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From: csimmons@hqpyr1.oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.next
Subject: Re: The NeXT Problem
Message-ID: <452@oracle.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 88 08:51:45 GMT
References: <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@oracle.uucp
Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont CA
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In article <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> pchris@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Chris Perleberg) writes:
>
>It seems that the NeXT machine may have a few problems:
>
>3) Non-Standard Software: What software company would develop software for
>   the special features of just one computer (NeXT Step)?  How many copies of 
>   this software can they possibly sell?

Oops...  Note that IBM has licensed NeXT Step and plans to port it to
run on top of AIX.  Potentially, OSF will go with AIX as its
operating system, and this would suggest that NeXT Step would be
likely to appear in any OSF offering.  In any event, with IBM backing
the NeXT software, NeXT doesn't have to worry about this little item.

>4) Slow Optical Drive: In the past, optical drives have been significantly
>   slower (seek times) than magnetic drives.  What is the advantage of the
>   optical drive?  Cost must be less than that of the larger 330Mbyte $2K
>   magnetic drive.  But NeXT will be hurt once benchmarks come out for its
>   i/o performance (using the optical drive).

Something to factor into your price performance picture:  I believe another
article pointed out that the optical drive was under $1500 dollars.  So,
for $1550, I get 256MB of disk storage.  For $1600 I get 512MB of disk
storage.  For $1700 I get 1 Gigabyte of disk storage.  Admittedly, my
seek time gets a little bit long (2 to 3 seconds) when I have to swap disks...

For the 330 MB winchester, I'm fairly certain that you can't pop the
disk in and out of the machine.  To get massive amounts of storage,
you'ld have to attach a tape drive or floppy disk drive.  256 MB of
floppy disk storage, in volume, should cost you around $250.  For
the tape drive, your seek time is probably somewhat worse than 2 to 3
seconds.

So, the advantage of the optical drive is the ability to make available
massive amounts of storage at low cost and reasonable accessibility.

>6) Sun (I have heard) has sold 15,000 workstations to universitys.  How many
>   can NeXT expect to sell with its slow processor, non-standard bus/software, 
>   slow drive, and late software?

My understanding is that NeXT needs to sell 10,000 machines over the
next two years.

>2) Make "stub" boards that convert standard NuBus boards to the NeXT version of
>   NuBus.  These "stubs" would be placed between the NeXT slots and the
>   standard NuBus boards.  Longer Term Goal: Make the NeXT NuBus an
>   international standard, much as Apple made its version of NuBus a standard.
>   Possible Solution: Change the bus NOW to a standard, provide board
>   converters for computers with the current bus.

To some extent, this may have been done.  As Barry Lustig points out,
NeXT well be making available a chip that implements a NuBus interface.
Cost of the chip:  about $25.  It would be interesting to hear how
easy this chip makes it to build boards for the NeXT NuBus, or to convert
a board from 10MhZ to 25Mhz.

>3) Make NeXT proprietary software into standards, and beat Sun at its own game
>   before Sun beats NeXT.  This may mean making NeXT Step an overlay on X
>   windows.  The important thing is to develop a standard that can be (and is)
>   used by all computers.

As I mentioned above, IBM has already made NeXT proprietary software
into a standard.

Also, since NeXT runs a Unix-based operating system, it' going to be
real easy for companies to port their product from their current
Unix based machines to the NeXT machine.

The User Interface provided by the machine is supposed to be real real nice
in that it makes it extremely simple for programmers to put together a user
interface on top of their existing application.

>		Chris  Perleberg