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From: gn@orbus
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT as a vanilla UNIX box (...and major disappointment (long))
Message-ID: <1991Jun23.001024.171@orbus.uucp>
Date: 23 Jun 91 00:10:24 GMT
Article-I.D.: orbus.1991Jun23.001024.171
References: <998@rosie.NeXT.COM>
Sender: gn@orbus.uucp
Organization: Society For the Prevention of Necrobovinism
Lines: 73

In article <998@rosie.NeXT.COM> cmac@next.com (Chris MacAskill) writes:
> I found this thread to be fascinating.  It rekindled The Great Debate, at
> least at my end of the hall here at NeXT.
> ...
>
> In any case, our identity certainly isn't clear out there.  I sometimes think  
> we've combined the planet's best products with less-than-the-best marketing  

I guess I just gotta get some stuff out of my system.

We (Rathe, inc.) paid for a NeXT in January to develop a major railroad
shipment tracking application. I personally spent alot of time convincing our
client that NeXT was the platform to use.

After seven weeks I had to go back to the client and reconvince them that the  
best platform for development was Sun. I had to do this because we had project
time constraints, and contrary to several promises from NeXT we did not receive  
our order until the end of April.  Necessary technical documentation until 
the first week in June. I knew things were bad at NeXT when three days after
receiving the machine, I get a call from NeXT order processing informing me 
the system should ship at the beginning of the next week.

The NeXT Rathe bought is now relegated to my home machine, and I've come to
the conclusion this is for the best (for Rathe not NeXT, our client is the
largest RR in the world, and NeXT could of sold alot machines into this 
market.) I believe this for several reasons:

Documentation: 

The Documentation for the NeXT is at best sparse, incomplete, and in several
case just plain wrong. They do not include printed Unix documentation. The 
calls section of the on-line doc is missing at least twenty system calls/
subroutines, there are commands included in the distribution that are
not documented anywhere.
There are nice features of Mach and NeXTstep that are also completely
undocumented (shared libraries, class usage).
Documentation, to me, is NeXT's biggest short coming.

Unix:

UUCP is broken. Signals are not quite right. Shipped Sendmail is brain dead.
Security is weak. The worst, I feel is, dump/restore doesn't work, and neither
does tar when dealing with multi-volumes (dump/restore has additional problems)
The Mach implementation is also weak, missing several key features, like 
shared memory, and multi-processing.

Hardware:

Since receiving my NeXT I have had problems with:

The Printer (flaky).
The Disk Drive (replaced).
and next week Motorola is coming out to replace the processor board (Panicking
at least a couple times a week).
Even the 2.8 meg floppy disk shipped with the NeXT has gone bad.


The response I've most often received when speaking to others of my problems
is that, indeed NeXT has problems, but who doesn't (horrors stories about
HP & Sun follow)  Doesn't Next sell itself, though, as better, and outside the
circle of unix workstations? Better then those other guys.

There are lots of things that are wonderful about the NeXT (price/performance,
the user interface, Motorola repair, one of the best 'out of the box' bases 
of software and hardware features). This only waters down what are critical,
major oversights and failures on the part of NeXT.

--
Greg Noel, Rathe, inc.
umn-cs!rathe!orbus!gn

"Once performance is assumed, style is everything"  -A. Noctor