The story of Jobs and NeXT is surely going to be told many times in the next few weeks so I won’t put a repeat here. For now here’s the wikipedia article on NeXT. I acquired mine from another retro collector two summers ago. It’s been setup to dual boot NeXTStep and OpenStep for Mach. The old hard drive was small and slow. After maxing out the memory with parity RAM, the hard drive was replaced with a CF card. The NeXT outputs VGA with the sync signals embedded in the green line. Some older monitors, particularly those manufactured by Sun Microsystems were able to display this. Nowadays its a lot harder to find one of these monitors and when you do they’re often CRTs which I really don’t want taking up space. So a small circuit board was designed to separate the sync signal and convert to standard VGA. This works wonderfully. Currently on the back burner is another board designed to extract digital video straight from the graphics chip. This could be quite a while in coming though.

• 18-349: Embedded Real-Time Systems
  Topics covered include embedded architectures (building up to modern 16/32/64-bit embedded processors); interaction with devices (buses, memory architectures, memory management, device drivers); concurrency (software and hardware interrupts, timers); real-time principles (multi-tasking, scheduling, synchronization); implementation trade-offs, profiling and code optimization (for performance and memory); embedded software (exception handling, loading, mode-switching, programming embedded systems).
• 18-650: Policies of Wireless Systems and the Internet
  Investigates the government role in facilitating the creation of infrastructure, in advancing competition among broadcasters and communications service providers, in managing spectrum, and in protecting privacy and security. The course will then address Internet policy issues, which can include Internet governance and the domain name system, taxation, privacy and security, and intellectual property. Because these are inherently interdisciplinary issues, the course will include detailed discussions of technology, economics, and law
• 42-444: Medical Devices
  Topics covered include phenomenological and mechanistic descriptions of processes such as wear, corrosion fatigue, fretting, in addition to the characterization of bone and other biological materials as it relates to device performance requirements including biocompatibility. The course also involves case studies of orthopedic fixation devices and prostheses, pacemakers, heart valves and artificial organs. A portion of the course is a final design project which involves the design of a new medical device or the redesign of an existing device.
• 88-182: Topics of Law: The First Amendment
  This course examines the historical and philosophical roots of the first constitutional amendment, how it has been fleshed out and defined over time through case law, and the bases of some more recent critics of this amendments and current interpretations. This amendment guarantees every U.S. citizen five freedoms: freedom of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.
• 19-452: Engineering and Public Policy Project Course
  An interdisciplinary problem-solving project. This term’s project is to analyse the current Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) set forth by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and to make recommendations on how to improve patient compliance and reduce side effects. The course will results in a presentation before an expert panel and a report to be submitted to the FDA.