Years ago I acquired a 68040 NeXT Cube from my friend Sean Vesce. Sean had bought it when he worked at NeXT. Over the years I had upgraded it's memory and tinkered with it occasionally, but it had one little problem looming on the horizon. The OS wasn't Y2k compliant. It hopelessly could not get over the year 1997. Years ago, right around 2000, I did get the paperwork from the Apple website that I could supposedly send in to get a free copy of the OS. But I eventually lost the page. Later searches for update information have been fruitless.

I had always dreamt of using the NeXT cube as a web server or trying to get ahold of a DSP setup for it and exploring it's synthesis capabilities. The NeXT was the first computer to even run a web server or web browser and I believe that is enough to really give it quite a place in history.

Finally, after looking at it sit in my garage for a few years, I was determined to bring it into the new century and get it's OS updated. Using torrents I located a disk image of NeXTStep 3.3, the latest version. Next came the quite difficult task of installing it since I had no way to write the disk image onto one of it's Magneto Optical disks. As it turns out, the MO drive is now dead, and in the process of installing the system, the original hard drive went belly up as well. It seemed I was screwed.

I dug around my apartment and came up with a 2GB SCSI HD and a SCSI CD-ROM that I had used on my K2000 synthesizer. After burning the CD images using Dragon Burn on OS X, then locating proper termination and cables, I amazingly was able to install NeXTSTEP 3.3 onto the new/old hard drive and it booted and ran just fine!

The NeXT OS is stunningly similar to OS X in so many ways. It really is the origin of OS X.

In the menu to the right, I have a gallery of images from the upgrading.