Classics long overdue a Boot.

[David Brownlee]

On 20 May 2016 at 15:50, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
> On 2016-05-20 3:39 AM, Adrian Graham wrote:
>>
>> On 19/05/2016 23:10, "Sean Caron" <scaron at diablonet.net> wrote:
>> ...
>> My NeXT slab also hadn't been powered up for 10 years so I checked that
>> one
>> and all was ok, only it wasn't my slab! I picked up a load of NeXT gear
>> from
>> an ex-employee many years ago including a colour turbo, cube, slab and
>> Elonex SCSI PC running the x86 version of NeXTSTEP (NeXTSTART by then?).
>> At
>
> OPENSTEP?
>

Could be, though NeXTSTEP 3.x (for x>0) was definitely available on
Intel hardware - I remember helping support a bunch of Pentium 133
"workstations" at Dreamworks running custom software under NeXTSTEP
3.3. They also mainly had Micropolis disks ("For all your data loss
needs").

This combined with NeXTSTEP's baroque install process and tendency to
occasionally crap out and destroy its own disk (I believe this was
more of an x86 only feature), meant production support spent a fair
amount of time reinstalling boxes.

The solution was BSD boot floppy which asked for their pager id, then
downloaded and blatted a compressed NeXTSTEP disk image onto the local
disk, emailed their pager and then rebooted into a nearly complete
NeXTSTEP system, so they could walk away and be pinged to come back to
finish off the config some time later.