Installing NeXTSTEP on my Sun SPARCserver 5

[@csudsuindustries]

Also for Doom. Move the mouse over the window and/or click. The CG6 is 8bit colour and back on SunOS/Solaris X11 days you change focus to the App and the colour map would change. This was common for Netscape/Mosaic to have non-suck images.

[@rednight2476]

You can actually use any device ID for the CD drive however you have to specify the device ID in the boot command. "cdrom" is just a device alias to SCSI ID 6, same as disk defaults to 3. It is critical on Sun Sparcs to make sure the CD is jumpered to use 512 block size else you will get a ton of read errors, and usually won't boot to it. For the Doom colors: The CG6 is a double buffered 8 bit frame buffer. Doom is a 256 color game. It should have a command line switch to install it's own color map which will give the Doom window full control over the palette when it's window is active. It should also have switch to double the size.

[@JamieCrookes]

Ah, brings back memories. I woefully regret giving my large collection of 1990s nix boxes away when I moved house in 2011 due to space. Included a tonne of sun machines, SGI and also a PA Risc machine. WHen I bought mine in 2002 they were dirt cheap, including the SGI ones. I feel a little tear in my eye when I check the prices they go for on eBay now. I would have been quite a few thousand £s richer. Especially from the likes of my SGI Indigo2 Max Impact. I bought mine for £160. Fully working. Check out the price of that model now. :( Great video fellow UK friend, i'm actually from England (just remember, not all English hate scots). Glad I found it on a bit of a nostalgia run.

[@9393zach]

Such a beautiful OS running on such a powerful arch. Long live SPARC! I know it's a little modern for you but I just picked up a SPARC T4-1 and I gotta say, this is my new favourite piece of server gear :)

[@AshtonSnapp]

They still make SPARC stuff?

[@camerongray1515]

They're still made, Oracle and Fujitsu sell a range of SPARC servers but they're only really used in specialist applications.

[@francoisrevol7926]

You're cheating, you're missing the 30kg Trinitron Sun monitor :D

[@pigpenpete]

Oh god i remember lugging them from the boot of a car as an apprentice 20 years ago xD

[@Yu-Fei-Hung]

@@pigpenpete the same to me. I used a huge CRT monitor because its sharpness was great for coding.

[@zakruowrath]

Glad you said that about UltraSPARC, I have an old SunBlade 1000 I’d like to put to use one day.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Someone needs to make a VirtualBox image of NeXTStep 3.3 color.

[@Shiunbird]

Ten Minute Tokyo 2 I’ve managed to run open step in virtual box but never got to color.

[@Shiunbird]

Awesome video!

[@CodeAsm]

cxXw9iGE3f4 maybe?

[@ladreamin5008]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZeYnoihj82Mr6s

[@GameStarUK06]

Nice! I installed NeXTSTEP on my HP 712/100 workstation a few years ago now. About a month or so ago I swapped the 2GB HDD out for a SCSI2SD board so I could have both HP-UX and NeXTSTEP running without having to reimage my HDD on the rare occasion I wanted to run HP-UX instead. Maybe this summer I might finally get around to making a video about it as well as some of my other machines!

[@michaelheinrich44]

did you?

[@hikaru-live]

Given the software version, you might be able to get some macOS apps recompiled for this. NeXTSTEP is the basis of modern macOS after all.

[@mylesl2890]

NeXT pioneered universal installer /universal binaries, so many apps would install, run on all supported hardware if dev took full adv.

[@AdamChristensen]

Doom, the ultimate benchmark!

[@sauwercraud]

very nice! That's some oddity, NeXTSTEP on sun 😊 Didn't OpenSTEP run on some 64 bit processors?

[@konatadesuka]

I just came for that Pioneer slot-in drive

[@mindfuloftech]

Really interesting stuff! Got me thinking about which weird and wonderful OS to install next.

[@alexkindl861]

Yes, please do that A B comparison.

[@boardernut]

May be as rare as Windows NT for Sparc processors.

[@Andrath]

That took be back. Ahhh the nostalgia.

[@dbranconnier1977]

In your opinion, is NextStep better than Solaris? It certainly looks a lot nicer.

[@cryptnotic]

To fix the backspace key, run "stty erase [backspace]".

[@stonent]

I always hated how these older Unix OSes couldn't give a flying F*ck about backspace and made you configure it manually.

[@reloAO]

You got an email from steve jobs, thats kinda spooky :)

[@Storm_.]

Does nextstep run faster on the sun machine vs the motorola based next machine?

[@blakespot]

Storm Yes. And also on the HP PA-RISC platform: www.bytecellar.com/2016/03/02/a-quick-tour-of-the-hp-9000-712100-nextstep-workstation/

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

sd0 and sd1 are drives on my machine also I think that sd4 or sd5 would be my DVD rewriter, when the system said you can now remove your disc hit enter and after a few minutes of whirring noise the disc drive will open and let you remove it, have used verbose option?

[@wishusknight3009]

have you tried setting termination on that dvd rom to prevent errors? seems like that would solve it

[@kbhasi]

It does appear to me that termination is enabled.

[@wishusknight3009]

it may need to be set the opposite of what it is. Or termination on the HD needs to be disabled.

[@paulaxford6754]

I had problems installing Nextstep on my HP 735/99 as well, but don’t remember if it was SCSI related. Multiple attempts got the job done and in the end it boots fine once installed. I do wonder however, on your machine, if you should have an external terminator installed. I always use one on my Suns and my HP when no peripherals are attached and the internals drive shares the same SCSI2 bus as the internal disks

[@Thiesi]

An active terminator to terminate the chain at the end of the cable is always the safest bet.

[@paulaxford6754]

I installed NeXTSTEP 3.3 on my HP Apollo 735. I had similar issues with the install taking repeated tries to get moving and even now it won't boot without the -v option, even on a network. One oddity is that the Steve Jobs email is just an image. What might that be about?

[@RogerBarraud]

Cube or Go Home!!1!!11!!! ;-) But srsly, thanks for this video. I feel like trying the 486 version out in a VM now :-) Cheers!

[@AB-ns8ix]

Hey Cam, what microphone do you use? I'd love to record some videos that kill background noise as well as that mic

[@camerongray1515]

+Ante It's a "Giant Squid Audio Company" lavalier plugged into a Zoom H2n recorder. The main thing is having the microphone clipped onto my shirt, definitely improves the voice/background noise ratio. I put up a video about it all a few months ago.

[@leocomerford]

1:50 Dear old SCSI, being a bit _fussy_ ? Unpossible.

[@Anubisviech]

you should really fix that bios battery.. it's not a hard thing to do if you don't have two left hands.

[@camerongray1515]

On this machine it's not a simple battery, it's an entire chip that contains the battery sealed within it along with the realtime clock and NVRAM memory. The only way to replace the battery is to cut into the chip very carefully to expose the battery terminals and attach a new one. I'd probably do it down the line but would need to source a new chip first as I don't want to kill the current one which is technically working apart from the battery.

[@Anubisviech]

Did the same procedure on my Sun Ultra 1 and had no problems, just carefully make your way from the top on the correct side until you find the old battery. Should be a cr1216 or something similar. When you found it, you can carefully cut it out and connect a standard battery holder. I used one for CR2032 in my machine which i hotglued to the Serial port. A Dremel would be a good tool to use for that. It's not as hard as it might seem. Edit: found the pictures i made back then for someone who posted the tutorial on youtube. teamicos.net/images/special/IMAG0757.jpg teamicos.net/images/special/IMAG0758.jpg teamicos.net/images/special/IMAG0760.jpg

[@camerongray1515]

Will probably do it when I have some spare time, would make a good video anyway! Would just need to budget to get a dremel.etc

[@RetroTechIIfx]

@Shannon Smith No, the new ones are not fully compatible with how Sun structures the NVRAM memory and it leads to problems. Best route is to hack the old battery out and mod the chip. Glitchworks offers this service if you don't want to do the repair yourself with their mod kit. www.glitchwrks.com/2017/08/01/gw-48t02-1

[@Hamboarding]

Doesn't.support ULTRASparc 😕

[@Edward3DFX]

Thanks for the video, can you please make a video installing NeXT on an older IBM laptop......I tried gave up after many hours...

[@mylesl2890]

installing the intell v on any pc based machine need careful attention to the drivers stick w/the supported stuff preinstall drivers settings n u should be good

[@northof-62]

Is that a case fan making so much noise?

[@camerongray1515]

The high pitched whine is the hard drive, pretty common with these old SCSI drives.

[@stonent]

@@camerongray1515 Pretty much anything Sun had a whining hard drive.

[@XtremeKremaTor]

Isn't cmos battery leaking?

[@camerongray1515]

The battery on these is integrated into the NVRAM chip - I haven't seen one of these leak or cause damage, probably due to the battery being completely sealed in. Removing the NVRAM chip would prevent the machine from working so it needs to be kept in the machine. The solution is to cut into the chip to access the battery connections and wire on an external one which I may do in the future however I'd want to do it on a spare chip so that I don't render the machine completely useless!

[@pianokeyjoe]

Yeah , NextStep for NON NeXT hardware has a bit different requirements for the hardware. I do know you need specific video cards for NeXTStep in non NeXT hardware like intel and SUN. As you found out. 24bit(full color)framebuffers are best. HP-PARISC units I have NO idea..The SCSI deal with your cdrom is your lack of termination. You HAVE to terminate the SCSI device or you get all kinds of errors JUST like you got. I am surprised you did not fry the scsi bus.

[@Christian-bc2my]

The CD-drive is terminated, according to the jumpers. Jumper 6 is shorted, which according to the sticker on the drive, does (should) terminate the drive. I believe these machines only had narrow SCSI, so that's all the termination that should have been required. The errors do look like termination errors, though, so it could be a faulty drive with respect to termination.

[@pianokeyjoe]

@@Christian-bc2my Check your HDD drive ID. The CDROM should be consecutive to the HDD id. The SCSI adapter ID is 6 in most systems of the day. As for termination, there should be a set of pins on the HDD and the internal CDROM drive that say TERM or termination or TM. That terminate the chain. Example: HDD=ID1,CDROM=ID2,SCSI adapter or interface=ID6, If HDD is on the same cable as CDROM, terminate CDROM, but if CDROM is to be temporary device, terminate HDD, and CDROM too, to be safe. Usually the termination jumper has a resistor inside or the drive has that resistor at the pins and you just need to short those pins to complete the circuit. Yeah had my share of SCSI with UNIX systems and few Windows PC systems.

[@user78405]

i feel like next is only good that time..its how organize on file folder explorer more cleaner than KDE PLASMA DOLPHIN...WHAT I MEAN CLEANER...ICONS TELLS WHERE YOUR ARE WHEN I GO TO DEEP in hierarchy system folder...on linux its confusing when you don't know where i am at or where home folder, have to keep copying the addressbar on every folder i open it display on file manager..and run terminal emulator to see where i am at...but on next...everything on one window with home icon is sure helpful while showing other drives same time...like computer icon...

[@mylesl2890]

nahh, NeXT did a ton of stuff way ahead of it's time, and pioneered loads of stuff

[@brostenen]

Oh my god.... That is a lot of background noise. Uhmmm... That is SCSI for ya' 😁 Personally, I am after getting an SD-to-SCSI for my 486dx2-80/VLB system. I have this SCSI-VLB card that I want to use. Perhaps I will install it with Os/2, just to do a different machine setup.

[@metroboytartu]

Can it run Crysis? :D

[@CodeAsm]

Cool :D

[@craigsnowden7696]

Can it run Crysis?

[@user78405]

the error still same problem for today mac os x...i am serious seen this before ..not sure why it panic on that part ...now i know why??...it works on nvidia cards only....on first OSX systems back then but nextstep is very limited on video cards to work on...only 256 colors i heard so far...close to 12bit...

[@sundhaug92]

I think your drive might be dying

[@camerongray1515]

It's loud for sure but that noise level is pretty standard for these old SCSI drives. Of course given its age it's not exactly going to be in the best health but it's not like the machine will ever store anything of value nowadays.

[@acos21]

AKA "running linux on the desktop in 2017"

[@crihsagnlel]

Not if you know how to use a computer.

[@blackneos940]

7 Windows fanbois Disliked this video. :)

[@Daold]

I got 2 mins in, the mouth noises are beyond annoying.