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#vintagecomputing

17 posts14 participants1 post today
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Blake Patterson

Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.

The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).

That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.

It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.

(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)

But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...

OpenStep CD icon
#NeXT#NEXTSTEP#NeXTstation
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Blake Patterson

@bitnacht Good point, re: the busy bee.

As for the spinning disc (or "beachball"), it got its start in NEXTSTEP as a greyscale spinning magneto-optical disc rendering indicating the system is busy / data is loading, which was seen quite often on the early NeXT Cube, as it came with no HD but only an MO drive, and it used that drive for _swap_, if you can imagine...

That spinning disc became color when NEXTSTEP gained a color display on later hardware, and from there it evolved into the spinning "beachball" we know today (macOS being structurally based upon and evolved from NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP).

EDIT: Oh, I think I misread - you are talking about the busy mouse pointer icon in Windows, I think. I'm not sure of its specific history. Apologies.

NEXTSTEP OS loading screen showing spinning magento-optical mouse pointer icon indicating that the system is busy
Shot showing the evolution from NEXTSTEP's color spinning MO-disc to the curretn macOS spinning beachball indicating system is busy
#macOS#NeXT#NEXTSTEP
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i686-powered lia

🇬🇧
Look what arrived!

An original, sealed box release of #SuSE #Linux 8.1 Professional, from the year 2002!

I grabbed it off of eBay for a small price and it arrived quickly.

My plan is to take my 2001 laptop, the Fujitsu #Lifebook E6550, and without using the internet and just by consulting the manual and disks in the box, set up an authentic contemporary Linux system.

... as an #LGR-style video for #PeerTube!

Photo of the front of a large, light green box release of SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional. The front features a green Y2K design resembling a low-quality succulent. There is a bunch of floating German text detailing the features of the system, including Office, Multimedia, Networking, E-Business, Web, Intranet, Development and Security.
Photo of the back of the box. It's still light green and features a lot of text and screenshots that I can't possibly transcribe. The top headline, still in German, translates to "Stable, open, secure: SuSE Linux".
Photo of the side of the box, detailing the live customer support they offer as well as the differences between the Personal and Professional editions.
#vintagetech#retrotech#vintage
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