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From: pclark@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Peter Clark)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXTStation
Message-ID: <96091@srcsip.UUCP>
Date: 11 Oct 90 03:56:15 GMT
Sender: news@src.honeywell.COM
Lines: 79

I've been blessed with the opportunity to play with a demo NeXTStation for the
past two days, and felt I owed it to the net to summarize my experiences. This
will be somewhat stream-of-consciousness, so bear with me.

In a word- Outstanding! If this is the 'future of NeXT', NeXT should be pretty
well off. The '040 slab seems to be around 4 times as fast as the '030 cube
for cpu-intensive work (it can count to 1^7 4 times as fast)- the '040 manages
to stay ahead of the DSP in Mandelbrot for quite a while, and finishes way
ahead of the '030.

The 2.0 software is also nice. The Workspace manager is now the 'file viewer',
and it has a 'shelf' to put commonly-used directories and files. Clicking on
the shelf will jump you to the location of the file/directory in the file
system. It also lets you run things like copying & removing as background
processes- the workspace manager isn't tied up until the copy is finished.

All programs launch *much* faster.

The 3.5 IBM-Compatible drive really is. It shows up just like a directory in
your home directory, and you can open text files with Edit, & read & edit
them. The MS-DOS file system mounts flawlessly into the Unix file system.

Most 1.0 binaries work- NX_VOID and FrameMaker 2.0 work fine, but Scott Hess'
TimeMon program doesn't work. I don't know why.

Terminal & Shell have been replaced with a re-worked version of Stuart.
Congrats, Scott!

The Admin tools have been reworked, and they all seem to be better.

The Librarian is a *hell* of a lot faster, but it doesn't work with old index
files- be prepared to re-index all your non-standard stuff. It's worth it.

You can print to a fax-modem as well as the printer. It shows up in the print
panel, almost like a printer.

WriteNow does indeed now do underlining.

The Preferences app has a panel for choosing monitors. Evidently, you can
indeed have a multiply-headed cube.

There are a few new toys in the NextDeveloper/Demos directory- a Datebook, a
couple of fractal programs, the Gourmet calculator (mentioned in the NeXT on
campus magazine), a spiffy PendulumLab program (which does very smooth
animation), and a program called ShowAndTell, which records all the things you
do with the computer & can play them back (great for developing training
scripts).

The ScorePlayer program now has two types of score files- one which is
'compiled' or 'optimized' for playback, and the old text format. It seems to
be a lot better at playing without skipping or slowing down with the system is
loaded.

Improv is neat, but I haven't had enough time to get a feel for it. It looks
a lot better then Excel (the only spreadsheet I've used a lot).

PowerStep and WorkPerfect are there, and they work. I haven't played with them
much either, but they seem to work as advertised.

The 'Request' Menu has been renamed to Services, and it extensible. Various
applications can install menus in here- Mail shows up (i.e., mail the
selection), and there's been some others as well.

The IB has some new palettes, and a better Text object. It's supposedly easier
to add custom palettes now, but I haven't tried it.

The C compiler now supports both Objective-C and C++. All the libraries are
still in Obj-C. Emacs is ver. 18.55.

These are all the things that I can think of right now- I'm going to be sad
when I have to give it back to NeXT tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to
having my very own soon! Feel free to e-mail any questions that I might be
able to answer.


	Pete Clark
	
p.s. I have no affiliation with NeXT, other than as a satisfied and impressed
customer.