Also: NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP
- further reading: books on NeXT
Summary
NeXT is a BSD 4.x UNIX-based operating system made by NeXT that runs on Intel/Cyrix/AMD Pentium, Intel 80486, and Motorola 68040. OPENSTEP runs on Intel/Cyrix/AMD Pentium, Intel 80486, Motorola 68040, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC.
“The distinguishing features of NeXTstep are the use of Display Postscript and the application frameworks.” — William Cox
NeXTCube
Intended purpose
Server/mainframe: small and medium scale server systems; some enterprise systems
Desktop/workstation: primarily for scientific, mathematic, or engineering workstations
Handheld: not appropriate
Real time: not appropriate
Kind of OS: proprietary UNIX
Release Date: replaced by Rhapsody
Current Version:
Tim Berners-Lee of the European CERN laboratory created the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer in 1990.
Cost:
Hardware Supported:
- NeXT: Intel 80486, Motorola 68030, 68040
- NeXTSTEP: Intel/Cyrix/AMD Pentium, 80486, Motorola 68040
- OPENSTEP: Intel/Cyrix/AMD Pentium, 80486, Sun SPARC, HP PA-RISC
“Just a couple of comments on the page from someone who admins in a computer lab filled with a few too many NeXTs ;-). NeXTSTEP worked on 68030 as well as 68040. The early NeXT Computers (they were the cubes, but weren’t called NeXT Cube) had 68030 processors. Almost all of them have been upgraded (by replacing the motherboard), so 68030 NeXTs these days are very rare. Also, NeXTSTEP 3 was available for SPARC, but your site suggests that only OPENSTEP was. I’ve got a SPARCStation 5 with NS3.2.“—Graham J Lee
680x0 assembly language is discussed in the assembly language section.
Maximum Number of Processors:
“Max. Processors was 1 on all architectures. Rhapsody and OPENSTEP will work on some multiple CPU Intel systems, but will only use the first CPU.“—Graham J Lee
Number of bits: 32
Kernel: Mach 2.5-based implementation of BSD 4.x (microkernel)
POSIX: compatible
“POSIX compatibility came around fairly late and wasn’t fully stable — a special flag to the C compiler (-posix) had to be used to compile against the POSIX libraries and headers.“—Graham J Lee
Peripherals:
“The peripherals section I could spend a fair while on :-). The most important though are the NeXTDimension board which allowed the 4-grayscale cubes to draw to a 32-bit colour display, and the N2000 laser printer. This was a raster printer which used the GUI code to prepare the printouts, just like the GDI winprinters of the 1990s.“—Graham J Lee
File Systems Supported:
- preferred file system: UFS (NRWF)
- read/write through third party software: SMB (RW) through SAMBA
Other Systems Emulated:
Graphics Engine: DisplayPostScript
Text Command Shell: UNIX shells
User Interface (graphic):
Graphic Command Shell:
NeXT
Screen shot of NeXT
screen shot courtesy of Operating Systems
Disabled support:
Internet Services:
“Internet Services: The world wide web was invented on NeXT by (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN.“—Graham J Lee
Application Programs:
Security:
Other:
NeXT was the first operating system to have a graphical web browser.
References
References within this web site
(for your convenience, look for this symbol marking passages about NeXT, NeXTSTEP, and OPENSTEP)