Despite our best efforts, not everything worth discussing is directly related to NeXT. In order to keep community activity and attention more focused, this board has been created to catch whatever mental drippings avail themselves to us. Post away!
Thanks for all you do, Rhetorica!
I have now left Discord behind and will limit any future activities and communication to this wonderful forum.
I have been spending a lot of time using a PERQ 2 workstation, an influential predecessor to the NeXT. To run a PERQ is to know sorrow, as a PERQ breaks all the time, what with being made of around 600 discrete ICs. Yesterday something in the guts of the I/O system has broken, and it is now time to attach the logic analyser to try and figure out what it could be. The culprit is almost certainly a single IC that has gone faulty. Alas...
Quote from: stepleton on Feb 15, 2026, 05:02 PMI have been spending a lot of time using a PERQ 2 workstation, an influential predecessor to the NeXT. To run a PERQ is to know sorrow, as a PERQ breaks all the time, what with being made of around 600 discrete ICs. Yesterday something in the guts of the I/O system has broken, and it is now time to attach the logic analyser to try and figure out what it could be. The culprit is almost certainly a single IC that has gone faulty. Alas...
That sounds like misery to deal with. What sort of things were you doing on the PERQ?
Quote from: Rhetorica on Feb 16, 2026, 06:06 AMThat sounds like misery to deal with. What sort of things were you doing on the PERQ?
Nothing particularly redeeming --- of note lately has been the investigation of an unusual operating environment called Flex, which is nothing like any other OS I've used before. Here is a kind of introduction to it (https://archive.mg-1.uk/flex/rsre_report_86003_ocr.pdf), amidst other papers (https://mg-1.uk/flex/flex.html).
But fixing PERQs is basically what you do with the things. It's part of the "fun"...
How's about this for off topic: I've just cleaned and re-greased my old DAT deck and it's running great again. The amount of gunk that came off the rollers for the tape guides was crazy. The heads on the drum were ok though. The grease on various parts of the mech hadn't hardened yet (which was a surprise) but I thought I'd apply fresh stuff anyway.