Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!ginosko!uunet!lll-winken!lll-crg.llnl.gov!guerra
From: guerra@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Frank M. Guerra)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Saw Release 0.981 and here's some news about it...
Message-ID: <32387@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 7 Sep 89 14:41:02 GMT
References: <393@wjh12.harvard.edu> <1131@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: guerra@lll-crg.llnl.gov.UUCP (Frank M. Guerra)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 47

In article <1131@accuvax.nwu.edu> mccoy@accuvax.nwu.edu (Jim McCoy ) writes:
>In article <393@wjh12.harvard.edu> clp@wjh12.UUCP (Charles L. Perkins) writes:
>>Tonight at the NeXT Boston Computer Society Meeting there was a
>> system engineer from NeXT who showed us Release 0.981 (N.B. < 1.0)
>> which is one of the asymptotic sequence on the way to 1.0
>> (0.99999....).  He said 1.0 was due last week of Sept. or first week
>> of Oct. and sounded serious about the statement). 
>>
>
>Don't they all sound serious ? ;-)  I wonder if the hold-ups are due
>to?
>

From what I was remember, 1.0 has already missed it's original ship date of 
mid-august, but I too am confident in their claim of shipping by Oct 1.  There
were a variety of problems with the delay of 0.9 not related to the OS that
I don't see arising again.  I sincerely doubt that NeXT wants to alienate its
current following with another late release.

>> And their were MANY others demos and new things I couldn't play with
>> but saw in the browser...  there are claimed performance
>> enhancements in Math.  and in the system overall (not all that
>> obvious to me).
>
>This is what i think is of prime importance here.  If system speed (at
>least on the graphics side) does not make a huge leap, i think this
>system will start down the same road that the Lisa went.  I like the
>system, but i'm not buying unless it gets MUCH faster.

I saw (perhaps) the same version here, but I couldn't be sure of the version
number since instead of the release number in the NeXT icon, a greek Beta symbol
was there instead.  When they gave their presentation, I *immediately* noticed
that it seemed faster than what I was used to.  In my opinion, display
performance will improve in 1.0 and when I asked the NeXT rep to what extent,
he figured that a 20% improvement is close; not staggering, but better.  In
fact to show it off, there was a Saturn demo that show a moon whizzing around
the planet at a fairly brisk pace.  Also, both of the sound applications that
I saw had a peak level meter that did a very good job of keeping in sync with
the audio.

My general impression of what I remember is that a lot of nice touches have been
added. I eagerly look forward to receiving our copy.

Frank

Internet Mail : guerra@lll-crg.llnl.gov
NeXT Mail     : guerra@cae.llnl.gov