karnak wrote:

There was no version of NeXTSTEP above 3.3, NeXT changed NeXTSTEP's name to OpenStep and briefly put out versions 4.0 and 4.1 before its widespread release of 4.2, the last release.

If you say so. It's been a hell of a long time, but I assembled a fairly high-end machine for a former employer to run a very late version of the Intel port, about a decade and a half ago. My recollection is that it still said NeXTStep on the box (I declined then, and still do, to keep up with their goofy periodic capitalisation changes), but I could well be misremembering. I remember that it had an incredibly thin hardware compatibility list, such that I had to fall back to an ISA ATI Mach64 video card, there being no reasonable options for anything better.

When I left that firm in 1994, that was the last I saw of the OS, except on rare occasions when I use my friend David Burrowes's black-cube monochrome NeXT box.

My assumption is that that OS's time has come and gone. If you did find any leftover boxes of the x86 port -- and I haven't seen one in a decade -- trying to find hardware for which it has drivers would be an exercise in frustration, and just not worth it.

The OPENSTEP spec, now, that lives on.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com