The NeXTstation Turbo computer. The effort required to get this machine running was minimal. I was able to complete a usable network configuration within a few minutes. As with most NeXT systems it came installed with the NeXTStep version of Berkeley UNIX BSD, the grandfather of the MAC OS X. Click image for larger view.

Here is a view of the motherboard, drives, and power supply. Click image for larger view.

I attached an external SCSI hard drive to the external SCSI port. With this configuration I ran the BUILDDISK utility to create a bootable OS drive, essentially a transportable clone of the internal hard drive. BUILDDISK is nice for rebuilding or replacing drives. In my case the new bootable drive will be used to repair my NeXT Cube's corrupted internal drive. BUILDDISK is very simple to use, just make sure your external drive is not set to "0" before you plug it into the external SCSI port on the back of the source computer and power on the system. The NeXT will automatically detect that the external drive is present. Within BUILDDISK select your target to be the external drive (not the SYSTEM drive) and follow the screens. I have a few screenshots linked below. When you move the external drive to the target machine, change it to be SCSI ID 0, and the target drive ID to something else (i.e. 2). The target can be another external drive but usually you'd want the target SCSI drive to be attached directly to the motherboard (the internal drive). Boot off the external drive and run BUILDDISK from there. Target the internal SCSI drive, which at this point is SCSI ID 2 (!= 0). When the build is complete, power off the system, change the target ID to 0, remove or re-ID the external drive and boot. Click image for larger view.

Pictured, the BuildDisk is copying/installing the OS onto the external drive. Click image for larger view.