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From: knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu (Raymond group)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!!
Message-ID: <1990Nov7.230807.17914@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 7 Nov 90 23:08:07 GMT
References: <1990Nov7.160943.19804@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <90311.152209CXT105@psuvm.psu.edu> <1990Nov7.223221.14989@agate.berkeley.edu>
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jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad) writes:
>I've always been curious about one thing about the NeXT:  If the NeXT GUI
>is so great, why is it that whenever I look over the shoulder of a NeXT user
>on our campus, I invariably see him or her typing away the same old UNIX
>commands in a terminal window?  Same comment applies to X-Windows for that
>matter.

There are probably a variety of reasons for what you say you've seen:
1.  There are some people perverse enough to prefer command-line interfaces.

2.  There are some people who would like to use the full power of Unix.
    Like the people in group 1, these people would be extremely disappointed
    by what the Mac offers.

3.  They may have been logged onto their university minicomputers running
    Unix. 

4.  Programmers generally like to use both the power of Unix and the power
    of the NeXT's GUI and program development environment.  So if your
    NeXT lab is full of programmers, you'll probably see them running Unix
    in one window and hooking up program buttons with a mouse in other windows.

>Our experience here at NU is that you really do need to be a UNIX hacker to
>successfully install, maintain, and use a NeXT, or at least you frequently
>require the assistance of a hacker.

There is a very large difference between a multi-user or networked environment
than the single-user home environment.  If you need to maintain multiple
accounts on one machine, you do need to do some system administration. However,
if you use a NeXT like a standalone Mac, you don't have multiple users to
take care of.  The NeXT also allows more than one person to be logged onto the
same machine at once.  This requires some initial systems adminstration, but 
this is also something you can't do at all with your normal Mac.  

As for installation, all you needed to do with the old NeXTs was plug it in
and load the disk with the OS.  The new NeXTs come with the OS on the built-in
hard disk.  So all you have to do is plug it in.  

>Our Mac users don't require 1% of the technical help our NeXT users do.

The thing is that many NeXT users are ex-Mac users.  This means that people
expect to do everything on a NeXT in the same manner as they did it on a
Mac (or in Windows).  It's a matter of re-training people to learn an even
better system.  Also, people generally use NeXTs to do more powerful things
than you can do with a Mac.  More powerful number crunching, programming, etc.
However, a word processor on a NeXT is as easy to use as a word processor on
a Mac.     

>Have the people who think that Interface Builder is so superior to the Mac
>ever tried Apple's latest versions of Object Pascal/C++/MacApp/Mouser/
>ViewEdit/Inspector etc.?

My impression was that they have (at least here on Usenet).  I've only used
THINK C myself on the Mac, but I have extensive experience with the NeXT
programming environment and love it.          

>Is one really all that superior to the other, or are we just picking nits
>here?

I think the best criteria to determine the answer to this question is the
quality of the software produced in both environments and the length of 
time it took to write that software.  NeXT programmers agree that they
save 50-75% in development time over a traditional GUI environment.  NeXT
software speaks for itself.