The NeXTstation Turbo Color
After quitting (and/or being fired from) Apple in the mid 1980’s, Steve Jobs launched a new venture he called NeXT. Rather than competing against Apple in the consumer market, NeXT designed and built computers, operating systems and applications aimed at scientists, academic researchers and high-end ‘power users’ who struggled in that era to find desktop-size workstations that could meet their performance and connectivity requirements. NeXT only lasted as an independent entity for a little over 10 years, but during that time, they designed some incredibly advanced (and beautiful) hardware and software. The Retro Roadshow is proud to have several complete and functional NeXT workstations in our collection - let’s take a look at one of them: the NeXTstation Turbo Color
The sleek black ‘pizza box’ under the LCD screen is the NeXTstation Turbo Color
While NeXT launched their line of desktop workstations with the iconic NeXT Computer (aka the NeXT Cube), the most powerful NeXT-branded computer they released was the NeXTstation Turbo Color from 1990. The complete specs of these workstations are easily found online, but ours has been enhanced significantly from the basic configuration. In addition to sporting the maximum-supported amount of RAM, our Turbo Color has had its original mechanical hard disk replaced by a modern “SCSI2SD” solid-state drive, which is fast and silent. It also has a “nu_io” breakout box, which allows it to connect to more modern displays like the Samsung LCD seen in the photo, as long as the display supports “sync-on-green” video signals. Thanks to the BSD UNIX underpinnings of the NeXTSTEP operating system and its built-in Ethernet support, our NeXTstation Turbo Color happily coexists on our home network, and has even hosted simple public websites for months at a time with no downtime.
Because these NeXT workstations were significantly faster and more powerful than the typical consumer machines of their era, they are capable of supporting some interesting software configurations. For example, if you look closely at the image above, you may notice something interesting: our NeXTstation Turbo Color is running three contemporary operating systems simultaneously! Specifically:
Its main Operating System is NeXTSTEP, the UNIX-like platform that NeXT designed in-house. NeXTSTEP later evolved into OPENSTEP, which (after NeXT was purchased by Apple) evolved into Mac OS X (aka macOS), iOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc. In other words, there is a direct line connecting the primary operating system of the NeXTstation Turbo Color to the operating systems used daily on nearly two billion devices today. Of all the vintage operating systems I play with, NeXTSTEP is the easiest to jump into and get stuff done without having to do a big mental reset each time. The GUI feels familiar, and there's a fairly deep catalog of useful software floating around online still.
Also visible in this pic is the classic game "Eric's Solitaire" for Mac OS running via Executor, a brilliant app that allows Mac apps to run on non-Apple hardware without needing copyrighted Apple ROMs. Executor was later ported to numerous other platforms, and still exists as Open Source software
Finally, our NeXTstation Turbo Color is running Microsoft DOS via the SoftPC emulator, which allowed non-Intel computers to run MS-DOS and Windows apps side-by-side with the 'main' OS.
I'll conclude this post by saying how amazing these NeXT machines are. They still look futuristic despite being 30+ years old, they're surprisingly powerful, and with built-in networking and a UNIX-style OS, you can actually still do useful and interesting stuff with them. The Retro Roadshow is delighted to have several NeXT machines in our collection, and we look forward to inviting our attendees to get hands-on with them sometime soon!
