Xref: utzoo comp.arch:6647 comp.sys.misc:1811 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!postman+uid0 From: dpm@cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard) Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.misc Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (long) Message-ID: Date: 17 Oct 88 16:52:05 GMT References: <360@elan.UUCP> <449@oracle.UUCP>, <4005@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 31 In-Reply-To: <4005@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> > If the students are going to own these, they'll have them in their dorm > > rooms, and they almost definitely WILL be run as standalone PC's. I know > of > one campus (Iowa State University) that has wired their dorm rooms with > a > second phone line for future data communications use, and there are probably > > more, but I doubt that ANYONE in the near future will be wiring their dorms > > with full ethernet capability, file servers and extra tape/disk drives for > > loading data. I know that we are a lunatic fringe case at the moment, but CMU already has a token ring running to all of the dorm rooms. The campus computer store sells an ethernet adapter for the ring. NeXT machines here will probably use the Andrew software so they would have access to all of the Andrew file servers, printing facilities, etc. Students with IBM PC compatibles already have this access (if they fork out the money for a token ring card). It is expensive to wire a campus, but I think that more places will be doing it. I think the high price tag IS a real barrier to student sales. If you add up the component costs though, it would be REALLY hard to build a $3K workstation. The 68030 isn't cheap. Memory prices are still pretty high when you want 1Mbit parts, and hi-res monitors cost a pretty penny. NeXT has tried to side-step one of the big money sinks by selling hard disks as an option. I know that I would want one though. n --- David P. Maynard (dpm@cs.cmu.edu) Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 --- Any opinions expressed are mine only. I haven't asked the ECE department or CMU what they think. ---