NeXTstation Color

My first black hardware was a NeXTstation Color with the proprietary multimedia box, keyboard and mouse. I was able to hook it all together and used a VGA analog monitor with a 13W3 ↔ VGA adapter cable. It came with NeXTSTEP 3.3 but I installed the latest software, OpenStep 4.2, and I finally had a real NeXT. It was so cool.

I installed the NeXT Developer Tools and spent some time porting a lot of open source software I was accustomed to such as OpenSSH, screen, vim, etc. Well, I learned a few things about why Mac OS X makes it so excruciatingly difficult to port POSIX software: !@#$ NeXTSTEP/OpenStep made all kinds of pointlessly incompatible changes to the BSD on which it was based. But The Steve never met a standard he couldn't ignore or corrupt, so I suppose that should have been no surprise.

I'm definitely keeping OpenStep on my Color, but I decided to install BSD on my next NeXT, a plain ol' 2-bit grayscale NeXTstation. That made integration into the museum network vastly simpler.