In late 2016 a guy in Milpitas posted a big collection of old Macs and other computer stuff to clear out his garage. One of those other items was an original NeXTcube from 1988 — serial number 183! He didn’t know if it worked. It didn’t come with any cables or accessories. It was in rough cosmetic shape. It was even missing its radical Paul Rand designed logo.



The Macs weren’t in much better shape. They were being collected and restored for an art project that never got finished. I thought it would be fun to fix everything up and maybe sell some of the Macs to pay for the price of the haul.

Later that day, the cube sat on a bench in my garage. Its ports were mysterious. A DB-19 pin port for the monitor? No ports for a mouse or keyboard? Woah, built-in twisted pair ethernet from 1988! I didn’t have a display cable or adapter that would fit and had lots of other projects to work on. So the cube sat in that garage for over a year.

In March 2018 I was getting more serious about converting part of my garage into a Tiki bar. In order to do that I’d need to get rid of a lot of stuff, including those Macs I hadn’t gotten around to restoring. The cube was also on the list. Before getting rid of it, I figured I’d try to get the cube functioning.

A bit of research revealed that the original cubes were paired with a NeXT ‘MegaPixel’ display. In true Jobsian fashion, that monitor had a speaker and connections for the mouse and keyboard with just a single cable connecting to the cube. I didn’t have that monitor. They’re pretty rare there wasn’t space in the garage for even more computer stuff. NeXT eventually created a ‘Sound Box’ so its computers could work with other displays. I bought a modified sound box from Black Hole, Inc. on eBay that allows the connection of either ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) or non-ADB mice and keyboards. It was quickly apparent the box wouldn’t be enough to get up and running. There was still that 19-pin connector to deal with. I bought a custom DB-19 to VGA cable from the same store and hooked it up to the sound box, the cube, an original Apple Studio Display LCD and an Apple ADB keyboard. After a press of the power button there was an exciting whir from the fan and hard drive — but the screen wouldn’t sync.

The next stop on my journey was at the amazing and sorely missed Weird Stuff Warehouse (unknowingly during it’s last week of business) to buy an old ViewSonic 17” LCD for $11.

Back in the garage, the new/old display was connected. Power button pressed. Whirrs again. The display lights up! The cube booted to a firmware shell!

Unfortunately, the keys wouldn’t respond. A bit more research revealed that an Apple keyboard wouldn’t cut it. I’d need a real NeXT non-ADB mouse and keyboard. I couldn’t find any for sale online, but Rob from Black Hole was able find a set for me.

With a real NeXT keyboard I could now poke around the firmware shell and coax the beast back to life.

> help

> boot sd (Boot to the SCSI drive)

Ooh, things are happening. Ugh, now they’re not.

The boot process hung at the same spot, but there weren’t any obvious clues why. Maybe there are leaky capacitors on the logic board. Maybe the 27-year-old RAM just needs to be reseated. Opening the cube and getting to its innards was surprisingly easy. Four captive screws on the back and you’re in. Disconnect the curly power cable from the fan. Pull the logic board away from the backplane a bit to reveal the optical and hard drive connectors. Remove the connectors. Slide the board the rest of the way out.

The logic board was surprisingly clean. No leaky caps. The clock battery wasn’t corroded. But there was a problem. No RAM was installed. Back to Black Hole to order some memory. A few days later the RAM was installed and we got a little further. Now it would boot to the message “yp server not responding”. It’d keep trying and timing out in a continuous loop. I think it was trying to talk to a NIS server that didn’t exist and for some reason wouldn’t give up and move on. After a lot of searching I figured out I’d need to boot into single user mode, edit /etc/hostconfig and tell the computer to not try to attach to the server.

> bsd -s

> vi /etc/hostconfig

Shoot, how does vi work again?

> ctrl+q (grrr)

> q!

> man vi

> q

> vi /etc/profile

… clumsily edit …

> YPDOMAIN=-N0-



> wq!

> reboot

A log in screen!

Trying a couple of names and passwords were rejected in the most delightful way. The login window shook after the failed attempt. A precursor to the same behavior in OS X!

A bit more research later I discovered it would be possible to reset the root password.

> sh /etc/rc &

> New password: blah

> Confirm: blah

> reboot

Login. We’re in!

There was a lot to look through. Apps like Mail, Preview, Terminal and other familiar names.. user folders.. mail archives. I opened a mail archive for what looked like an unused user account. Inside was a default email from Steve Jobs welcoming the user to NeXT! It even included an audio recording of Steve making the case for ‘interpersonal computing’. He saw collaborative creation as being the next era of computing.

This was all exciting, but I kept thinking about that ethernet port. Would it be possible to get this computer taking with modern Macs on the network? I guess there was no DHCP at the time, so a manual edit of /etc/hostconfig again was required to give the cube an IP address.

NeXTstep 2.0 didn’t include ssh, and modern Macs don’t support telnet. I tried for a while to get a telnet server working on a Mac before realizing that wasn’t necessary.

Telnet from a Mac to the cube worked though!

And FTP worked too!

Now I could download NeXT software on one of the modern Macs and transfer it directly to the cube over the network. It would be really cool to get a web browser installed and functioning. So I downloaded a few copies of OmniWeb, unsure of which would work. Unfortunately, they were all compressed as tar.gz and the cube didn’t have a working copy of gunzip installed. I tried unzipping on the Mac and doing the rest of the TAR decompression on the cube but I haven’t yet found a browser that will launch on NeXSTEP 2.0. I’d also like to get a working copy of gunzip that’s compatible with the OS too. I decided to put these things aside and focus on restoring the case.

Taking the rest of the computer part was very easy. The process is well documented in this YouTube video On The Workbench - NeXT Cube teardown.

One of the last steps was to unscrew the rods that hold the three main case pieces together. Two of the 4 rods broke between the threads and the smooth part of the rod. They’re steel and had corroded just enough to make the collar yield to the torque it was a taking to get them out.

Later that night copious amounts of goopy paint stripper was applied to all of the magnesium parts which were set to rest overnight.

The next morning all of the parts were washed. After a light scrubbing, the bare magnesium was revealed. There were a couple of chips in the magnesium, but overall it was in good condition.

Later that morning, I found a local machine shop to remake the broken rods. While waiting on the rods to be remade, I experimented with painting the drive cover with red PlastiDip. Unfortunately, it bubbled on the magnesium as it was applied and left the crevices unevenly coated.

I stripped off the PlastiDip and tried again with some FlexiDip that I had from a previous project. This did not bubble and filled in the crevices perfectly. The drive covers received matte smokey grey. The front and rear case got matte black. The center case fins were coated in glossy red.

A couple days later the new rods were ready for pickup. The replacements don’t have inset collars that were a seemingly unnecessary weak point on the original rods.



I took the parts home and began to spray there front case black. It still had the chips in the magnesium, but I was hesitant about filling them. One was just a depression in the metal, but the other was like a large flake of paint. If removed, it would make an even larger defect on the top of the case. I figured enough coats would mostly fill the depression as well as the void under the flake.

After many coats it was time to reassemble. It went mostly smoothly but there were a few issues noted below. A little dab of 3-in-one oil was applied to the screw bosses to prevent issues with removing the rods in the future.

Casualty list:

One of the bolts on the old rods wouldn’t budge. The rod eventually broke at the same weak point as the rods that broken in the case. The logic board wouldn’t mate with the backplane connector easily. It finally wedged in after a scary amount of pressure was applied. A tab on one of the plastic board guides broke off. The hard drive was a lot fussier after reassembly. It took several attempts to get it to boot.

Overall I’m very happy with how it turned out. A friend noted that it was reminiscent of the Cray X-MP supercomputer, which is my favorite computer design of all time. Now it’s time to back up the dying hard drive, replace it with a SCSI2SD and get a web browser and IRC client accessing the internet.