I'm starting this thread as a place to post interesting finds about NS and OS. If you know of any cool tricks please share them here.
Here's a couple that were found perusing the comp.sys.next archives.
NextStep 0.8 could run some Sun3 binaries.
Why? Well, the earliest builds of NextStep were developed on Sun3 machines. This is likely a remnant of the Sun origins. This ability was removed in 0.9.
In the pic below I extracted the games archive from SunOS 3.5 and ran a few of the titles.
next_screen_084.png
How to clean install NeXTSTEP 3.x without a floppy on a non-Turbo machine.
If you don't have a floppy drive and want to do a clean install of NS, overwrite the bootblock of the hard disk with the boot.cdrom file and reboot. The system will scan for a connected CD-ROM and boot the installer.
The boot.cdrom file is in the usr/standalone folder on both the installed system and the CD. Write it with the disk command:
disk -B /path/to/boot.cdrom /dev/rsd0a
If you don't have verbose boot enabled you will be guided through the initial installation with screens like this:
next_screen_063.png
All going well, you'll see this screen at the end:
next_screen_065.png