NeXTSTEP on PA-RISC
Overview
NeXTSTEP was a Unix operating system based on Mach microkernel with an advanced GUI developed in the 1980s and 90s. NeXTSTEP supported some PA-RISC computers in the 1994 in its 3.3 release in an effort to open up the operating system ecosystem to other hardware platforms.
Introduced in 1989 by NeXT, NeXTSTEP featured complete development and user environments, a unique GUI and special display system, the DPS Display Post Script.
The underlying operating system core is a Mach microkernel, 4.3BSD compatible and runtime-extensible.
In its early years, NeXTSTEP only ran on the so called black hardware
, sophisticated and expensive custom NeXT designs, based on Motorola 68000.
In 1991 white hardware,
Intel x86 PC technology was supported with Version 3.1.
Development was continued and in 1994 Version 3.3 was released with support for RISC platforms including Sun SPARC and HP PA-RISC.
The support for PA-RISC was only brief and limited to a select set of workstations. NeXTSTEP itself, while revolutionary in aspects, did not have long-lasting commercial success. Parts of its ideas and technologies live on though in contemporary Mac OS.
Systems supported
NeXTSTEP runs on some of the 1990s 32-bit HP 9000/700 PA-RISC workstations with PA-7100 or PA-7100LC processors and ASP or LASI chipset.
Hardware supported
NeXT supports most standard hardware of the supported workstations models:
- Diskspace requirements between 400 MB for a user environment to 700 MB for complete developer environment
- 32 MB to 64 MB RAM required, with a maximum of 256 MB supported
- All onboard graphics and CRX and CRX-24 supported
- HCRX and HCRX-24 graphics supported after installation of the NeXTSTEP 3.3 patches
- On 712 and 715/{64,80,100} workstations only PS/2 keyboards supported, no HIL
- All other systems support HIL
- Unsupported on the 735/755 are the FWD (Fast/Wide Differential) SCSI subsystem and the optional FDDI network boards
References
Manuals
- NeXTstep 3.3 Network and System Administration Manual, NeXT Software Inc. (1994, mirrored at NeXTComputers.org. Accessed December 2019)
- NeXTstep 3.3 Developer Documentation Manuals, NeXT Software Inc. (1994, mirrored at NeXTComputers.org. Accessed December 2019)
Literature
- The NEXTSTEP/OpenStep FAQ, Bernhard Scholz (1996?, mirrored at levenez.com. Accessed December 2019)
- First NeXT RISCWorkstation: Our first look at NEXTSTEP on HP's low-cost pizza box, NeXTWORLD, April 1994
Software
There used to be a large software archive available at the Peanuts.org FTP server. It went offline about 2004-2005, without a known mirror. Other than that there is not much software available, other than contemporary open source of shareware software.
- NeXTSTEP Current Patch List (.pdf) Apple Computer, Inc (2006, mirrored at NeXTComputers.org. Accessed 8 January 2009)
- NeXTSTEP 3.3
User
patch NS33RISCUserPatch3.tar (.tar) and its release notes NeXTSTEP 3.3 Patch 3 Overview (.pdf) Apple Computer, Inc (2006, mirrored at NeXTComputers.org. Accessed 8 January 2009) - NeXTSTEP 3.3
Developer
patch NS33DeveloperPatch2.tar (.tar)