Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!oz.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Meat and Potatoe Programs Message-ID: Date: 20 Jul 89 19:53:32 GMT References: <5527@oregon.uoregon.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: J Greely Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 97 In-reply-to: joe@oregon.uoregon.edu's message of 20 Jul 89 15:30:04 GMT In article <5527@oregon.uoregon.edu> joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (Joe St Sauver) writes: >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? Not terribly. I've seen bundled spreadsheets, and they didn't impress me. To be useful, it would have to support the current standards, and that's a major endeavor for a company who's still busy making the machine work reliably. >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. No, one grabs the third-party announcements, turns to the page with LOTUS on it, and lets them draw their own conclusion. Hopefully, by the time the machine is actually released, you'll be able to show them the real product announcement (or the real product!) instead. >Want >to see a balancing seal neural network or a poker demo instead, >though?" Mathematica thrills the mathematicians, but it leaves the >accountants cold. Any profession where excitement revolves around spreadsheets and COBOL deserves a little disappointment. Hard-core business people are going to be skeptical of NeXT anyway, due to the nature of the bundled software. How many of them are going to be excited about *any* of the Apps? A symbolic math package? Beta SQL with a five-machine license? Lisp? A low-end word processor? Shakespeare? Unless the bundle changes for the business environment, who will go for it? I'm *still* trying to figure out what the non-university market looks like. >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. (side note: the emphasis on demos is partially because the current machines are to help developers get a start in their environment. Looking at them as features for end-users is probably the wrong way to go about it) Square pegs, black holes. The only one I have any use for is the vt100, which I consider non-negotiable if it's going to be disguised as a Unix machine. I don't do spreadsheets, since I can do what I need faster with emacs, awk, and perl. And if I want statistics, I can either pick up any of several Unix stat packages or roll my own. >I also wish NeXT would distribute the BSD compilers (fortran and >pascal, say) with the machine! This struck me as odd for a moment, and then I thought about it. Both f77 and pascal are pcc-based, and NeXT has abandoned pcc for GNU c. That would mean either porting the backend of pcc, or adapting f77 and pascal to run with gcc. Either option is messy and time-consuming, and neither language is as important to a Unix machine as a good C compiler. I imagine that when Absoft showed up interested in porting their Fortran with object-oriented extensions, NeXT jumped at it. They gain some needed third-party support, and cut development time. >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. Anyone who makes a purchase decision based on 0.9 deserves what they get. You can't really evaluate it fairly right now, on any criteria other than "concept". >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?" The question you should then ask is, "What do you want to *do* with it?" If their answer is not something that is best served by the NeXT, tell them to buy the other machine. My NeXT is more fun than the Sparcstation down the hall (or wherever it's gotten to), but I know which one I'd rather do crunching with. >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! Then again, some of us like to grab a chainsaw and make our own. :-) "I was trying to modify the Sony Walkman into something *useful* -- throw the heterodyne into the fourth dimension -- when I lost concentration and a whole bunch of green icing fell to the ground." -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)