Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago I was excited to learn that the Quake editor (and Doom before that) was written on NeXT. I figured with my rudimentary Linux and C skills I could get it working, but of course it was a little harder than installing everything and running make

From JohnC:

"This is a NEXTSTEP application, so hardly anyone is going to be able to use the code as is. This is not an OPENSTEP application. It doesn't even use the foundation kit, so porting to gnustep or openstep-solaris/mach/nt would not be trivial."

"This application was really not a very good fit for NEXTSTEP. The display postscript model fundamentally doesn't fit very well with what we need here -- if you run in an 8 bit color mode, the line drawing runs at an ok speed, but the texture view goes half the speed it should as it dithers from 24 bit color down to 8 bit. If you run in 24 bit color mode, you get less screen real estate and significantly slower line drawing as a 3 megabyte XY view is flushed. Sigh. If anyone does actually run this on NEXTSTEP be advised that you want a fast machine."

"QuakeEd is written for NEXTSTEP 3.3, while GnuStep is an implementation of the OPENSTEP spec. I haven't had time to port it to openstep yet, but it looks like it will take a little effort. NeXT has tools in NS 4.0 to help, but it still isn't automatic."

An ultimate Hacker News comment here; John Carmack, Quake/Doom anecdotes, relevant ties to NeXT.

Just saying, greatly enjoyed it.

Still missing Rust, blockchain, and gut bacteria but it's not bad!

If he rewrites it to include those things then it’ll be like the Mearle Haggard “perfect country and western song” thing.

“I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison…”

LOL

I'm pretty sure that Carmack was running NeXTSTEP 3.3 on an HP PA-RISC machine.

NeXTSTEP ran on m68, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC. Then it was ported to PowerPC and renamed.

https://wiki.c2.com/?NextStep

Yup - from another .plan file:

We hadn’t really used them for much of anything in the past year, so it was just easier to turn them off than to continue to administer them. Most of the intel systems had already been converted to NT or 95, and Onethumb gets all of our old black NeXT hardware, but we have four nice HP 712/80 workstations that can’t be used for much of anything. If someone can put these systems to good use (a dallas area unix hacker), you can have them for free. As soon as they are spoken for, I will update my .plan, so check immediately before sending me email.

You have to come by our office (in Mesquite) and do a fresh OS install here before you can take one. There may still be junk on the HD, and I can’t spend the time to clean them myself. You can run either NEXTSTEP 3.3 or HP/UX. These are NOT intel machines, so you can’t run dos or windows. I have NS CD’s here, but I can’t find the original HP/UX CDs. Bring your own if that’s what you want.

I’m a bit nostalgic about the NeXT systems – the story in the Id Anthology is absolutely true: I walked through a mile of snow to the bank to pay for our first workstation. For several years, I considered it the best development environment around. It still has advantages today, but you can’t do any accelerated 3D work on it.

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