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From: rlin@cs.ubc.ca (Robert Lin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: New NeXTs rumored out September 18
Message-ID: <9291@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 27 Aug 90 01:24:00 GMT
References: <7721@helios.TAMU.EDU> <287@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Organization: Objective Software Engineering Corp.
Lines: 32

In article <287@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> barry@math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>In article <7721@helios.TAMU.EDU> daugher@cs.tamu.edu (Dr. Walter C. Daugherity) writes:
>
>>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I think this is unfortunate---floppy drives really are outdated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.
>
>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!

I believe the marketing thrust is to sell the pizza box as a network node,
which really can't hack it alone but needs an NFS file server. The server
is expected to have a big 512M OD, though. So for those situations, the
OD distribution still makes sense.

On the other hand, for people who haven't got an NFS server, you could
also attach a bigger SCSI (a 660M external, for example) and stuff all
the other distribution stuff there.

The 100 Mb hard disk only holds the bare bone UNIX, device files, etc.
Remember, even the leviathan System V R4.0, known for its gigantic girth,
takes only 40M (though 70M is recommended for actual use).

-Robert