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From: knrgroup@garnet.berkeley.edu (Raymond group)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!!
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.071319.14991@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 07:13:19 GMT
References: <1990Nov10.022306.6551@agate.berkeley.edu> <108620@convex.convex.com> <1990Nov14.062822.7879@rice.edu>
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jack@Taffy.rice.edu (Jack Howarth) writes:
>Granted the FLOPs [for the 486] are poor compared to an 040
>that only applies for scientific/engineering application

Or any application that needs to do calulations to draw.  E.g., any application
that makes use of PostScript (actually all applications use PostScript to the
extent on the NeXT that Display PostScript is the screen imaging model, however
drawing programs are even more PostScript-intensive.). 

There are probably a few more important uses for fast floating-point operations,
but I can't think of them at the moment.

>the installed base [of NeXTs] was 8,000 or so.  At that level of market
>share you have developers sitting around writing great tools for each other.
>My guess is that the 040 NeXT will make a few gains this year but will level
>off as Mac 040s come

As I've said more than a few times, there were 15,000 NEW orders in the two
months prior to Sept. 18th.  I've just recently heard that there have been
many more since then.  NeXT is now not so much worried about getting enough
orders as it is about getting those orders out in a timely fashion.  By the
way, the new NeXTs will ship in one week (representing a slip of three weeks
from the original schedule...now how many *weeks* is System 7.0 late?)

The NeXT is not making "few gains." It's making rather large gains in the
workstation/high-end PC market.  No official figures yet.  But many NeXT
software developers are sleeping much sounder nowadays.  I believe the NeXT
will take off, and take off in a big way.  And if by some chance it doesn't,
we can always port our software to other platforms--software that would have
taken much longer to develop on virtually any other platform than the NeXT.