The Unforgiving Minute

I hope my regular readers (both of you) will bear with me through a little bit of antique-computer-geekery. I’m pretty sure that DirtCrashr, Dr. Strangegun and Tamara will get a kick out of it, at least.

While most people know that Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wosniak back in 1976 and that he’s once again running the company, you have to be a fairly big computer geek to know about NeXT Computer, the company he ran from 1986 to 1996. NeXT developed a line of flashy and very expensive black computers to run their advanced NEXTSTEP operating system, which was widely admired and highly influential (Byte Magazine called it “the most respected piece of software on the planet”), but both the computers and the operating system failed commercially.

Original NeXT hardware, never very common, is almost never seen today. The company officially only sold 50,000 machines over five years (though stories have circulated for years about large secret contracts for government agencies and the military). In contrast, Apple sold 1.5 MILLION Macs in just the first quarter of this year. Given the low production numbers and the high attrition rate for old computer hardware, I’d be quite surprised if even a few thousand of the old NeXT boxes are still in working condition.

I’m happy to report that two of them are mine.

While I never managed to get the iconic NeXTcube workstation, I do have a pair of NeXTstations, also known as “slabs,” one grayscale and one color. For now, the color unit sits in storage. I just resuscitated the grayscale machine this week. It was shelved after the failure of the hard drive, though I always intended to revive it. Over the years I picked up odd bits of hardware and software for the project but didn’t actually bring all the pieces together until now. Here’s how it went:

I’ll admit to being a bit apprehensive when I pulled the system out of storage because computers don’t always fare well when they sit unused for years. Hard drives and fans seize up, motherboard batteries leak, capacitors fail, and sometimes things just Stop Working For No Reason (SWFNR). Since I already knew the hard drive was toast, I was primarily worried about the battery and fan. Powering up the system, the fan spun up without undue noise and the system cleared its self-test routines but reported the date as 1994. As expected, the motherboard battery, which keeps the clock ticking and preserves some boot settings, was long dead. Given the NeXT philosophy of doing everything in the most exotic possible way, I worried I’d be stuck tracking down some hopelessly obscure battery that hasn’t been made in ten years. So it was a pleasant surprise to see a (still-intact) CR123 lithium cell tucked into its socket on the motherboard. Ten minutes and $10 later, I dropped in a new battery and turned my attention to the rest of the hardware.

This NeXTstation was the entry-level model, with 8 MB of RAM and a 105 MB hard drive. While machines in this configuration can function as stand-alone workstations, they were meant to be net-booted from a server; a stand-alone machine really needs more RAM and hard drive space. Since I needed to install a new hard drive anyways, I decided to see what else I could do to upgrade the machine. A derelict Power Mac 6100 in my junk pile held both a 350 MB SCSI hard drive and a pair of 4 MB SIMMs (RAM chips). Hmm…

I snapped in the SIMMs, connected the hard drive, crossed my fingers and… Success! Well, partial success. The drive spun up, the system cleared self-tests, and the ROM Monitor reported 16 MB of 70-nanosecond RAM installed. Time to load the operating system. NEXSTEP, by the way, was the first operating system shipped on CD-ROM. NeXT computers, though, did not come with CD-ROM drives. This is a problem.

Turning back to the pile of old Mac stuff, I dug up an old Apple external SCSI CD-ROM drive. Excellent. Just gotta plug this in and… Dammit. NeXT, in their endearingly quirky way, equipped their machines with SCSI-2 ports, which require a relatively uncommon cable. After much scrounging, I amazed myself by finding just such a cable. It snapped into the SCSI port on the back of the NeXTstation with a satisfying ‘click’ and… didn’t have the right connector to mate to the CD-ROM drive. Dammit again.

I seriously thought about admitting temporary defeat and ordering the right cable from the Internet when I happened upon an old SCSI Zip drive in another junk pile. By daisy-chaining from NeXT -> Zip drive -> CD-ROM, I had a (theoretically) valid setup. Except I didn’t have a terminator, and the foggy recesses of my memory told me that SCSI chains have to be terminated. Back to the junk pile…

Alright. I stuck my boot floppy into the drive (this is the special floppy I mentioned needing here), dropped the CD in, crossed my fingers, and hit the power button. After much churning the installer program loaded and, after saying a little prayer to the Computer Gods, I began the installation. Things went well for upwards of 5 seconds before error messages started spewing out on the terminal. The hard drive was not happy. Dammit yet again.

Okay, I knew NeXTs were fussy about SCSI termination, and I didn’t bother to check the new hard drive before I plugged it in. It was probably a simple matter of switching around a few jumpers on the drive (remember jumpers?) and I’d be good to go. Except the drive didn’t have the usual label that specified the jumper settings. And finding them on the Internet proved fruitless. Fuck.

One more trip to the junk pile (if you’re starting to suspect I’m a serious computer geek with pack-rat tendencies, you’re very perceptive) yielded an old Quantum Fireball 1 GB drive. Yeah, ONE FULL GIG. We’re hardcore here. I threw it in the ‘station, flipped the switch and… HOLY SHIT, IT WORKS!

Well, it works very slowly. The better part of an hour was consumed as ones and zeros trickled across the SCSI cable and onto the NeXT’s hard drive. And there it was: I had a glorious, functional NeXTstation with a brand-new copy of NEXSTEP installed. Except the computer still thought it was 1994, and it wasn’t quite ready to learn that it’s now 2007.

NeXT, forward-thinking company that it was, didn’t actually think very far beyond 1999. The last version of NEXSTEP, released in 1995, wasn’t Y2K-compliant. Amazingly enough, though, a Y2K patch was actually written and released. Even more amazingly, the patch can still be downloaded from Apple’s FTP servers. It took more time to download the patch and burn it to a CD than to install. I rolled the clock forward and declared victory.

So, click here for a little NeXTstation photo gallery with notes.

By the way, if you’re using a recent Mac running OS X, you’re really running a later version of NEXTSTEP; Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and used their software as the basis for OS X.

Other fun trivia:

• Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT when he invented the World Wide Web. His NeXTcube was the world’s first web server; you can see it here and here.
• The classic computer games DOOM and Quake were also written on NeXTs. John Romero has a blog entry about it here.