NEXTcube

How's the NeXTcube compare to the NeXTstation? I'd never touched a NeXT of any sort until last night. Someone on a local BBS posted a message looking for a good home for an unwanted complete NeXTstation Turbo Color, so of course I was there within the hour loading the thing up. It booted right up and ran pretty dang well for a 33 MHz system. Running the Mandelbrot demo program showed the lack of underlying horsepower, but I think it's still more responsive overall than my old SPARCstations. For that matter, Windows Explorer on a PII-400 can be a frustrating experience and it's nice to see a system that makes good use of its resources. Plus, the whole thing just LOOKS really cool. With a 33 MHz 68040 and 32 MB of RAM, will this thing run a useable web browser? I've got an SGI Indigo2 in the living room for web surfing right now, but maybe it's time to swap it out for an easier-to-use system. A bit off-topic, but do they have a release of AGI's Satellite Tool Kit for NeXTStep? It runs pretty well under IRIX. How does Rendezvous compare, or have you used STK? I'm actually about three miles from the pad where IMAGE was launched, BTW. We all climbed up on the roof to watch that one... pretty nice launch if I remember right. Those Delta II's are really cool at night, though. Scott -----Original Message----- From: Mark Tapley [mailto:mtapley@swri.edu] Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2000 2:12 PM To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Re: NEXTcube Mike Ford wrote: Yo! My cube normally sits on my desk at Southwest Research Institute (and is my only desktop machine at work, my other work computer being a Powerbook 3400). I use it for websurfing (OmniWeb), compiling command lists weekly for the IMAGE spacecraft (Perl 5.0, Terminal), pass and orbit visualization (Rendezvous), attitude determination software design, testing, and debug for IMAGE (Mathematica 2.0), newsgroup reading (NewsGrazer), preparing presentations (Concurrence, Diagram), analyzing attitude and other data (cc, Quantrix), and other stuff. I also do incremental backups of my powerbook to it (ftpd, compress). It's got an optical and a 540M hard drive and a floppy internal (using a special bracket to get the floppy to the second faceplate slot and still hold the 3.5" hard drive in that same bay). It also has two 1.2G externals in an old PC chassis (a far far nobler cause than that chassis ever served before...gotta get that thing painted black... :-) ). The machine is now upstairs at home, because while trying to upgrade to Mathematica 3.0, I used for the first time, to hook my CD drive into the SCSI chain, a Centronix-to-Centronix cable that was apparently not a SCSI cable. (What do I know, it came out of a box that said "SCSI cables, $3" at Wierd Stuff Warehouse). The boot hard drive got scrambled, then I discovered I don't know as much as I thought I did about "dump" and "restore". I'm about recovered from that by now, so I'll try again (with a *different* cable setup) on the Mma 3.0 install. BTW, as of a few weeks ago, Wolfram was about to quit doing upgrades from Mma 2.2 and earlier, so if you've been putting that off, don't. The 25 MHz 68040 CPU is not as fast as modern workstation processors. That said, NeXTStep 3.3 on NeXT is a very solid and very useful OS/Development environment for a workstation, and the amount of freeware/shareware/payware out for NeXT is amazing. Since nothing I do requires a lot of serious crunch power (or if it does can be run overnight), the NeXT is a really good machine for me. I know of a couple of folks around here I'd like to get connected with NeXTs. Also, I'd *love* to find a NeXTDimension board, cable, and color monitor to add to my system at a price my wife will accept. Finally, there are a couple of NeXT resellers still on the market who would likely be interested in hearing about big piles of new hardware. If you see/hear of another batch in peril, *particularly* if it includes a cube tied to a color monitor, let me know and I'll hopefully arrange for you to grumble back and forth to the bank several times. - Mark