inside a NeXT
By anders pearson 09 Apr 2004
my new workstation arrived today so, to clear up space for it on my desk, i finally decided to get rid of the old NeXTstation Turbo that i inherited from <a rel=”friend met” href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“ title=”the goggles do nothing”>peter</a>.
before it went, i figured it would be fun to open it up and see what it looked like on the inside. here are <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2004/04/next/“ title=”NeXT guts”>some pictures</a>. it was also a good excuse to play with the macro settings on my camera.
interesting things to note: first, there is no mount for the hard drive; it’s just plugged in and sitting on top of the motherboard. if you shake the case it rattles around. second, it is remarkably dust-free. for a machine as old as it is, it’s practically spotless inside. it’s probably been cleaned a few times before i got it, but i know that at least in the last year it hasn’t been cleaned at all. every other computer in our office accumulates an inch thick layer of dust in that timespan. third, it certainly wasn’t designed to be very expandable. i guess you could replace the hard drive and upgrade the RAM a bit, but otherwise there’s nothing like the PCI expansion slots in most intel PCs. perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that figuring out how to open the case in the first place was somewhat akin to opening the hellraiser puzzlebox.
it’s pretty much outlived its usefulness but not by much. it was only a 33MHz machine, but the <a href=”http://www.occam.com/images/pics/NS3.jpg” title=”screenshot”>OpenStep GUI</a> felt snappier and more responsive than windows or OS X does on hardware 100 times faster.
