Very nice setup, haplain. Definitely keep us posted on what you do with it.
NeXTWorld Magazine and some other information I've seen on the web talked a lot about NeXT on government systems, and there used to be a really great web site with NeXT sales/marketing material talking about how to talk about it with various types of customers. Most of these materials talk about NeXT as being the "One True Computing Platform" where the same OS and hardware was suitable for your infrastructure (e-mail/directory/dhcp/dns/files/printing), your apps (database/middleware servers), your developers and technical users, as well as your receptionists and administrative assistants who might have been entering data or creating documents in WordPerfect (which was available on NeXT as well) or another app (there were several.)
Judging from the documentation, this was probably not impossible or unrealistic, either. NeXTSTEP (at least 3.x and OpenSTEP 4.x) had things like directory services for network logons, network-resident home directories (Steve Jobs talked about this in a presentation or two), an internal e-mail system which could accommodate formatted text and attached images and sounds, as well as things like directory replication and purportedly very simple resource sharing.
Woefully, I've never gotten two NeXT systems with networking both working next to one-another to test out some of this stuff. It would be very cool to see some of this stuff in action.
I have a Sun Voyager running NeXTSTEP 3.3, though I would like to get it reinstalled with OpenSTEP 4.2. I may have to drum up some OS4.2 virtual machines at some point in the future, to play with the infrastructure therein.
(1) It looks like Mathematica 1.0 first shipped on the Mac, but because of reasons, became a more capable product on NeXT. It's said that for a while, NeXT was the platform where Mathematica was most fully capable, from end to end. Although this was in marketing materials and I suppose the thing to be aware of is that choosing an appropriate computer is sometimes better than choosing the best one.
(2) The Internet is fairly coy about exactly when Frame was available for NeXT, the best information I've been able to find is here: http://daube.ch/docu/fmhist00.html which says Frame was founded in 1986 and the first release was in 1987. It looks like the NeXT version was discontinued by 1992. Frame competed with a product from a company called Interleaf, which is said to have releases as far back as 1982 (or maybe that's just when they were founded.)
Almost anything. They were aimed at higher education and design/graphics markets, so there are a few one-off apps in each of those markets for it. Mathematica(1) came of age on the NeXT (and for a while was included on every one), Frame(2) was available for it, which for as nice as Quark/InDesign and PageMaker are, Frame/Framemaker are the kings of the structured document layout world, or at least were in their time.
NeXTWorld Magazine and some other information I've seen on the web talked a lot about NeXT on government systems, and there used to be a really great web site with NeXT sales/marketing material talking about how to talk about it with various types of customers. Most of these materials talk about NeXT as being the "One True Computing Platform" where the same OS and hardware was suitable for your infrastructure (e-mail/directory/dhcp/dns/files/printing), your apps (database/middleware servers), your developers and technical users, as well as your receptionists and administrative assistants who might have been entering data or creating documents in WordPerfect (which was available on NeXT as well) or another app (there were several.)
Judging from the documentation, this was probably not impossible or unrealistic, either. NeXTSTEP (at least 3.x and OpenSTEP 4.x) had things like directory services for network logons, network-resident home directories (Steve Jobs talked about this in a presentation or two), an internal e-mail system which could accommodate formatted text and attached images and sounds, as well as things like directory replication and purportedly very simple resource sharing.
Woefully, I've never gotten two NeXT systems with networking both working next to one-another to test out some of this stuff. It would be very cool to see some of this stuff in action.
I have a Sun Voyager running NeXTSTEP 3.3, though I would like to get it reinstalled with OpenSTEP 4.2. I may have to drum up some OS4.2 virtual machines at some point in the future, to play with the infrastructure therein.
(1) It looks like Mathematica 1.0 first shipped on the Mac, but because of reasons, became a more capable product on NeXT. It's said that for a while, NeXT was the platform where Mathematica was most fully capable, from end to end. Although this was in marketing materials and I suppose the thing to be aware of is that choosing an appropriate computer is sometimes better than choosing the best one.
(2) The Internet is fairly coy about exactly when Frame was available for NeXT, the best information I've been able to find is here: http://daube.ch/docu/fmhist00.html which says Frame was founded in 1986 and the first release was in 1987. It looks like the NeXT version was discontinued by 1992. Frame competed with a product from a company called Interleaf, which is said to have releases as far back as 1982 (or maybe that's just when they were founded.)
8-o 
