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From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: 68040 for the Mac?
Message-ID: <749G*$t7@cs.psu.edu>
Date: 27 Jan 91 02:42:24 GMT
References: <5$7Glmf4@cs.psu.edu> <1991Jan24.005516.8300@NCoast.ORG>
	<a?5Gk-_5@cs.psu.edu> <1991Jan26.031909.10366@NCoast.ORG>
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In-Reply-To: allbery@NCoast.ORG's message of 26 Jan 91 03:19:09 GMT
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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.

   In my home environment, I have:

   * IBM-compatible laptop
   * XT-clone with a 386 card
   * Xenix/386 box (currently on loan, will be replaced by a permanent 386 UNIX
     box)
   * Mac SE

   Getting data between *any* of them is non-trivial, except that the XT-clone's
   360K disks can be read by the Xenix box (but it doesn't work the other way
   around, 1.2MB floppy drives don't do a good job of writing 360K disks and the
   XT clone is rather particular about disks anyway).  No Ethernet.  (No slots
   available in the XT or the laptop, so it wouldn't help anyway.)  Not enough
   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.

   Even ignoring the rest of the machines and their purposes, though:  this is a
   home environment.  A NeXT does little for it; why do you think Apple has the
   SE/30 as well as all the big Nubus machines?  Because not everyone needs a big
   do-everything computer, just a *small* fast machine.  I want the SE/30 upgrade
   for the speed and the ability to stuff more than 4MB of memory in it, but I
   don't need a 32MB departmental server.

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?

-Mike