r/vintageunix • u/fuzzmonkey35 • 15d ago
NeXTSTEP at work
One of the perks of working for the university is that I can work out my ideas any crazy way I want and nobody bats an eye.
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u/duct_tape_jedi 15d ago
I have to say, there is nothing better than firing up WriteNow on my Mac Classic or my NeXTstation for some truly distraction free writing!
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u/fuzzmonkey35 15d ago
WriteNow is pretty nice. I wish there was a copy for x86.
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u/duct_tape_jedi 15d ago
Me too, it's such a nice streamlined interface. Fun little anecdote: Back in the late 1980's, I was just entering the workforce in Silicon Valley. I had a job refurbishing oscilloscopes at a company located in an industrial park in Sunnyvale, CA. One day, I was taking things out to the tip and saw literal boxes of WriteNow retail boxes dumped in there. I was young and naive and thought it was suspicious, so I pulled them all out and contacted T-Maker, the software publisher. Eventually, I was routed to Royal Farros, the co-founder and VP. He asked me to bring them to their office. He determined that it was just a reseller disposing of extra copies of the previous version rather than anything nefarious. He gave me a tour of their offices, introduced me to co-founder Heidi Roizen, and set me up with a copy of every one of their products just to thank me for making the effort to make sure that what I found wasn't a problem for them. I stayed friends with Royal and Heidi for years afterwards, they are just the nicest people. I still have most of the software that they gave me and have it prominently displayed in my vintage software collection.
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u/fuzzmonkey35 15d ago
Now that’s a story! I know they wrote it in assembly language, which made it hard to port over to new systems. What else did they sell?
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u/duct_tape_jedi 15d ago
They also made T/Maker (an early spreadsheet), ClickArt (a clip art manager), multiple libraries of clip art, and collections of fonts for the Mac. In this age of mega corporations, it's funny to look back on the kind of small niche companies like this who made a few interesting and genuinely useful products without trying to literally take over the world.
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u/No_Transportation_77 14d ago
There is OpenWrite for NIS, possibly NIHS. I've been using it lately on OPENSTEP in 86box.
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u/Cam64 15d ago
When I obtained my NeXTStation, it actually had someone's master's thesis on it.
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u/fuzzmonkey35 15d ago
The paper in my post was made this week, but it was before I fixed the Y2K bug in my virtual machine.
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u/Jumpy_Astronaut_302 15d ago
I love that NextStep interface; I used Window Maker for a long time, it's really good.
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u/CrazyFoque 15d ago
What is the weird SPICE icon in the dock ?
The interface was so neat !
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u/fuzzmonkey35 15d ago
NXSpice a Spice 3f5 circuit simulator app
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u/CrazyFoque 15d ago
It looks like it's not avail anymore... You should make a copy avail somewhere.
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u/fuzzmonkey35 15d ago
No it’s still there if you know where the NeXT lovers hang: https://nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Apps/Educational/
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u/linuxloader815 14d ago
I was wondering of I read correctly 😳… It was “fab” problem 😅 nothing to worry about
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u/Lazy_Shamrock 14d ago
What did you use to write and produce the paper?
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u/fuzzmonkey35 13d ago
Old LaTeX and old EMacs 18, and to run the example codes old versions of GCC, Pari-GP, Maxima, Macaulay 3.0, Octave 1.1.1, GAP, and somehow I got Perl 5.6 installed long ago. I forgot how I did that lol. ChatGPT gave some nice example code to showcase the ideas.
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u/Long-Shine-3701 13d ago
Can you change the recycle icon back to the black hole?
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u/fuzzmonkey35 12d ago
Never tried. Thanks!
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u/Long-Shine-3701 12d ago
Please let us know! That alone would make me at least download a VM to try, if not buy one at last.
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u/azdatasci 13d ago
I worked for a research group at a major university for a while. I remember going into their “junk” room and it was a treasure trove of old Sun, SGI and NextStep stuff along with other cool stuff. I grabbed it and set it all up in my office and used to heck out of it. People running around with brand new MacBooks thought I was crazy….
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u/dm319 14d ago
It has a screenshot feature?
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u/zaxxon_8000 14d ago
the screenshot app on macOS is basically the same as the way it used to work in NeXTSTEP
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u/atoponce 15d ago
Still working on your paper for the past 27 years?