Hacker News

points by boie0025 4 days ago | 0 comments

I have a working NeXT workstation with a monochrome monitor and working system keyboard and mouse. Running the original NeXTSTEP os. It's not a cube, just a workstation, but I'm happy to have it. I dumpster dove the workstation sometime around 1997, and my HS girlfriend's dad donated the KVM to me when he learned I obtained a workstation. He kept the cubes for himself; three previously employed at his now defunct typesetting company.

I have it displayed on the stairs to the basement of my software consulting firm. I nod at it every time I walk by.. and then ponder the chaos that would ensue if I plugged it into the internet.

I'm not Jobs' biggest fan, but we stand on the shoulders of giants.

[–] wpm 4 days ago

Not a lot would happen if you plugged it into the internet, unless you happened across a bot that had some exploit for a 40 year old OS at the ready and thought it was worth the time. NeXTSTEP is well into the "secure through age" part of the bathtub curve.

[–] boie0025 4 days ago

That seems reasonable.. "secure through age" is effectively "security through obscurity", which is stunningly effective most of the time... yet, I'll take a hard pass. I will let it rest in peace. Note that your point is well taken. I have an arbitrarily large collection of legacy compute that I have acquired over the years, and it all stays offline because I don't have the time or energy to deal with any fallout of plugging it in. I'm sure everything would be fine. The NeXT box, the old BBS servers, the CP/M crap I can never find time to dork around with.. maybe one day if I am able to retire I'll spin up the inefficient hoard and enjoy it. But until then, I can't risk the distraction. I miss when it was a hobby and not a career.

[–] TheOtherHobbes 3 days ago

As long as it's not running PHP you should be fine.

[–] shrubble 4 days ago

I used a NeXT mono slab for 8-10 months while working at a NeXT reseller in the mid 1990s. It was a fantastic experience.

[–] hofiflo 3 days ago

I think there wouldn't be too many exploits casually flying around the net for this kind of thing ;) but it'd be an interesting experiment. I once wrote a CTF challenge for a retro-themed challenge. That was fun and it took most of the participants still the better half of a day to pop it, simply because the system is so obscure by today's standards!

[–] jdswain 4 days ago

Not a lot would happen because it doesn't have a DHCP client. You would need to open HostManager manually set up the interface.

[–] zerohm 3 days ago

The first time I ever entered a college computer lab, it just happen to be a room of NeXT machines. You could tell immediately they were very high quality machines, and being not Windows or Mac, unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was so confused as to what they were and where they came from.

[–] boie0025 4 days ago

I should note that it runs "a patchy server" on boot.

[–] itomato 3 days ago

Not a lot would happen, but we're still pushing the boundaries of the platform.