to load from CD, but I think you need either a floppy or
an optical to start the boot process (but I'm not clear on that). There are
then patches to put atop that...depends on whether you want original
NeXTStep or current NeXTStep.
Let me know...
- Mark