Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!brunix!doorknob!twl From: twl@cs.brown.edu (Ted "Theodore" W. Leung) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!! Message-ID: Date: 8 Nov 90 17:14:33 GMT References: <1990Nov7.015140.239@agate.berkeley.edu> <1990Nov7.015951.784@agate.berkeley.edu> <46372@apple.Apple.COM> <1990Nov7.212944.11043@agate.berkeley.edu> Sender: news@brunix.UUCP Organization: Department of Computer Science, Brown University Lines: 96 In-reply-to: knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu's message of 7 Nov 90 21:29:44 GMT >>>>> On 7 Nov 90 21:29:44 GMT, knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu (Raymond group) said: > If you use a NeXT to do Mac things, there is no system administration > involved. You plug the NeXT in and use it like you would a Mac. You > don't even have to create user accounts; merely use the single "me" > account that comes set up. The issue in system administration is not for single users. For a single user, I'm willing to believe that setting up out of the box is trivial (although adding a SCSI drive to a NeXT doesn't seem to be so easy -- I have a long file of directions from various people who claim that their way works). However, lets take two novice users and give them 5 Macs and 5 Nextstations to setup in a small network, each with one laser printer to share. How much work is it for these people to be up and running (to be fair, the mac people have to install Appleshare on one machine)? I'm not so sure that I think the NeXT will be plug and play. If you have an experienced user, might be a different story, but not two novics. > As for when something goes wrong with the machine, pray tell what you > would do with your Mac? If it's a system crash, I reboot, and rebooting > is as easy to do on the Mac as the NeXT. If something happens to a file So what does the novice user do when fsck starts to print all sorts of messages about bad cylinder groups and incorrect inode counts and bad superblocks? > shop. Opening up the Mac voids the warranty. Likewise, I would send a > broken NeXT to the shop. Happily, the NeXTs I use at work have never > broken down. This is not much of an argument. Sooner or later the NeXTs you use at work WILL break down. Things wear out and break. Law of nature. Now suppose you move to a different part of the country... Where are you going to take your broken machine to get it fixed? And how long is it going to take to get the parts needed to get you back up and running? > As for adding new equipment, as someone else pointed out, NeXT 2.0 allows > many peripherals, including popular hard drives, to be plug-and-play. > The fact is that adding anything to a Mac is a tough job whose toughness is > obscured by the fact that Mac peripherals come with the software that does > the set-up for you. Why do you think that a Mac hard disk is 50-100% more > expensive in many cases than an equivalent PC hard disk? The Mac hard disk > manufacturer had to add special hardware and software to make his drive > compatible with the Mac. As for the NeXT, peripherals designed specifically > for the NeXT are mostly plug-and-play. The great advantage the NeXT has > over the Mac is that you can also use peripherals NOT designed with the > NeXT in mind. With some Unix, you can use all sorts of neat peripherals > that would be virtually impossible or a nightmare to personally connect to > a Mac. I assume that you're making this claim because of the SCSI bus on the NeXT. There *is* a SCSI bus on the Mac as well, and many people go out and buy just plain disk mechanisms and hook the up via SCSI, and use software like Apple's HD Setup or Silverlining to format their drives. The difference in price between Mac and PC drives is the SCSI bus. Why not compare equivalent prices for plain drive mechanisms that would be used in a Mac or a NeXT? Surprise? They're both SCSI, and they both cost the same. The differences in price after that are that drive "manufacturers" add value. Sometimes that's a case and power supply, sometimes its software, sometimes it's a warranty. But if you look in the Fall 1990 software catalog, you'll see that NeXT compatible drives are also similarly priced, and for the same reasons. I fully expect that I can take the new 510MB Connor drive that all the folks in comp.sys.next are drooling about and hook it up to a Mac via SCSI, format it via Silverlinging and forget about it. Scanners are just as easy to hook up via SCSI -- to either machine. The scanner software is really what counts anyway. So what kind of peripherals does unix make so easy to connect? Everything in unix is either a block or character device, with a protocol imposed by the device driver. If you add some funky device you need a driver. What's so different about this compared to a Mac? You don't just get graphics by plugging a board into /dev/cgsix on a Sparcstation. You need OpenWindows or MIT's X. Give us one example of such a peripheral.... On the other hand, the Mac's ADB makes it easy to add new input devices to the Mac without chewing up SCSI addresses. Is this easy to do on a NeXT? > Take another example. Does a normal user know how to use a modem with a > Mac without a program like Red Ryder or Microphone to connect and communicate > with the modem? I think the answer is a resounding NO! On the other hand, > I'm using a modem with the NeXT without the help of any outside software. > I run the standard terminal emulator and use a Unix program called tip for > dialing. If you don't want to use Unix, Microphone II, Communicae, > HitchHiker, and other easy-to-use communication programs are already > available for the NeXT. All you're saying here is that a terminal emulator isn't bundled with a Mac. There are a number of freely available terminal emulators that will do just as nicely as tip or Microphone II. Don't get me wrong. I like the NeXT. In some ways, its the machine that we wish the Mac had been at its introduction. But there are also some strengths that the Mac has which yoy aren't recognizing, and some claims that you are making which appear unsubstatiated. So go ahead, talk me into buying a NeXT (for my self, and for my computer illiterate and cash-poor friends). -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet/CSnet: twl@cs.brown.edu | Ted "Theodore" Leung BITNET: twl@BROWNCS.BITNET | Box 1910, Brown University UUCP: uunet!brunix!twl | Providence, RI 02912