NeXT in Toronto/Canada - was Re: Looking to re-home some NeXT hardware

[Chris Hanson]

On Mar 8, 2017, at 7:01 PM, Mouse via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.

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