Mastodawn

Note: this is off-memory, details might be wrong, correct me in comments.

Steve Jobs got fired from Apple for spending an insane amount of development resources and marketing in the original Macintosh (the literally 1984 Macintosh ad).
So they kicked Jobs and he went to create this company called NEXT who made these next-level hightech computer workstations called NEXT Stations, that ran an OS called NextStep.

The OS was very advanced. It look good and it worked wonders.
The NEXT machines became the standard High-End tech company computer. John Romero loved those things. Quake was written entirely on the first NEXT stations they bought for their office after DOOM iirc.

They were the pinnacle of "expensive productive computer" from 88 to 93. Basically they were the SGI workstations but not for graphics and more affordable.

And their OS (NextStep) inspired some of the look and feel of versions of MacOS after MacOSX (2001).
NextStep went to become OpenStep and later became GNUStep and a compatibility development environment
But all that I really care about it is: The window maker: The desktop environment, the stuff you use, the desktop.

And so although I love CDE (another Unix workstation desktop environment) WindowMaker (the reimplementation for xorg) seems so flipping cool.
(it is still somewhat maintained BTW It's not abandoneware)

Also #NextStep used Objective C and so MacOSX onwards was also programmed in that until 2014 when Swift was introduced.

Retro Markus 🇩🇰🇩🇪4d ago

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #omniweb #nextstep #next #nextcube

Catch of the Day: Greetings from the Forefather of the Web! 🧊

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your hats because last night we had a visit from absolute IT royalty on our server. Our bouncer logged this magical combination:

OmniWeb 3.1rc1 on a NeXTSTEP system!

Let that sink in for a moment. NeXTSTEP is the operating system Steve Jobs developed after he (temporarily) left Apple. And even more importantly: It was exactly such a NeXT system (the famous NeXTcube) on which Tim Berners-Lee programmed the very first web server and the first web browser in the world at CERN in 1990!

The fact that someone today is using NeXTSTEP and the legendary OmniWeb browser (which was developed exclusively for this platform in 1995) to find their way onto the modern internet via FrogFind is a goosebump moment for any tech historian. This isn't just retro—this is time travel to the architectural roots of Mac OS X and the World Wide Web itself.

A reverent toast to that magnificent black box cube!
Your FrogFind Team 🐸

Window Maker Live 5d ago

"Previous is a NeXT Computer emulator based on the Atari emulator Hatari. It uses the latest m68k emulation core from WinUAE and the i860 emulator from Jason Eckhardt. Previous works on all systems which are supported by the SDL3 library."

https://previous.nextcommunity.net

#previous #wmlive #nextstep #gnustep

The Previous Emulator

Infravermelho 6d ago

Back to the distro-hopping!

I'm planning to install #Arch with #WindowMaker this time around. There's just something about that clean, functional UI that never gets old—the perfect blend of stability and that classic #NeXTSTEP aesthetic.

Does anyone still run Window Maker in 2026? How's the daily driver experience?

Also, looking for tips on customization. What are your go-to tools or dotfiles setups to make it truly yours?

#Linux #ArchLinux #FOSS #OpenSource #DistroHopping

Michael Engel Apr 22

Some progress running NeXTstep for PA-RISC on the 11.0.0 version of qemu released today – I can boot from a CD-ROM image, but the "ec" driver complains about an incorrect cache line size.

#qemu #parisc #nextstep #retrocomputing