kalisphoenix said:
...NeXTSTEP is just too much OS for the slabs to run effectively. More of Steve's eyes being bigger than his stomach.
Actually NEXTSTEP (up to 3.3) should run quite nicely on a slab with enough RAM. It would, on the other hand, be sluggish running OPENSTEP... but this really had nothing to do with Jobs doing anything.
The thing you should remember is that
Black Tuesday (the day NeXT closed down the hardware side of the business) was on February 10, 1993. OPENSTEP 4.0 was released in the summer of 1996 (and 4.2 was released early in 1997 after the merger with Apple had started). That means that the newest NeXTstation was three and a half years old at the release of OPENSTEP and was four years old at the time of the final release.
This would be roughly equivalent to running Mac OS 8 on a Quadra 700... you can do it, but if you are used to seeing Mac OS 8 on a PowerPC system, it's going to seem a little under powered.
And you need to also recall that OPENSTEP was really meant for Intel based systems of 1996, and that the ability to run it on old NeXT hardware was more or less an after thought.
Minimums that I usually recommend for NeXTstations are 64 MB for NEXTSTEP 3.3 and 128 MB for OPENSTEP 4.2 (noting that 3.3 and 4.2 are the only NeXT operating systems that Apple made Y2K compliant). If you are running at 16 or 32 MB of RAM, even NEXTSTEP 3.x would start to drag a little with more than a couple apps open (depending on which apps you are using). And RAM can only make up so much in performance, the 68040 at 25 MHz (or 33 MHz if you have a turbo slab) isn't the fastest processor to be working with using a mid-90s operating system.
Even I notice a slow down on my ThinkPad (Pentium at 133 MHz) running OPENSTEP 4.2 with 80 MB of RAM (oddly enough, Rhapsody with the same hardware runs much better).
