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From: peterd@cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: why X? what am I missing?
Summary: This one's short! ;-)
Message-ID: <1991Jan14.003054.13436@cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 14 Jan 91 00:30:54 GMT
References: <12048.278dfd95@ecs.umass.edu> <F$=y*674@cs.psu.edu>
Sender: news@cs.mcgill.ca (Netnews Administrator)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 63

In article <F$=y*674@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>
>In article <12048.278dfd95@ecs.umass.edu> gerst@ecs.umass.edu writes:
>
>   What is the REAL reason people are choosing X based systems over the NeXT?
>
>   Is there something I'm missing? What is running on X that everyone is using
>   other than Xterm, Xeyes and Backgammon :) ???
.  .  .
>   Everything I've seen so far is "we have to run X", "we need X", "we bought
>   Sun's because they run X"...     WHY?????
>
>At Penn State we have VLSI tools like magic that run under X.  The
>great thing about X is that you can run a program on a Cray and have
>it display on a Sun, Mac, etc(but not NeXT).  X is here to stay.
> .  .  .  

And here at McGill we have a BBN GP-1000. This is a
parallel machine (in our case with 16 68020 CPUs) that we
use for teaching parallel programming. Our instructors are
expected to integrate a parallel assignment or two into a
number of our ugrad courses.

The BBN has a very nice parallel debugger, one that allows
programmers to monitor the various CPUs as they fire
instruction. It is also capable of displaying not only
program flow, but timing dependences among the various
CPUs as they execute programs. The operation and output of
the debugger is integrated into a GUI interface that runs
on "almost any" standard workstation in an ethernet
environment.

The hitch? You got it. Your monitor must have TCP/IP and
the X window system. Our new lab does not, at least until
we get our version of X working under NeXTStep 2.0 or until
someone else gives or sells it to us. I really don't care
which it is. But the semester started last week and any
minute people are going to start asking the obvious
questions.

And before anyone writes that I was silly to buy NeXTen if
I wanted X, I have it in writing from them that NeXT plans
to support X in some manner. I understood it may note be
as a NeXT product, and as I said, I don't care. I was
willing to help people write it for me, I was willing to
pay someone a reasonable amount of money to do it for me,
whatever. I just wanted NeXT to make clear what it was to
be, so I could tell my boss tomorrow when he asks....



				- peterd

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+-------+ 	Peter Deutsch		McGill University
| u # u |	peterd@cs.mcgill.ca	School of Computer Science
|/\/\/\/|	
| a   a |	"Well she turned me into a newt!"
 \  a  /	"A newt?"
  \___/         "I got better."
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