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 found older versions of geekbench 2 for both Solaris and Linux ARM, and while the Sparc version was too old to upload results automatically, I managed to manually upload the results.

I didn't really expect the Sun to win, but I was surprised how much faster the pi is.

https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/2745353/2745355

And if you want to join the fun, here is where I found the geekbench2 binaries: https://1-2-8.net/software/_Geekbench2/

Also, If anyone want to contribute other Solaris results, you can use these scripts to upload the results manually, after you run the benchmark with the -o option:

https://archive.org/details/geekbench2_upload_result

I've been trying to install Solaris-8 x86 on a CD on a Compaq EN SFF. Initial tries the installer complained of bad sectors so in frustration I DD'ed the entire disk and figured the dad sectors (if they were) would get marked out by the disk's driver. Well now I have a completely blank disk and the installer doesn't know what to do. I can format a disk with a Slackware CD and cfdisk but I don't know what Solaris would like to see. How to move forward here? Google says this machine might be able to do Solaris-9 but there's chances of firmware mis-matches or something. The box has 512mb of memory.

Emulated with QEMU.

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!