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From: mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc,comp.os.misc,comp.misc,comp.arch,alt.next
Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (long)
Message-ID: <10634@reed.UUCP>
Date: 14 Oct 88 04:44:58 GMT
References: <360@elan.UUCP> <17479@gatech.edu>
Reply-To: mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg)
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Lines: 32

In article <17479@gatech.edu> ken@gatech.UUCP (Ken Seefried iii) writes:

	>Will they be including any development tools for
	>the DSP, like the Motorola assembler or (better) C compiler?

I haven't seen it on paper but I'm pretty sure they are including the C
56000 C compiler for it.


     >I spent a little time doing work with optical disk technology,
     >and it was far, far to slow to be primary main storage.  What
     >magic has NeXT worked to make it suitable?

A person from Reed who was at the announcement said that things seemed
to load slowly but then goes faster.  That makes a lot of sense, since Mach
uses as much memory as it can as a disk cache, making things go faster
once you use them.  The optional SCSI drives would be faster I suspect.


	>The big question of the day: how stable is Mach?  Until
	>relatively recently, Mach was a reseach OS.  Has NeXT
	>had time to get all the kinks out?

CMU is planning a new release of Mach this fall which will be independent
of the AT&T license requirements and will be more machine independent.
I don't know what the NeXT people are using.


It is such a nice machine.  I wish I could go to school & buy a machine
at the same time.  I wish I had a BMW I could sell for a few bucks.

Mike