Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bionet!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!oregon!joe
From: joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (Joe St Sauver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Meat and Potatoe Programs
Message-ID: <5527@oregon.uoregon.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 89 15:30:04 GMT
Organization: University of Oregon
Lines: 40

After learning that I'm not alone in yearning for a VT100 emulator, let me
follow up --

Having a lot of friends who are business oriented, and, recalling (myself)
that VisiCalc is what got the whole microcomputer circus rolling in the 
first place, does it strike anyone as slightly odd that there's no spreadsheet
distributed with the NeXT?

Maybe some of you can sympathize -- people come in and see the new machine, and
then the first thing they (the business types) say is, "So, can it run Lotus or
Excel or SuperCalc?" One is then put in the awkward position of mumbling, 
"Well, not yet, but maybe someday. Want to see a balancing seal neural network 
or a poker demo instead, though?" Mathematica thrills the mathematicians, but
it leaves the accountants cold.

The emphasis on graphic and sound demos is fine and good, but there's also a 
*crying* need for some meat-and-potatoe programs such as honest-to-god VT100
emulator I mentioned earlier, a mainline spreadsheet program, one of the major
stat packages, etc. I also wish NeXT would distribute the BSD compilers
(fortran and pascal, say) with the machine!

I realize the machine is still not in a production release of the OS, and is
intended primarily to be a development environment, but I still can't help
being sadened to see a lot of initial (potential) buyers lose interest in
the machine when they see how little software is currently available. [I'm
afraid the computer buying public has become rather leary of promised software
after the rash of vaporware plaguing the industry as a whole.] The question I
hear is, "Why should I buy a NeXT rather than a Mac II or SparcStation or 
one of the new low end Vaxstations?"

Right now the big selling point for the machine seems to be its storage
capacity, but there are only so many people who want a warehouse -- lots of
people want a building *with* furnishings!

I mention these views not to start a flame war, but rather in the hope that
either (1) someone out there will be encouraged to develop meat-and-potatoe
programs for the machine, or (2) someone at NeXT will consider these opinions
when deciding where priority development support should go.

Joe St Sauver