Does this work? I’d make it look better too.

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...

Remember if you have one of the elderly #sun #sparc systems and the OBP asks for a pwd. Boot into OBP then remove the idprom (THEN press n) and you can setenv security-mode none .. My SS5 with S24 and #openstep 4.2 SPARC. As beautiful as my #amiga 3000 pizzabox

I was powering up this weird old convertible tablet (Compaq TC1100) to see if it actually works, and if I could sell it, and... IT HAD OPENSTEP INSTALLED!

So cool. I do NOT remember doing that, though it's obviously the sort of thing I would do.

Goddamn gorgeous UI.

Short trip to my retro outpost. Yes, we had #openstep on #solaris runtime back then. The dev tools never left the building the reason we never had further apps and #java was the strategy for #sun. So if you are a #macOS user, yes we had something in common for not too long.

In the museum, we also have a well-preserved box containing the NeXTSTEP 3.1 operating system and its documentation. Originally developed for NeXT workstations, version 3.1 was the first to support the i386 architecture.

Infinite Mac is a collection of classic #Macintosh and #NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.

Pick any version of #System Software / #MacOS or #NeXTStep / #OPENSTEP from the 1980s or 1990s and run it (and major software of that era). You can also run a custom version with your choice of machine and virtual disks. Files can be imported and exported using drag and drop.

https://infinitemac.org/

Decided to install and experiment with #openstep 4.2 from 1997 in #virtualbox today. I got bored and decided to try some old #operatingsystems for funsies. I’ve always liked the look and idea of the *STEP OSes honestly.

Have you ever used any *STEP OS before, and how was it? I’d love to know!

Got the NeXTstation back up and on the network.

Random from the desks

Long forgotten today, Apple actually shipped a "MacOS X" for PC's. Yes, this isn't Yellow Box for Windows, but an actual MacOS X operating system for PCs. Someone made a video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZUhzQzJ3jI
#NeXTstep #OpenStep

... somehow, I managed to install the wrong version of NeXTStep, *and* it also somehow works? How NeXTStep runs on a Pentium 2 Dixon and 440BX chipset is beyond me!

"Please select the items that you want to install". Of course I want the GNU source! (deselected by default)

#NeXTstep #OpenStep #YellowBox for #Windows

This is what #Xcode looked like before it got the X. Also `-performSelector:withEachObjectInArray:`

#NeXTstep #OpenStep #YellowBox for #Windows

Looks like I finally got it working, not in the Electron Win95 yet, but in DOSBox Windows98. Let's see whether we can build an app with that! #nextstep #openstep #windows #yellowbox

I have just accepted an invitation to officially join the GNUstep project's Github as a member with merge access -- and in so doing, I have now merged my changes upstream, adding the hooks for Agora into the official GNUstep libs-gui.

So I'm putting aside all my DOS playtime for now, and will be focusing on cleaning up the Agora codebase and making it work with the upstream libs-gui Git repo -- and then I can start work on the vector implementation of the Argentum theme, which, if you recall this design mockup, is really pretty, in my very biased opinion.

Shenanigans are afoot!