January 5, 2026
Retro OS, modern flame war
NeXTSTEP on Pa-RISC
HP’s 90s NeXT comeback sparks chaos: “It became macOS” vs “Windows steamrolled it”
TLDR: NeXTSTEP 3.3 brought Apple’s future DNA to 1990s HP PA-RISC workstations, a short-lived port with big ambitions. Comments erupt over whether macOS is essentially NeXTSTEP, dreams of a never-made Alpha version, and how Windows-on-Intel crushed rivals—proof that today’s Macs trace back to bold, almost-forgotten experiments.
NeXTSTEP on PA-RISC? Retro-tech catnip. The 1994 NeXTSTEP 3.3 port brought Steve Jobs’ stylish Unix to a handful of HP 9000 workstations like the 712 “pizzabox” and the beefy 735, a bold bid to escape NeXT’s pricey cubes. The article paints it as a noble but short-lived experiment with few apps. But the comments pounced: user badc0ffee insists macOS didn’t just “borrow ideas”—macOS basically is NeXTSTEP (that “NS” prefix developers see? It literally stands for NeXTSTEP). Cue the history rewrite and a chorus of ‘told you so’ from NeXT diehards.
Then the “what-if” timeline exploded. speed_spread mourned the missing port to DEC’s Alpha chips, while others blamed the 90s Windows-on-Intel steamroller for crushing cooler platforms. Nostalgia got spicy: people drooled over the sleek NeXT look running on industrial HP hardware, joked “pizzabox? now I’m hungry,” and sparred over whether the PA-RISC detour was doomed or visionary. Meanwhile, hardware nerds cheered the 735/125 as the fastest NeXT box ever. One camp says this RISC fling was a dead end; another calls it the bridge that kept NeXT alive until Apple scooped it up. Either way, the HP + NeXT crossover has the crowd reliving the moment macOS’s DNA took shape.
Key Points
- •NeXTSTEP 3.3 (1994) added support for select HP 9000 700-series PA-RISC workstations (712, 715, 725, 735, 755).
- •The PA-RISC port was developed on and for the HP 9000 712 and offered strong onboard hardware support.
- •Third-party software availability for PA-RISC was limited, and porting enthusiasm was modest, confining support to 3.3 and specific models.
- •NeXT expanded NeXTSTEP beyond proprietary Motorola 68000 hardware, adding Intel x86 (3.1) and RISC platforms including Sun SPARC and HP PA-RISC (3.3).
- •NeXTSTEP’s technologies (Mach microkernel, DPS GUI, 4.3BSD compatibility) were notable; some later influenced Mac OS.