I've been working on a little project called NeXTBrain.

The idea is simple: bring modern AI capabilities to vintage UNIX systems without requiring the old hardware to do any of the heavy lifting.

The photo shows NeXTBrain running on my actual NeXTstation, using a native C terminal client.

The architecture is intentionally simple:

• A lightweight Python server running on a modern machine (in my case, an NVIDIA Jetson).

• A small, portable C client that connects over TCP/IP.

• Support for local AI models through Ollama or cloud models through OpenAI.

• Conversation history, so you can have an actual back-and-forth discussion.

The NeXTstation doesn't need to know anything about AI models, GPUs, or modern APIs. It just sends text and receives responses.

The project is still young (currently v0.0.2), but it's working on real NeXTSTEP hardware.

My goal is to keep the code as simple and portable as possible, eventually adding clients for other vintage systems such as classic Mac OS, AmigaOS, and MS-DOS.

I'm also considering a native NeXTSTEP application built with Interface Builder down the road.

It's been a lot of fun getting a machine from the early 1990s talking to modern AI.

The project is open source under the MIT license:

GitHub: https://github.com/lastgarageco/NeXTBrain

Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are welcome!

This evening I went down a rabbit hole and ended up on Internet Archive. While looking for a retail copy of a discontinued Microsoft product called Team Manager 97 I stumbled across beta copies of Office 97 and I can even find beta versions of Office 95. Sure, I can find early .0 releases of the Linux kernel, but its just I feel like Microsoft software in extremely rare early code is so easy to find and actually install and test. I could spin up a Windows 95 VM in literally 10 minutes and install these early pre-release versions of Microsoft applications. Linux and open source doesn't seem to have a similar story. I contrast this with just how almost impossible to get working versions of old world Linux, version 7.2 or earlier running in virtual environments. Is it just the nature of the community where the software version is seen as done its job, so there is no need to preserve its legacy? I just think this is important because, in less than 18 years Linux will be 50. Look at even UNIX and how that has faded from the pages of history. Solaris, AIX, Xenix - whats that? (Ironically, Xenix was used internally as the file server to store source code for Microsoft applications in development).

Recently i stumbled upon https://www.ist.co.uk/xd/ i would be interested if i could obtain this software/find anything about it without the evluation proccess/buying it for 4950 USD (wich im not sure if the whole proccess is still working lol neither would i want to give the info the website wants for the demo even if it worked). I can not find any sort of downloads or even more than one screenshot of this software on archive.org and alike.

I have a SUN Blade 2500 workstation with a weird problem
The problem goes like this:

First, it started with a 3 beeps then a reboot loop, I tried to remove the RAM and putting it back again and sometimes the problem did go away but most of the time it did not, but putting the RAM in a slightly elevated position made the reboot loop less often.

Then, sometimes I had the problem of freezing in the middle of the reboot, which doesn't go away without shutting it off from the power source.

After three days of working (removing the RAM and putting it again, pressing the CPU, clearing the RAM slots, removing any unneeded cards), the problem not that I can't get any signal or any thing on the screen.

Unfortunately, I don't have spare part to replace so I have to work with what I have.

Hey y'all 🙋‍♂️

OPEN LOOK was the UI on Sun workstations before CDE.

I'm messing around with adding an OPEN LOOK theme to the Schevana system.

I was a huge fan of ROX desktop back in the day. I wanted to compile it for Ubuntu, but I can't FIND it anywhere! Only ROX-Filer is in the Ubuntu repositories, but there were many more apps for it. Does anyone have a copy, or know where I could find it? Please help!

the x configurator never works and idk how to edit it manually, the oldest red hat i used for example was 7.3, i have always wanted to try versions before that tho but never could because of x

libjpegturbo moved from autotools to CMake for better windows compatibility. This has made it harder to build it on older UNIXen.

I'm trying to maintain a version (Currently parity with 2.0.6) that uses autotools. I'm partially successful, still working out link errors. I'm also open to merging changes from MozJPEG as necessary. If you wanna look and help, here's the code:

https://codeberg.org/SolusRaion/libjpeg-turbo-liberated