Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!ucla-cs!math.ucla.edu!joshua!barry
From: barry@joshua.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: New NeXTs rumored out September 18
Message-ID: <287@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 26 Aug 90 05:05:09 GMT
References: <7721@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Sender: news@MATH.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: barry@math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Organization: UCLA Department of Math
Lines: 40

In article <7721@helios.TAMU.EDU> daugher@cs.tamu.edu (Dr. Walter C. Daugherity) writes:

[quoting Notes From The Field:]
>
>"Look for color and monochrome units based on 25-MHz 68040 processors.
>The $10,000 color machine will have four slots and use the same case as the
>current machine, which will no longer be produced.  

Great!---I guess that makes our originals collectors items! :-)

>The $5,000 black-and-white
>machine will be a 'pizza box,' with a single slot.  Both units will have (at
>last) a 2.88-meg 3-1/2-inch floppy, and a 100-meg hard disk.  The optical disk
>will be optional, but bigger (512 megs).  

I think this is unfortunate---floppy drives really are outdated
technology. The just don't have the capacity a machine like NeXT needs.

For example, the excellent TopDraw demo takes up 27 Meg!---wouldn't
be much fun having to load those 20 floppies, would it? :-)

Or, another example, I just copied a friend 90 Meg of (public domain)
stuff. He'd sure be loaded down if I had to give him 70 floppies!
(Not to mention 70 floppies cost at least twice as much as an optical
disk, with only 1/3 the capacity.)

And even so, big files---like tar files or graphics---would
need to _broken up_ for transfer onto multiple floppis; a
repulsive notion, isn't it?

The optical drive was one of the greatest, and most useful, innovations
of the cube. Sorry to see it go.


Also, the predicted 100 Mb hard drive + _no optical_ just isn't
going to cut it---thats not enough to store distribution 1.0 !?!

I have a 330 MB drive that hovers at 90% full, and much of that
is just the standard distribution. I have another 300 Mb of stuff
on od's. 100 Mb just ain't enough!