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Comment by WesolyKubeczek | Hacker News Reader

Run on more than two screens?

Support modern networking?

Support Unicode in all applications?

In 1990 you could have up to 4 displays on a NeXT Cube + 3 NeXTDimension 32bit colour boards. These were 1152x864 32bit colour displays at a time when people were using 80x25 16 colour text (likely, wordperfect/Lotus 123), or /maybe/ 640x480 16 colour graphics in windows 3.0.

NeXT had full ipv4 support from the start.

Unicode wasn't a thing until after Apple bought them.

One experiment I've done on my own NeXTStation turbo was run equivalent applications on both a NeXT and a modern Intel mac pro. Mathematica, email, Framemaker/affinity publisher all take roughly the same time to load and execute similar tasks.

Yes you can't do 3d, video, or AI on a 33 year old NeXT, and the image files would be smaller, but beyond that you could easily do your day to day work on such a system. It doesn't feel old at all.

Pretty sure Foundation supported Unicode from the start.

But modern OSes added support for a luxury we call hotplugging. Would that work smoothly back in the day?

I’m not negating your experience and share the same sentiments, but there is also a bit of undeniable progress modern OSes made.

One such bit is high DPI and mixed DPI support (theoretically should be easy peasy with Display PostScript, but somehow I don’t think it would pan out well in practice).

Good question about the screens. Under OpenStep on PC hardware, I think you can do multiple monitors. I believe TCP/IP was native to NextStep, but doubtful about Unicode way back then.

Have there been Matrox drivers for OpenStep?

I don’t remember what other multihead graphics cards existed at that time. For multiple video cards, you again had to reach for Matrox, since they were produced in both PCI and AGP variants and I’m unsure about other brands.

Yes, I built my first PC that could run OpenStep with a Matrox Millenium. Since I was new to Unix at that point I assumed that Netscape was available for OpenStep. I later found out that the Unix guru was running an X session from an SGI machine.

Multiple monitor support had caveats, IIRC, that contemporary Macs did not. Possibly the bit depth of all of the monitors had to be identical, or you'd get dithering on some?

>Multiple monitor support had caveats, IIRC, that contemporary Macs did not

Considering that some M1 laptops didn't support multiple monitors because of the internal USB allocations, it's not like modern Macs don't have such caveats

Getting dithering on some is an acceptable compromise compared to getting dithering on all of them or some displays flat out refusing to work, but that’s just my opinion.

So if you don't care about Unicode because you're covered by ASCII, and only use one screen (or the laptop screen), and already had networking in 1991, not much?

Modern cryptography enters the chat. The way it has been implemented so far, it won't work as a drop-in replacement unless the whole stack is aware of all its capabilities. Typically a bump in crypto and HTTP libraries necessitates a whole browser update too, although I'd happily jump onto any project where URL handling and networking is fully decoupled from the rendering engine (won't happen because imagine all the ad-blocking possibilities!).

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