Does this work? I’d make it look better too.

Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.

The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).

That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.

It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.

(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)

But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...

Operating System Emulationen of older Mac OS, Mac OS X or NeXTStep from the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, or your own custom versions of this systems, as a Webapp in your Browser:

https://infinitemac.org

by Mihai Parparita: https://blog.persistent.info

Another #GlobalTalk goal achieved, connected an emulated NeXT Cube running CAPer v8 (via Previous) to my AppleTalk zone by way of a MacIP gateway running on a Raspberry Pi (via MacIp.net). Soon I will be serving a public folder, so peeps in this internetwork can see this rare server icon on their Mac desktops. #NexTSTEP

TIL via the diagram in this post that original DOOM was developed on NeXT machines.

https://fabiensanglard.net/fastdoom/index.html

Wikipedia:

> Doom was written largely in the C programming language, with a few elements in assembly language. The developers used NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system.

»Die Kooperation von NeXT und SunSoft mit dem Ziel der Festlegung eines offenen Standards für objektorientierte Entwicklungs- und Betriebssysteme auf der Basis von NEXTSTEP wird die Verbreitung objektorientierter Technologie deutlich beschleunigen.«

Quelle: Offene Systeme, Band 3 Nr. 1, Februar 1994
#vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #nextstep

I am writing the second part of my blog post on man-pages and I am trying to get to the bottom of the origin of the MANPAGER variable. It seems like it may have appeared as a modification to the 4.3BSD man command in NeXTSTEP some time between 1987 and 1989. It didn't have PAGER because the import of 4.3BSD-Tahoe to the code base didn't happen until 1989.

Does anybody have any firsthand knowledge about this? Did it maybe show up somewhere else before NeXTSTEP?

This week, I wrote about InfiniteMac, a brower-based emulator for running classic Mac OS and NeXTStep operating systems.

https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/97134-infinitemac-a-browser-based-journey-into-classic-macos-and-nextstep-operating-systems/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=infinitemac-a-browser-based-journey-into-classic-macos-and-nextstep-operating-systems

@lcamtuf NS stands for #NextStep, m8!

This ain't like #NSAKEY ...

#Life is a game of #chess.
You cannot undo the moves.
But, you can make the #nextstep better.

#TIL: The game #Doom was originally developed on #NeXT computers running the #NeXTSTEP operating system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom

@me_ Hast du Erfahrung mit der Installation von #NeXTSTEP via #Previous auf einem #Raspberry Pi?

Awesome! This guy has installed and is running #NeXTSTEP v0.9(!!!) in the #Previous emulator on a Windows machine. NeXTSTEP when it was still in beta at that time.

#RetroComputing #VintageComputing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgdG_Cuawq0

It seems no one has ever built a binary of p7zip for Nextstep?

(At least I couldn't find any in the usual archives.)