NeXTSTEP on Pa-RISC

Summary

NeXTSTEP on PA-RISC © NeXT 1994 NeXTSTEP is a Unix operating system developed in the 1980s and 90s by NeXT, based on a Mach microkernel with an advanced graphical user interface. NeXTSTEP supports several 32-bit HP 9000 PA-RISC workstations in release 3.3 from 1994, for which HP and NeXT had high hopes. This was an effort to open up the NeXT operating system to other hardware platforms after NeXT stopped designing its own custom NeXT computers. NeXTSTEP, Thomas Schanz CC BY-SA 4.0 Introduced in 1989 by NeXT, NeXTSTEP featured development and user environments, an unique GUI and the Display Post Script (DPS) display system. The operating system core is a Mach microkernel, 4.3BSD compatible and runtime-extensible. In its early years, NeXTSTEP only ran on NeXT black hardware, sophisticated and expensive NeXT cubes, based on Motorola 68000. Intel x86 PCs, white hardware, were first supported in NeXTSTEP 3.1 in 1991 to open up the platform to off-the-shelf hardware. NeXTSTEP version 3.3 included support for a handful of contemporary HP 9000 700 workstations (712, 715, 725, 735, 755) with good onboard hardware support but admittedly limited software choices. Third party applications and porting enthusiasm for PA-RISC fell short and the PA-RISC port was limited to NeXTSTEP 3.3 and to thos select set of 32-bit HP 9000 workstations HP and NeXT advertisement, HP 1994 The PA-RISC version of NeXTSTEP 3.3 was developed on and specifically for the HP 9000 712 pizzabox workstation, a very advanced combination for the 1990s with a nice, integrated user experience. NeXT tried to get its own NeXT RISC workstation to market (chased a chimera) and looked at Motorola 88000 and PowerPC, but decided to partner with workstation vendors to bring NeXT to RISC. Development continued and in 1994 NeXTSTEP 3.3 was released with support for different RISC platforms including Sun SPARC and HP PA-RISC. NeXTSTEP itself, while revolutionary in aspects, did not have long commercial success. However so...