Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!hsdndev!rice!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Why all of this NeXT talk? Keywords: A3000UX NeXT stop rediculous Message-ID: <1991Feb11.025210.24933@sugar.hackercorp.com> Date: 11 Feb 91 02:52:10 GMT References: <1991Feb9.083920.27791@en.ecn.purdue.edu> Distribution: usa Organization: Sugar Land Unix -- Houston, TX Lines: 51 In article <1991Feb9.083920.27791@en.ecn.purdue.edu> doctorj@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Jeffrey W Davis) writes: > Why is everyone so worried about competing with the NeXT machine. Because the NeXT, Amiga, and machines like the Sparcstation are the only machines at this price-point in the UNIX workstation market. And the RISC machines are diskless servers. It's the competition, and technically it is a superior product. Just as the Amiga 1000 was a superior product to the competing machines when it came out. Funny how that old "expandability" shoe is on the other foot now, and it's suddenly a major factor? > Being an avid Amiga programmer, I know its potential. Irrelevent for the UNIX product. > The Amiga is now supported by AT&T! The world champions at shooting themselves in the foot. > The Unix port running on the NeXT machine is not actually Unix. Yes, it is. It is 4BSD UNIX running on top of Mach. Mach is a message-passing small-kernel operating system similar in many respects to AmigaOS. Think of "UNIX under AmigaOS". > Another thing I have seen too much of is the comparison between a > 68040 based NeXT and a 68030 based A3000/A3000UX. These are the machines being offered. WHat do you expect? > An example of expandibility on the Amiga is that Transputer boards are > readily available. You really want to program in Occam? If you want more CPU power get a RISC machine and have all your software speed up, instead of just the stuff that's highly parallelisable. > So why all the NeXT info? Because I want to know why Commodore has spent all this money on UNIX, and what it's going to buy them. I want to know who is going to be buying the Amiga, and I want better answers than "Real UNIX" (sure, now consider it substandard), or "AmigaOS" (why is that a selling point for UNIX machines?), or slots (what are you going to put in them?), or color (I'd happily give up color for higher resolution... think how many monochrome STs were sold on that basis?)? What is the market for this product? -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' .