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From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: new NeXTs as PostScript engines?
Message-ID: <1990Sep28.213733.26340@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 28 Sep 90 21:37:33 GMT
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 23

I posted the following to comp.sys.next:
>The next thing I did was to do a slightly unconventional comparison with the
>Mac price list. Imagine you are in the market for a laser printer with a fast
>PostScript engine, e.g., a LaserWriter IINTX. Stanford price: $3820. Does
>NeXT offer an alternative? Their printer is 400dpi (which I presume is an
>advantage), but needs a NeXT workstation to drive it. Stanford price for a
>NeXT printer: $1229. Total for printer plus minimum NeXT: $4382. Now, this
>is $562 more than the Apple printer, but the LaserWriter doesn't have a
>nice screen to preview your PostScript, or a 105M hard disk. Also, it's
>processor isn't as fast as the NeXT's and it doesn't include a unix
>workstation in the price, or very much bundled software...

This wasn't entirely meant to be a serious suggestion, but a NeXT engineer
pointed out to me that their combination has some major advantages, like the
high speed of the 68040, 8M of RAM, and virtual memory (which should allow very
complex imaging).

So, if anyone has access to an NTX and one of the new NeXTs, a benchmark would
be really interesting. I don't have any suitable benchmarks, (or for that
matter, an NTX or a NeXT) - so I can't take this any further myself.
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu