Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!mce
From: mce@tc.fluke.COM (Brian McElhinney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: The NeXT Machine
Message-ID: <5611@fluke.COM>
Date: 18 Oct 88 21:42:24 GMT
References: <8810141735.AA28542@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM
Organization: SRS Recursive Software, Castrovalva, WA
Lines: 30

In article <8810141735.AA28542@cory.Berkeley.EDU> dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
>	What we are left with is simply a good engineering job with a
>25MHz 68030 in it.  I would hardly call this a quantum leap.

Any new commercial product can be dissected like this.  After all, if it's
commercial, the parts must be somewhat commonly available.  Does that mean no
product can be a quantum leap?  The whole is more than the sum of it's parts;
a machine with a 256 MB "floppy", DSP chip, 16 bit D/A, 8 bit A/D, 256 KB
cache, 12 DMA channels, and the "usual" screen/mouse/keyboard *is* a quantum
leap.  Nothing made by SUN or Apollo or Commodore or Apple compares.  Of
course, NeXT isn't actually making any either... only time will tell.

The place where the NeXT design should really shine is in I/O.  If you like
multiprocessing, you gotta like 12 DMA channels!

Choosing only the university marketplace may be seen, in the long run, as a
Good Idea.  It could give NeXT time to polish the software, and manufacturing
line, while still making sales in a marketplace less sensitive to the related
problems.  And unlike some other computer manufacturers, the price of a NeXT
machine is likely to go down.  Speculating on the "real" commercial price is
interesting, but useless.

As for the laser printer, I doubt any third party will make a generic $2000
400 dpi Postscript printer any time soon.  To be generic, you would need both
a CPU capable of running Postcript, and a licence from Adobe to run it.  The
NeXT printer needs neither of these, as the main cube is used instead.


Brian McElhinney
mce@tc.fluke.com