NextStation Online!

2023 is turning out to be a year where I close off loose ends with my Retro Computing hobby.  I've been acquiring hardware at a pretty good clip over the last couple of years and I've been thinking about things I could do with the equipment but just seem to never get around to.  And so far this year I am getting around to quite a few things.

Taking inspiration from both Macintosh Librarian and Sean @ Action Retro, I recently came back to my NextStation.  I've talked about acquiring that machine previously on the blog, and I've had it for over 2 years now.  Although I do keep coming back to it this computer has provided a challenge for me.

As we all probably know NextStep OS was the forerunner of our modern MacOS, but it's old enough that although it does have some familiar apps and look and feel, it's also quite different from modern MacOS.  As an additional challenge, I'm not that strong with Unix but the version of Unix that underlies NextStep OS is quite dated and so many of the commands I'd expect from Ubuntu or Raspbian  are simply not there, leaving me with alot of reading and Googling to do in order to use the system.

I decided one way to get a jump on this was to install a Next emulator on my modern PC.  That was a bit of an adventure and I found a shortcut that may be helpful to other people which I will document here.

Ctrl-Alt-Reese has documented the process of getting NextStep installed on actual hardware, but he also called out a link on WinWorld that contains a pre-setup copy of the Previous emulator, a Hard Drive image, and the required ROMS.  This version of the emulator is quite out of date so even if you are running Windows on your modern computer, I'd recommend going to the Previous hompage and getting the latest version (2.6 as of this writing).  Once you have all these components installed together it's fairly easy to configure the modern version of the emulator to point at the ROMs and the existing Hard Drive image from WinWorld.  That being said, getting the emulator running was not that big of a help to me because the biggest hurdle was getting my NextStation connected to Ethernet networking, and that's quite a bit of a different process inside of the Emulator.

So, I was back on my actual black hardware.  Following along with Sean's video above we see that we have to set a Static IP on the NextStation.  I was able to do this using some help from the manual section called "Setting Up the NEXTSTEP Computers" in this linked document.  This doesn't cover the DNS issue that Sean shows, so I also did that step.  Oddly enough, after rebooting, I was not able to ping like Sean was (I suppose it is not on the path, but I don't know what directory it should be in).  But when I went over to another computer I was able to Ping the NextStation so it was up on the network.

The FTP command did work, thankfully, and I was able to connect to my NAS where I store software for my vintage computers and grab some files and pull them over to the NextStation, uncompress them and install them.

I also figured out which folder to load software into (/LocalApps/) so that it can be easily added to the Dock and executed by normal users (not root), so now I have Mathematica, Doom, and OmniWeb installed and configured on my NextStation, and an easy workflow to add more software at any time.

I consider myself fortunate to be the current owner of this hardware and will be able to get a great deal more enjoyment from it now that I know better how to use it.