Maybe 6 months back, one of my coworkers, Roger, asked me if I wanted two NeXT Cubes he had been given several years back that were just taking up space. I of course said yes and became the owner of 2 Cube chassises, 4 system boards, two monitors, and a NeXT laser printer. I played with them a little when I first got them, but didn’t do much.
This morning I finally got to work on them.
I started with one working bootable system. Openstep has an interesting property that you can install the OS onto another hard drive as long as you have a working system, you do not need install media (although I do have the install CD). I pulled out an external 4GB SCSI drive I had and after much noodling was able to get it attached and recognized by the Cube.
Why use a new drive? Good question; I wish I had a tape recorder. The drive that is in the Cube is the newest of the three drives I got with the machines. It is a 3.5 inch half height 1GB drive (as opposed to the other 2 non-functional 300MB full height 5.25 inch drives). But even though it is “newer” it is still old and the bearings sound like they have sand in them and can be heard half the house away. I doubt that drive has much life left in it.
Once I had the system installed on the new drive, I detached the old drive and began to play. So far I am attached to my network, and am able to browse the web.
Pretty cool for a computer nearly 14 years old.