Is there anyone who knows about the internals of the #NeXTStep 3.3 finder/wm? It does some mount magic with CDROMs on inject/eject - but I cant find it documented or if there's API's to hook into that process.
I've been playing with the #WindowMaker version of #Debian recently, just to remember the old, good #NextSTEP, #OpenSTEP era. I used to have a #NeXTStation but I sold it locally for $300 just before I left US for Greece. It could probably fetch thousands on eBay, but I didn't want to deal with shipping such a heavy item.
Ah, I miss the old #SiliconValley. Back when there was actually room to innovate in ways that were revolutionary, and not just additive.
Spent some time playing around with #NextStep on infinitemac.org
I totally forgot how incredibly clean that GUI was. It didn't at all feel like a throwback, but rather, a beautiful upgrade to the interfaces we have now.
They did more with 4 shades of gray and 1120x832 than we do with 16 million colors and 4k.
It made me want to try running #GNUStep and #WindowMaker again, but even that isn't quite the same.
❝Today, thanks to Android and ChromeOS, Linux is an important end-user operating system. But, before Linux, there were important Unix desktops, although most of them never made it. …❞
⌨⬛ This is the NeXT computer. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau used it at CERN to set up the first web server, id Software developed games like Doom and Quake on it, and at Slovenian daily newspaper Delo they used it to digitize the entire newspaper production process.
... somehow, I managed to install the wrong version of NeXTStep, and it also somehow works? How NeXTStep runs on a Pentium 2 Dixon and 440BX chipset is beyond me!
I've been playing around with NEXTStep with the Previous emulator! Really fun. Emulating a NextStation Nitro Color. After installing NEXTStep, I stumbled upon a large archive of software and been exploring it. Here's OmniWeb displaying the iNode Gateway. #retrocomputing#nextstep#emulation#openstep#protoweb#retro
Alright, here's a blog post with the UI configuration steps for VirtualBox 7.0 (on macOS, at least) to run #OPENSTEP 4.2. Combined with the Adafruit tutorial it links to, you should have all you need to easily get it running. https://codingitwrong.com/2024/01/08/openstep-vm
⏭️💿 In the museum, we also have a well-preserved box containing the NeXTSTEP 3.1 operating system and its documentation. 🤩 Originally developed for NeXT workstations, version 3.1 was the first to support the i386 architecture.
Apart from #NeXTstep one of the environments which I found most inspiring (whether practical or not) is #Self. It is a #Smalltalk, but w/o classes. To create new objects you prefill one with the methods and defaults value you want, and then just copy it for use. And the fun thing is, even inheritance works through the prototypes.
And yes, this is how JavaScript works too, I think the only mainstream prototype based language. First thing people usually do is add classes 🙈 https://selflanguage.org
Microsoft refers to Windows releases by codenames during development, before their final name is decided. Famous examples are Windows Codename Chicago (Windows 95, 1995), Codename Neptune (scrapped, late 90s) & Codename Longhorn (Vista, 2006). What’s your fav Windows codename? 🤓