It was always my experience ... I think NeXTstep had a reputation of being a little balky on the proprietary NeXT hardware. I am fortunate to have a decent swath of their product line ... an original '030 Cube, a Color slab and a Turbo Color slab and even on the Turbo slab with 32 megs RAM and a 7200 RPM drive, NS 3.3 gets laggy. Slow as it is, the entire package has certainly got some class and it's something to revel at, of course. Can you even run Openstep on the NeXT proprietary hardware? The performance must be awful... I halfway thought NS 3.3 was the last revision they would run ... 3.3 should be pretty common in the wild because NeXT was giving it away for free with a valid NeXT serial number about 15 years ago as a Y2K mitigation strategy :O I run 3.3 on all my NeXTs, even the '030 Cube. If you really want to see NeXTstep 3.3 fly, people say it's great on the HP 9000/712 :O Best, Sean On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 1:54 AM, Brian Archer <archer174 at gmail.com> wrote:

I don't buy it :O Maybe just navigating around the operating system it's true you won't see it balk too much, but once you run an app ... take OmniWeb; it takes a few minutes to render my simple HTML 3.2 homepage on my NeXTstation color slab, 040/25, 32 megs RAM ... the turbo color slab isn't much faster ... Contrast to a contemporary Mac i.e. a Quadra 950 or a Mac IIfx, they will render the page faster and feel more responsive. I love the elegance and design of the NeXT hardware and software package but no denying it was pokey ... relative to contemporaries ... almost absolutely :O NeXTstep is a sophisticated environment and it's hard work for an '040 ... Maybe I feel it more because it's slinging 24 bpp at ~1280x1024! You have a mono station? NeXTstep's (err, Rhapsody's, err, Mac OS X's) performance was awful when first ported to the PPC as well. I don't think they really got things cleaned up good until 10.2, at least, maybe 10.3... Best, Sean On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Chris Osborn <fozztexx at fozztexx.com> wrote:

I don't recall/its been too long ago anyway to recall my OmniWeb experiences I do have it loaded on my Apple Mac mini, and it seems to perform just fine. No Pentium II experiences or HPPA to directly relate to though. Jerry On 06/ 1/15 09:46 AM, Chris Osborn wrote:

Jumping in on the bandwagon. A few years back, I had a friend loan me his NeXT slab for about a year. 25 Mhz CPU. Everything pretty much stock. My observation of the default GUI was it was pretty darn quick, not even taking into account the hardware it was running on. Jerry On 05/29/15 02:44 PM, Toby Thain wrote:

Well, numbers don't lie; I guess I just remember the NeXT as a slower machine because I was always playing with it side by side with SGIs or something :O It actually stacks up pretty well, here's the results of my rough little morning benchmark if anyone wants to know :O NeXT config was: Color Slab, 040/25, 32 MB RAM, NeXTstep 3.3, 5400 RPM drive, 24 bit color, 1280x1024 Mac config was: Quadra 800, 040/33, 20 MB RAM, Mac OS 7.5.3, 5400 RPM drive, 16-bit color, 800x600 Not totally a fair contest since my Q800 can't sling video quite like my NeXT can, however, the two configurations aren't totally out of line with one another ... I measured: Boot-up time: NeXTstation Color - 1:24 Quadra 800 - 1:35 (although many extensions are installed - could likely be reduced 10-20 seconds) Browser launch time: NeXTstation Color - ~0:22 (OmniWeb) Quadra 800 - ~0:25 (Netscape Navigator 3.x) Page load and render, my personal main page: NeXTstation Color - ~0:15 (OmniWeb) Quadra 800 - ~0:12 (Netscape Navigator 3.x) Page load and render, my Definity PBX at home page (fairly long text) NeXTstation Color - ~0:43 (OmniWeb) Quadra 800 - ~0:30 (Netscape Navigator 3.x) Page load and render, my Nortel PBX at home page (a little bigger yet) NeXTstation Color - ~0:57 Quadra 800 - ~0:30 So the color Slab is actually about neck and neck with the Quadra 800... considering it's around 25% less clock rate and is moving a lot more video data than the Quadra, it actually keeps up pretty well. The Quadra does a little better rendering "larger" pages but that's just the test I chose and we all know OmniWeb isn't the fastest thing in the world ... Not so bad after all. I guess this vindicates the NeXT :O It really isn't any slower than a contemporary Mac and can in fact be slightly quicker in some cases. Best, Sean On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote:

I am running OPENSTEP on an Axil 320 (SPARCstation 20 clone) with 416M of memory and a 60MHz SuperSPARC processor (sadly OPENSTEP (at least the version that I have) only supports one of the two processors in the system). The system runs OPENSTEP very well. alan On 5/28/15 8:20 AM, Sean Caron wrote: