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NeXT computers are the greatest machines ever!
- Everyone who has never actually used one...
I came into possession of a NeXT Cube sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I forget exactly when. I actually won a complete cube with laser printer at a Vintage Computer Festival because my Rainbow display was so bitchin'. I've tried to love this machine, but it is, quite frankly, a catastrophe.
My Cube features a Motorola 68040, which, I think, means it is actually a TurboCube, but I might be wrong. It doesn't matter. I believe there is 16MB RAM inside, which was somewhat beefy in the early 1990s, but not mind-blowing. With everything I mention, though, try to keep in mind that these machines cost somewhere around USD $10k...
Starting just with the specs, the machine isn't particularly great. By the time this machine was built, most serious UNIX workstations had moved away from the 68k line, which is not particularly fast. An Intel 486 is much faster in my experience just because a 486 can decode an MP3 in real-time, and this NeXT POS can't. It also has a Motorola DSP inside, which is a fun addition. It is, incidentally, the same DSP that's in the Atari Falcon, a computer that was an order of magnitude cheaper, but who's keeping track...
The Cube has a miserable design flaw. They all shipped with these magneto-optical drives that sound good-ish on paper, but almost no Cubes have a working drive these days. The fan, like most computers, blows air out the back. However, the ventilation on the Cubes wasn't great, so they tended to suck a substantial amount of air through the magneto-optical drive, rendering them useless after a few years due to dust build up. Great design... So you can fix this by opening the case and reversing the fan...
To get into your Cube, though, you need a stupid hex wrench (or maybe torx, not sure now) with a hole drilled in the middle. That's right, NeXT was trying to stop you from opening these behemoths. Great...
The case is, quite frankly, enormous. Inside mine, there is a single board, the motherboard, connected to a 4-slot backplane. The only other "NeXT bus" board (or whatever you call it) I've ever heard of is a NeXTDimension board which provides... color graphics! Woah!
The computer connects to its monochrome monitor via a big-ass cable that also supplies power to the monitor. This cabling isn't particularly notable except that:
1. You can't turn off the monitor.
2. If you unplug the monitor, the computer powers down immediately.
So that's a great design feature too. In fact, if you get a NeXTDimension board, you need to use a NeXT sound box that also draws a load from the motherboard only to stop the computer from shutting down without its monochrome monitor plugged in. Another great design feature...
The keyboard is nice, but the mouse sucks...
"NeXTStep is so amazing," is what people often say. I disagree. It stinks. When I got my Cube, it was running 3.2, I believe. I had to upgrade it to 3.3, though, because 3.2 wasn't Y2K compliant! Actually, I don't even think 3.3 was Y2K compliant; I believe that was an extra patch. An operating system designed in the 1990s that wasn't Y2K compliant is... well, it's dumb.
Another fun feature of NeXTStep is swapping. I mentioned that my machine has 16MB, I believe. If I started a few programs going, I could max it out, and the OS would start swapping. There was a bug in the OS related to swap, though, that caused it to eventually fill up regardless of what you were doing, and the system would eventually crash because the swap was full (not because it ran out of memory, the swap was just full). So you'd have to occasionally reboot this catastrophe of an operating system.
Other than that, though, I guess the OS is fine. Networking sucks to set up because it expects NeXT-ish nonsense to be present.
I wrote this because my Cube is currently sitting on the floor in my basement waiting to be thrown back into storage on a shelf. I really hate that machine. If I wanted to use a slow 68k machine, I'd drag out my Atari TT030. The Cube just isn't great. I mean, it's black and large, but its coolness ends there.
Written on August 4, 2020