Hey y'all, I'm the... 8-Bit Guy?
What the heck is going on here?
Hey y'all! I'm DJ.
And I'm filling in this week for the 8-Bit Guy; while he's on vacation with the family.
Some of you may recognize me from the video about the IBM PCjr monitor repair a while back.
And others may have seen my channel, which you'll find in the link down below.
A friend of mine asked to borrow a NeXTStation computer,
so that he could develop some software for a project that he's been working on.
So today I'm gonna clean one up, upgrade it a bit, show you what I did.
Before we get too deep here, I just want to say that I don't have multiple cameras
and I didn't have a whole lot of time to devote to this project,
so when it comes to most of the restoration's video clips:
I only have one camera angle.
I'm sorry for that, but it is what it is.
This machine hasn't been stored in the best possible way...
..but it's not the worst looking machine that I've seen either.
Its prior owner had put tons of stickers and glitter glue all over it,
so the remnants of that all need to be cleaned up, before we can proceed.
I also want to give this machine some upgrades before I loan it to my friend.
So my objective here, is not to take this back to a like-new condition.
I just want to clean it up, make it more presentable,
and most importantly: I want it to run the best that it can possibly run.
So at this point, you might be saying: "Hey DJ! What the heck is a NeXTStation?"
Well, if you think back to whenever Apple's Board of Directors fired Steve Jobs...
..idiots(!)
HE LAUGHS
He went off to build the next computer.
Well, he literally called the company: "NeXT".
And this is one of the NeXT brand computers, that his company brought to the market.
- Hi, I'm Steve Jobs and I make computers.
This machine, and more specifically, its operating system,
are directly responsible, for what makes a Macintosh, a Macintosh today.
At the core of NeXTSTEP and OpenStep operating systems
is a BSD Unix system, based upon the Mach kernel.
The OS had a fully graphical environment:
with a spot on the screen where you dock your applications.
And even all the way down
to the way that things are named in the file system, like:
Terminal.app
All of that traces back to NeXTSTEP.
These were all Motorola 68k based machines, just like the early Macs,
and they were really fun machines to use.
This one is commonly referred to as a 'Mono Slab',
because it produces no color, just like the early Macs.
And because its form factor is that of a pizza box style slab.
All the monochrome NeXTs used this megapixel display,
which was the highest resolution computer display
at the time that it was created.
It was literally one megapixel in size!
Doesn't sound like much today, but at the time it was massive.
And I'll start with the monitor, since it's the dirtiest.
We want to get all the dirt off, but there's also sticker residue that we should remove.
As well as this glitter glue that's on the back.
So, we'll have to get into the crevices with a brush,
and with a microfiber towel and stuff like that.
There are some areas of the system that were damaged:
either in storage, or during handling.
Or during the prior efforts to remove the decorations...
..that the previous owner had done to the system.
There's not a lot I can do about scratched paint here.
I mean: the plastic is textured with a matte finish black paint.
I did end up using some alcohol on the monitor, but I don't recommend it.
It will soften and remove a lot of the paint that covers the surface of the monitor.
In my case, it did help smooth out some of the imperfections,
but in other places it did remove too much of the paint.
Thankfully, most people will never notice.
This monitor, like most NeXT monitors -- or just monitors in general --
had some issues due to older dried-out capacitors.
I went ahead and recapped all the electrolytic capacitors in this monitor,
to help us get the crisp picture and the great contrast,
that you'll see later on in this video.
So next, let's hit the keyboard.
The keyboard really needs a bath!
I mean, most of the time the system was stored; nothing was covering the keyboard,
so every little speck of dust that got between the keys... it did!
And then there's some tiny little nibbles out of the rubber gasket,
that goes between the halves of the keyboard case,
so maybe there's some mouse pee in there too.
Oh, that's gross to think about.
But, you know, we'll get the keyboard out of its enclosure,
and remove all the key caps, clean all the dust out from under the keys,
and put all the keys into a bowl of soapy water
and scrub them all down with the toothbrush.
I'm sure it'll look great when we're done.
Next: let's check out the main CPU unit.
I mean, you see this glitter glue on the NeXTStation logo here?
I'll have to hit that with a brush, to get all of that out of there,
and then there's another one of these silly, glitter heart sticker things.
Oh, these are such a pain!
I'm really not gonna do much to the mouse, except clean the dirt off.
I'm gonna leave these stickers on it, as kind of an homage
to the machine's previously decorated life.
The main system itself wasn't that bad, except for some sticker residue,
that little bit of glitter glue, and one of those pesky glitter hearts.
There's a bit of paint transfer on the top, but it's under where the monitor sits,
so it'll never be seen.
I tried to remove it, but I wasn't very successful.
Again: the case is painted with a soft paint.
If I tried to use any kind of solvent:
it would have left a dark black glossy spot, where the white spot was,
so I just decided to leave it as is.
So that's the extent of what I'm going to do aesthetically for this machine.
Next, we'll move on to the technical improvements:
Originally this machine had only 8 MB of RAM installed,
and this specific motherboard revision can go up to 128 MB.
So, why not?
We'll just install 128 MB.
Also: the original Quantum 105S SCSI 100 MB hard drive,
has got to go!
I'm replacing that with a SCSI2SD card, that has an 8 GB SD card installed.
The OS will be on a 2 GB partition,
and the rest of the card will provide multiple 2 GB partitions.
This will seriously be a lot of beefy disk space for this machine.
Finally, I always remove batteries from the systems, before I put them into storage.
When, not if, but when, the batteries eventually leak...
..they will wreak havoc on the PCBs in these old machines.
Since the NeXT machines will not work at all with a faulty or missing PRAM battery:
I'm going to install a new one.
Also, I like to label replacement batteries, -- when I can --
so that I know exactly how old they are, the next time I open a system up.
But if this computer goes back into storage, I will remove this battery before it does.
So...the system is all back together, and now we need to turn it on.
The power button was in a strange spot for this machine,
at the time in history when it came to market:
It was one of the first commercial computers to make use of soft power,
and you press the power button on the keyboard to turn it on,
something we take for granted these days, but it was really cool back then.
And hey, look, it works!
Now to be fair; I already got this machine working before I filmed this part of the video.
I just wanted to go ahead and get in there, take care of anything that I'd missed:
set all the parameters:
RAM, boot time options to the way that I needed them to be,
doing a full memory test to make sure that the SIMMs were good,
booting from the hard drive, etc.
So here you can see that it's booting up into NeXTSTEP.
And there you go!
This video isn't intended to be a showcase
of all the great things that this hardware was capable of.
Or how the operating system worked,
or its direct influences on Mac OS X.
Um...but it's just the restoration of this specific machine,
to bring it back to a clean and operable status.
I hope you enjoyed watching this process,
and if you did: please give the video a thumbs up.
You can also check the video description below,
for links to my channel if you want to see more of my videos.
And you'll also find links to the 8-Bit Guy's Patreon page.
As well as his website,
where you can find all kinds of great products he offers.
Until next time...see ya. Bye!
8-BIT CHANNEL OUTRO