NeXT Computers

NeXT computers give a user the best of both worlds, a nice GUI (graphical user interface) and a UNIX environment to do power tasks. I have a NeXT Cube (Motorola 68040, 33MHz) with NeXTdimension video capability. The NeXTdimension board allows me to perform video I/O with a television or VCR, which I really don't need for my engineering work, but is fun to play around with.

NeXT hardware is no longer manufactured, but the NeXT operating system (NeXTstep) and third party applications are still being developed for a variety of CPU architectures.

The NEXTSTEP Operating System, Release 3.3 is currently available for the following hardware platforms.

For more information on NeXT products, see the NeXT Home Page.

I do most of my engineering work using self written code in a variety of languages including:

FORTRAN - the old standby for scientific computing, still the best for intensive number crunching, like my work in computational fluid dynamics.
C and Object Oriented C (C++) - great for system programming tasks, allows me to do some things that FORTRAN just can not do (until F90!)
perl - a very powerful scripting language, used for a large portion of the WWW programming tasks (search engines, access counters, forms processing), best of all it is available for a variety of platforms and is absolutely free! Perl fills a niche between UNIX shell scripts and full C code. It is a great system administration tool.

There are free versions of FORTRAN (g77), f2c (a FORTRAN to C converter) and C/C++ (gcc,g++) available from the GNU Project. GNU has a large number of free software projects available for downloading at MIT for a variety of hardware platforms.

This page is maintained by George B. Ross (gross@ionasoftware.com), who absolves himself of any responsibility with his general disclaimer. Comments, questions and suggestions can be sent to me by selecting the link associated with my email address.