7 Mar
2017
7 Mar
'17
8:10 p.m.
I have some NeXT hardware that I'm looking to re-home. Items include:
1 NeXT cube with an unknown expansion card
2 Monochrome monitors
2 NeXTStation "slab" workstations, non-functional
Boxed NeXTStep installation media with manuals (may not be complete)
2 Mice, 3 keyboards, various cables, SCSI drives, odds and ends.
(Picture at
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Sme9n3mG2USjNJa3BaSVFJekk/view>;
the fruit is not included.)
I'm located in Toronto; preference will be given to anyone who is
willing to come here and haul it away. I *may* be willing to ship it
somewhere, but if so, you're paying for it and it can't cause me a lot
of hassle.
Everything is believed to work unless marked otherwise; however, it's
been years since I powered up any of these so I can't promise
anything.
The monitors both worked when I last tried them. One had succumbed to
the dimness problem but the other was still bright, if blurry.
Presumably, you could swap CRTs and have one like-new NeXT monochrome
monitor.
One of the two slabs would get partway through its boot sequence
before hanging so it might be easily fixable. The other one was
stripped for parts before I got it. The Cube worked the last time I
tried it. I did, however, try to add a second drive, which didn't
work. This may have screwed up the SCSI termination.
My preferred contact email is <chris at blit.ca>.
--Chris
--
Chris Reuter http://www.blit.ca
"I used to be able to count to 1023 on my fingers in two minutes, but
then I
got better."
--Eb Oesch, <903f6dfe.0303242039.1f9e65b6 at posting.google.com>
8 Mar
8 Mar
8:06 a.m.
On Mar 7, 2017, at 10:10 PM, Chris Reuter via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
I have some NeXT hardware that I'm looking to re-home. Items include:
1 NeXT cube with an unknown expansion card
One reasonable candidate would be a NeXTDimension video card. Connectors on mine, from the
top:
1) DE-9
2) DIN
3) RCA
4) DIN
5) RCA
6) RCA
(large space)
7) video, with coax imbedded among other connectors in a D shell - 13W3, I think.
If true, this is a reasonably valuable card. However it would make sense for there to be a
color monitor (Sun or NeXT or similar) somewhere nearby if that?s what this is.
2 Mice, 3 keyboards, various cables, SCSI drives,
odds and ends.
Those all look to me like the original non-ADB keyboards and mice
The monitors both worked when I last tried them. One
had succumbed to
the dimness problem but the other was still bright, if blurry.
Presumably, you could swap CRTs and have one like-new NeXT monochrome
monitor.
?Blurry?, in my experience, often clears up after 12-24 hours of running. It may be
worthwhile to power it up and leave it that way for a day or so to see whether this works
for you as well.
I truly hope someone saves these!
11:09 a.m.
On 2017-03-08 11:06, Tapley, Mark wrote:
On Mar 7, 2017, at 10:10 PM, Chris Reuter via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It's been a long time since I had the Cube open so this is from memory.
However, I'm reasonably sure that this was based off a NeXT card (whose
name escapes me) that was half bus interface and half prototype board so
that you could build one-off interfaces. I originally bought the Cube
as surplus from the University of Waterloo, so I'm guessing that it's an
interface to some piece of lab equipment.
Here's a slightly blurry picture of the Cube's back:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Sme9n3mG2UYUxuVWZ2eXhfS2M/view
The Mystery Board occupies the leftmost slot (IIRC).
--Chris
I have some NeXT hardware that I'm looking to re-home. Items include:
1 NeXT cube with an unknown expansion card
One reasonable candidate would be a NeXTDimension video card.
11:22 a.m.
On Mar 8, 2017, at 1:09 PM, <bulk at blit.ca> <bulk at blit.ca> wrote:
It's been a long time since I had the Cube open so
this is from memory. However, I'm reasonably sure that this was based off a NeXT card
(whose name escapes me) that was half bus interface and half prototype board so that you
could build one-off interfaces. I originally bought the Cube as surplus from the
University of Waterloo, so I'm guessing that it's an interface to some piece of
lab equipment.
Here's a slightly blurry picture of the Cube's back:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Sme9n3mG2UYUxuVWZ2eXhfS2M/view
The Mystery Board occupies the leftmost slot (IIRC).
Now that is interesting! I concur completely, this does not look anything like my
NeXTDimension. But it looks from the outside as though you have not one but two boards on
the left side. My cube originally had only the board on the right of your picture (and in
that same location). Unless there are internal connections between the two slots on the
left side, you may have two Mystery Boards.
Very neat! I hope we get to hear more about this system eventually.
- Mark
11:28 a.m.
Hi Mark,
I have reached out to Chris (I am local) and will providing a new home for
the lot. I will be happy to take hi-res pics of the board when I get them
over the weekend.
Santo
On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 2:22 PM, Tapley, Mark via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Mar 8, 2017, at 1:09 PM, <bulk at blit.ca>
<bulk at blit.ca> wrote:
It's been a long time since I had the Cube
open so this is from memory.
However, I'm reasonably sure that this was based
off a NeXT card (whose
name escapes me) that was half bus interface and half prototype board so
that you could build one-off interfaces. I originally bought the Cube as
surplus from the University of Waterloo, so I'm guessing that it's an
interface to some piece of lab equipment.
Here's a slightly blurry picture of the Cube's back:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Sme9n3mG2UYUxuVWZ2eXhfS2M/view
The Mystery Board occupies the leftmost slot (IIRC).
Now that is interesting! I concur completely, this does not look
anything like my NeXTDimension. But it looks from the outside as though you
have not one but two boards on the left side. My cube originally had only
the board on the right of your picture (and in that same location). Unless
there are internal connections between the two slots on the left side, you
may have two Mystery Boards.
Very neat! I hope we get to hear more about this system eventually.
- Mark
12:50 p.m.
On Mar 8, 2017, at 1:28 PM, Santo Nucifora <santo.nucifora at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Mark,
I have reached out to Chris (I am local) and will providing a new home for the lot. I
will be happy to take hi-res pics of the board when I get them over the weekend.
Santo
Santo,
that?s great! Wonderful to hear they are going to a good home.
I will try to pass on the photos to
http://www.nextcomputers.org
if that?s OK with you, or you can do so directly. That seems to be one of the biggest
active repositories of NeXT information.
If you want to get them running, there is also a lot of useful information in the forum
area on the same site, including pretty detailed steps on how to implement a SCSI2SD or
other hard drives. Some of that may be helpful with the cube as well.
- Mark
1:07 p.m.
Hi Mark,
Works for me or I can post. I am "snuci" on http://www.nextcomputers.org
and have been a member for a little while. I have a couple of NeXTs
already including only one that I've put on my site at
http://vintagecomputer.ca/next-dimension-cube-turbo One of these will go
to a friend who has a small collection and is new to NeXT so we'll have
another potential member soon :) For the record, that blog post is old. I
have the Cube working with dual monitors and have no issues with that one
at all.
Santo
On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 3:50 PM, Tapley, Mark <mtapley at swri.edu> wrote:
On Mar 8, 2017, at 1:28 PM, Santo Nucifora
<santo.nucifora at gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Mark,
I have reached out to Chris (I am local) and will providing a new home
for the
lot. I will be happy to take hi-res pics of the board when I get
them over the weekend.
Santo
Santo,
that?s great! Wonderful to hear they are going to a good home.
I will try to pass on the photos to
http://www.nextcomputers.org
if that?s OK with you, or you can do so directly. That seems to be
one of the biggest active repositories of NeXT information.
If you want to get them running, there is also a lot of useful
information in the forum area on the same site, including pretty detailed
steps on how to implement a SCSI2SD or other hard drives. Some of that may
be helpful with the cube as well.
- Mark
1:16 p.m.
New subject: NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware
On 2017-03-08 4:07 PM, Santo Nucifora via cctalk wrote:
Hi Mark,
Works for me or I can post. I am "snuci" on http://www.nextcomputers.org
and have been a member for a little while. I have a couple of NeXTs
already including only one that I've put on my site at
Hi Santo
I'm also a Cube owner in Toronto. Maybe we should start a local
collector's / user's group :D
Any others care to speak up?
--Toby
http://vintagecomputer.ca/next-dimension-cube-turbo
One of these will go
to a friend who has a small collection and is new to NeXT so we'll have
another potential member soon :) For the record, that blog post is old. I
have the Cube working with dual monitors and have no issues with that one
at all.
Santo
1:22 p.m.
New subject: NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware
On 3/8/2017 2:16 PM, Toby Thain via cctalk wrote:
On 2017-03-08 4:07 PM, Santo Nucifora via cctalk
wrote:
APPLE of the BORG ... All CUBES are US. :)
Ben.
Hi Mark,
Works for me or I can post. I am "snuci" on http://www.nextcomputers.org
and have been a member for a little while. I have a couple of NeXTs
already including only one that I've put on my site at
Hi Santo
I'm also a Cube owner in Toronto. Maybe we should start a local
collector's / user's group :D
Any others care to speak up?
--Toby 
7:01 p.m.
New subject: NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware
I'm also a Cube owner in Toronto. Maybe we should
start a local
collector's / user's group :D
Any others care to speak up?
I'm in Ottawa. I've got a - very small! - collection of NeXT hardware.
A slab or two, at least one megapixel display (the 2bpp greyscale
kind), some small number of keyboards, a mouse or two, that's probably
about it. I gave away my Cube years back.
I've been tempted to get rid of them, but feel sentimental enough about
having developed MouseX that I've so far avoided doing so. Also, I've
been holding out the (admittedly slight) hope that hardware
documentation will surface for the interesting hardware; I do not run
closed-source software, so that's important to me.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
14 Mar
14 Mar
11:59 a.m.
New subject: NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware
On Mar 8, 2017, at 7:01 PM, Mouse via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Sufficient hardware documentation has been available to write emulators (Previous) and
port NetBSD.
That said, I don?t understand why one would have NeXT hardware and then run NetBSD on it
instead of the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP operating system that was designed for it and is
period-appropriate. If you?re not going to use it as NeXT hardware, maybe someone who will
use it that way would be happy to have it.
Also, especially for software that?s (1) built using a common and well-undertsood
architecture, (2) not ?secured? in any way, and (3) not being updated, you really can
maintain and improve it yourself pretty reasonably.
Heck, there?s a pretty accurate Open Source decompiler for Objective-C called ?code-dump?
(derived Steve Nygard?s ?class-dump?) to which it would probably be straightforward to add
68040 support?
-- Chris
I'm also a Cube owner in Toronto. Maybe we
should start a local
collector's / user's group :D
Any others care to speak up?
I'm in Ottawa. I've got a - very small! - collection of NeXT hardware.
A slab or two, at least one megapixel display (the 2bpp greyscale
kind), some small number of keyboards, a mouse or two, that's probably
about it. I gave away my Cube years back.
I've been tempted to get rid of them, but feel sentimental enough about
having developed MouseX that I've so far avoided doing so. Also, I've
been holding out the (admittedly slight) hope that hardware
documentation will surface for the interesting hardware; I do not run
closed-source software, so that's important to me.
2797
days inactive
2803
days old
10 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
bulk＠blit.ca -
cmhanson＠eschatologist.net -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG -
mtapley＠swri.edu -
santo.nucifora＠gmail.com -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au