Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.ircc.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!VAX1.CC.UAKRON.EDU!mcs.kent.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: 68040 for the Mac? Message-ID: <1991Jan27.174415.1236@NCoast.ORG> Date: 27 Jan 91 17:44:15 GMT References: <1991Jan26.031909.10366@NCoast.ORG> <749G*$t7@cs.psu.edu> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.misc Organization: North Coast Public Access Un*x (ncoast) Lines: 82 As quoted from <749G*$t7@cs.psu.edu> by melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger): +--------------- | In article <1991Jan26.031909.10366@NCoast.ORG> allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes: | "Educational". Welcome to the real world, chum --- I post from home, I work | in a Unix business environment. I don't *get* educational pricing, and I | don't get educational solutions to problems. | | Yeah, the NeXT doesn't seem nearly as appealing if you have to pay | $4995 for one. Especially, if you consider that you need more disk | space if you want to do development work. Of course, people are | paying that much for IBMs and Macs. +--------------- I paid half that for my SE --- and got ripped off (it was available from other places for slightly over 2/3 of what I paid, I found out later). +--------------- | serial ports to network *that* way --- and any more serial ports on the XT | would be absorbed for another purpose (packet) anyway. | | How much does it cost to set up a 386 Unix box these days? The cost | of the machines themselve should drop even more now that AMD has | cloned the 386, but buying Unix itself seems to be a major cost. | Someone mentioned to me that it costs $1500 for SCO Unix. +--------------- True, but Esix is $850 if you can live without some niceties like manuals that come with the machine (I have manuals for SVR3.2 already, since I often get called at home to help out with emergencies on clients' machines, so this is no problem --- and there's always the Prentice-Hall set). I plan to put up a 386 Unix box, as I said (quote removed), but the Mac it ain't. Nor is Windows 3.0, which we have on a machine at work. X is margunally interesting but takes a lot of memory and even more horsepower; I use mgr, which is small, fast, and minimal, but you give up quite a few things to get that. In any case, the Unix box will be pretty much dedicated to various forms of communications --- I will continue to use a different machine (the SE) for other things. +--------------- | I realize that a machine with a 15 mip 68040 might seem like it's | overkill, but with the NeXT it is not. Display Postscript requires a | lot of horsepower, as does Unix, and Objective C. The extra | horsepower of the CPU is used to add more functionality to the | machine, not to create a machine that is blindingly fast. An SE/30 | will probably seem faster than an 040 NeXT because it is only working | with 21K of video RAM using Quickdraw. The NeXT has a million pixel | display driven by a better imaging model, Display Postscript. The | NeXT is much more than a faster Mac II. It is going to change | computing as much as the Mac changed computing during its first couple | of years. And as with the Macintosh, it's not going to happen | overnight? +--------------- I'll keep an eye on MachTen before conceding that Unix has to be a CPU-killer. (I also have experience with Altos 586s, which weren't the speed demons we're used to nowadays but somehow managed to be usable anyway.) And in any case, the NeXT can push computing "higher" all it wants, but until it's competitive in cost with existing computers, it won't catch on as you hope. You infer that the NeXT's base configuration is roughly equivalent to the base Mac configuration in terms of capability, but at twice the cost it won't make much of a dent down here at this end of the Mac users' spectrum. Now, if you could show me a NeXT "equivalent" of the Mac Classic or SE for under $2500, that would change. But it'd still have to be under $1500 to be competitive with an SE/30 upgrade for my existing SE. 2-plus-year-old computers don't resell very well, so selling the SE to help pay for a theoretical low-end NeXT wouldn't help much. PLEASE try to remember that, despite Apple's apparent (past?) unwillingness to pay attention to the low end, the Mac manages to cover everything from the home "front" up to high-end business machines, while the NeXT is designed as an educational machine with business shadings. It doesn't target the *entire* Mac lineup, and it's doubtful that it could be scaled down to do so. ++Brandon -- Me: Brandon S. Allbery VHF/UHF: KB8JRR on 220, 2m, 440 Internet: allbery@NCoast.ORG Packet: KB8JRR @ WA8BXN America OnLine: KB8JRR AMPR: KB8JRR.AmPR.ORG [44.70.4.88] uunet!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery Delphi: ALLBERY