NeXT!

It's amazing how hard it's getting to work with vintage computers nowadays. The relentless pace of change seems to leave many systems, especially those outside the mainstream, stranded in time.

I'm trying to load the last iteration of NeXTStep, OpenStep 4.2, on my NeXTStation. Many applications (including the only thing that could be accused of being a web browser on the NeXT, OmniWeb) require this OS because of the changes it made to support things like a multi-threaded text object and the Foundation Class Library.

But the NeXTStation lacks an internal CD-ROM drive. Finding an external drive a big problem. All the external CD-ROM drives in my department, if we ever had any, are long gone. Turns out we kept an old SCSI CD-R (4x, w00t!), which does work on the NeXT as a reader.

Now the problem was that the OS disc I had was burned at 32x. The drive couldn't read it reliably - the upgrade application would bomb out with SCSI errors written to console, and attempting to boot from the disc would freeze early in the process. Even burning the image at 1x on a modern CDR seemed to work only partially. I knew that early CD-ROMs had difficulty with CD-R discs, but it never occured to me that CD-R mechanisms could fail to recognize discs burned at faster speeds.

I finally lugged whole drive over to a SCSI-equipped Mac - the last one we had on the floor, an ancient beige G3 which we had used for disc burning æons ago. Then I had to dig up a program that could burn an .iso format image (but which did not require OS X). I figured that if this mechanism could read any CD-R discs at all, it should be able to read those it burnt itself.

Stay tuned for exciting updates throughout the evening. :-/