Desks and Desktops, Show Them!

[ZombiePhysicist]

Thought I would start a thread where everyone can share their workspaces and machines and projects!

Current modern systems, retro systems, show them all off here!

[jeffburg]

Thanks for creating this thread, this will be fun!

I recently got a 1GHz 17" iMac G4 and I would like to show it off. It sits next to my home-made iMac 5K monitor plugged into my M1 MacBook Air (which is basically ancient at this point, but Apple Silicon is so good I feel no need to upgrade it 🙃)

You can see more about the iMac G4 on my Mastodon - https://jeffburg.social/tags/iMacG4
And I have the same tag for my home-made monitor - https://jeffburg.social/tags/iMac5K

Even though my iMac G4 is retro, I use it every day to play Youtube. You may doubt because Youtube won't run on such an old system. But I found a way with pretty great video quality - https://github.com/jeffreybergier/Retro-Stream-Tutorial

Thanks for much for checking it out!

[ZombiePhysicist]

Nice! I love the old articulating screen iMac! I adore your OCD wire management!

I'm going to find a photo of my last NeXT setup but in the mean time, this was my temporary setup before we moved (just this past July so the new setup is in progress):

Bit of a basement setup but those are 3 30" apple cinema displays embedded into the desk, with an 8k 86" display above. Around 45megapixels of displays and still not enough!

At work I had this setup with "only" 6 30" displays, but, with a 160" wall of 4 65" displays and a glass wall in front of it for white boarding.

The new Desk 2.0 project I'm working on will be more ambitious.

[ZombiePhysicist]

Still trying to find my "proper" NeXT setup but here is a fun 'transitional' shot where I had my NeXTcube turbo ADB/Dimension machine and was transitioning to my intel build and the unapologetic mess that entailed. Wish I kept that old turbo cube and the awful yet best best best ADB keyboard and mouse.

I remember the next color printer was a marvel at the time. The regular printer is on the floor during the build.

The 1600x1200 resolution 21" screens were ENORMOUS for their day, and I think might have been deeper than the display area!

Embarrassingly the poor NeXT cube got relegated to the floor during that time. Note the official NeXT branded black spool of thin ethernet connecting the two for one of the first ever networked Doom play throughs ever. Before the PC version even shipped!

Not my refusal to give up on magneto opticals as I got, what I believe, was a 650MB 5.25" unit that I ended placing into the intel machine case. Forget which brand that was. eventually moved to the 1.3GB? 3.5" Fujitsu's. Fun times in tech! Not sure if pentiums were out yet.

What I recall about the intel machine was I got a cached DPT SCSI card instead of the adaptec that most people went with and I think I got the STB Pegasus card with 4MB of vram so it could drive full 24bit 1600x1200 21" Hitachi display. Was pretty high end stuff for its time. Absolutely do not remember what the CPU was. Guessing some 66mhz 486DX thing that was probably the max back then.

[jeffburg]

Folks! I was going through some old photos and I found my desk in college:

- Aluminum 20" iMac with external 24" monitor
- Dell Mini 9 Netbook Snow Leopard Hackintosh
- NeXT Cube

Sorry in advance for blurry photos, but digital cameras sucked back then

[jeffburg]

And then I found all my black hardware laid out before I sold it all 

[jeffburg]

And then I found pictures of me transporting my cubes in my Mini Cooper. Who knew that the trunk of a Mini Cooper is sized exactly right for 2 cubes??? That's good, forward thinking design 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Huge flex dude! Those cubes are sexy sexy sexy. And the car is off the charts awesome too!

[jeffburg]

@ZombiePhysicist I hope I don't appear to be flexing too much. All of that stuff is gone now. I want to make a full blog post on my tech over the years, but at some point I decided I want to leave San Francisco and travel and at that time, I sold / got rid of almost everything I owned... no regrets. But it was cool having that Black Hardware and that Mini for the formative years of my life.

[ZombiePhysicist]

@ZombiePhysicist I hope I don't appear to be flexing too much. All of that stuff is gone now. I want to make a full blog post on my tech over the years, but at some point I decided I want to leave San Francisco and travel and at that time, I sold / got rid of almost everything I owned... no regrets. But it was cool having that Black Hardware and that Mini for the formative years of my life.

I meant flex in the most positive way possible! It's all very cool. I've sold a lot of hardware over time. The mac][fx I had was the only computer i MADE money on, I think. And I bought my cube with it. The cube is the only computer, in retrospect, I regret selling. But at the time, I needed the money so there was that!

[Rhetorica]

(Just a quick note that I've boosted the attachment size limit—it's now 2 MB per image or 8 MB per post, whichever comes first. So feel free to upload better images to the forums going forward, or redo your posts, or whatever, if you want more pixels hosted locally! The attachment count limit is now also 100 files per post.)

[dlsa]

Hi NexT Community !

Been a long time fan of NeXT since 1990. I was just a teenager and drewled at the adds in the magazines.
On September of 2020 I bought my first NeXT machine on eBay. A NeXTStation Turbo.
Since then I've been buying them and now have 15 machines. I really love this stuff.

[Rhetorica]

Hi NexT Community !

Been a long time fan of NeXT since 1990. I was just a teenager and drewled at the adds in the magazines.
On September of 2020 I bought my first NeXT machine on eBay. A NeXTStation Turbo.
Since then I've been buying them and now have 15 machines. I really love this stuff.

Wow! It's a shame ImgBB ruined your image links! That is a VERY impressive collection! What are you compiling in that first picture?

[Rhetorica]

Here are @dlsa's pictures, re-uploaded as forum attachments.

[KennyPowers]

These pics are a little out-of-date...this stuff is always getting moved around and changed.  Yes, there's some black hardware hiding in there.  The Cube now has a working NeXT laser printer, PLI super-floppy, and external NeXT CD-ROM connected, as well as a working MO drive and several 2GB partitions on its internal BlueSCSI.  I have a monstrous 21" Color MegaPixel sitting in the corner if I can ever get my cranky Dimension board to work









I'm currently mocking up an upcoming VCF exhibit in front of the desks in the basement, so it's a little cramped in there: