Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!pyrnj!pyrdc!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com! From: Mark_Peter_Cookson@cup.portal.com Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: NeXT press release (very long but interesting) Message-ID: <10103@cup.portal.com> Date: 17 Oct 88 18:03:32 GMT References: <5423@juniper.uucp> <72886@sun.uucp> <635@ardent.UUCP> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 164 Here is a little file I got off of a local BBS about the NeXT machine that should help to answer some questions and give more details. Forgive the language, I tried to catch it all, but if I missed something, well, I tried... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- folks might be interested in...he does like to use emphatic language, which i have left in. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is my basic technical evaluation of the NeXT machine. (All the stuff the papers will be too clueless about to print...) Forward this to anybody not on the list who might want it. Oct 12, 1988 Small review: This is the next generation of computers. Don't buy a Mac. Don't even think about it. Price: $6500 (education price, basic machine) $2000 (printer) Overview: Like the original Mac, the view subscribed to is that of Least Common Denominator. That is, software developed for the machine will be written so the audience is the largest, which means, for the basic no frills machine. Thus the basic machine is all frills. All of which count. Physical Characteristics: Mouse, keyboard, monitor and 'box' are part of the basic package. The color scheme is black. The box is a 'tower' type box, meant to sit away from everything, connected by one thick cable to the monitor. The keyboard and mouse are connected to the monitor. There are several connetors on the back of the monitor: mini headphone jack, stereo RCA connectors, mike in. The monitor is 'perched' on a swivel stand, with space enough underneath for the keyboard. The box is unusually small for a machine of this caliber. It is a little larger than a vaxstation. The monitor is a megapixel monitor, 17 inch diagonal. Execellent white rendition. It is gray scale, driven with 2 bits/pixel. The keyboard is a very good keyboard. Those who have used it say they type faster on it than on most keyboards. The mouse is a 'curvatious' two button thing. Hardware: The machine is f***ing amazing. Remeber this is the BASE machine: I guess I should start with the processor. Watch it, this comes fast and furious. Memory: 4 MB standard (I think) 16 MB possible. Processor: 68030@25Mhz, 68882@25Mhz, Custom NuBus chip @25Mhz, 'Mainframe on a chip' @ 25Mhz, video @100Mhz, 52008 (?) DSP @25Mhz. Yes, the whole board is at 25Mhz, but that is only part of the story. The NuBus if FULL NuBus (not stripped like the apple version) at a FULL 25 Mhz. All of the control for the NuBus is on one big giant chip. (Apple's NuBus goes at barly 10MHz)! The DSP is f***ing amazing. Stereo, 16bit, 44Khz, raw CD compatible (speculation has the machine playing CD's like a stereo), can write raw CD to the optical drive to be read elswhere. The chip has a FFT instruction - enabling REALTIME FFTs! A/D's 16 bit are part of the chip too. (There is a built in microphone to use them) All with DMA to memory possible. The 'mainfram on a chip' is actually two custom chips. The do ALL the io. Everything in the system has an IO controller. NOTHING goes through the 68030! You can have everything in the system going (optical disk read, stereo synthesis, video action, and keyboard input) and still have about half the processor's time for anything else. Throughput of the system is therefore about 37 MIPS!!! The system architecture is based on the memory being the bottleneck, not the IO. With all the IO on it's own chip, this is true. So the system is going to be at least 2 * any other 25MHz system. The memory for the display (which is part of the main board) is VRAM, driven by the video chip, which means NO CPU cycles go for display. Drive: 250MB r/w optical removable drive. (Yes, 250 not 25) The disks are CD-sized, with a protective casing. I don't know the speed of the drive. Two winchester add ons are availiable (300 MB and 600 MB). No external r/w CDs were announced. IO ports: 4 Mbyte SCSI, serial, 4 NuBus slots. The SCSI is very fast, and is pin compatible with the Mac SCSI port (AH!). NeXT uses one of the NuBus slots for itself. There IS ethernet on board. And the machine can boot from there if there is no disk in. If that wasn't enough, all of the following software is bundled: OS: Mach. Really. It fast, and it does true multitasking. Not the diddlyshit that Apple and IBM are playing around with. Right on top of the OS is Display PostScript. Everything on the screen is either blitted there (like icons) or drawn by DPS (like everything else: menus, windows, scrollbars). Which means rotated text at different scales is possible, without looking like crap as it does on the Mac. Which means images and graphics can easily become part of any document. The NeXT toolkit is there, which provides the UI. The UI is very clean and well though out. Icons are nice and big, menus are all tearaway, scroll bars are obvious and clean. When you drag a window, it drags a window, not an outline. The 4 gray levels make things nice, and the way they are used gives everything a three-d look to it (scrollbars and buttons stand out, arrows and menus sink in.) Besides helping to make PostScript images look photographic. Also in the bundles software is the application builder. This is sort of like MacApp, only better. Every tool has an action, which is contained in a big menu. (i.e. I want to place a button here, and make it a 'stop' button...) A very good application can be built very quickly. At the demo is SF, they built a physics demo where molecules bounced around in a cylynder in real time, with a piston at one end compressing and expanding, with sound for the collisions, a strip recorder in another window displaying the pressure on the piston. This is a very polished, very well though out program. Another demo used the microphone. In real time, the voice was input, the frequency displayed in a window acting as a digital oscilliscope, and another window showing the real time FFT of the sound input. All done with nothing but the base machine. Also included are a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopaedia, which contains pictured. Along with these is Mathmatica (Macsyma only better), and an SQL database. There are a couple of more things I can't remember. There is a 'finder' program, of course, which is what MultiFinder was supposed to be when people were still dreaming about it. That's what is bundled in the basic package. There are also a couple of applications availiabe: Write Now, Frame (Pagemaker only better), and some other things. The LaserPrinter is a 400 dpi printer. The price comes from the fact that it doesn't have PostScript on board, it gets the bits from DPS on the main box. Which means, to use the printer, you need a box. Which also means, who cares? For $8500 you can have something that would take over $30000 to put together any other way. There is more bang for the buck in this machine than in any other machine due to be out in the next year. As for Sun's 'next killer' - Hah! I'd sell my Sun stock as soon as possible. Their SPARC based machine may have a processor rated for more MIPS than the 68030, but machine throughput won't be as high, and the machine will cost 2* as much. DEC is the only company that has a machine in the works that could possibly compete. But it won't come with enough stuff to make it usable in the way this machine is. The machine is a miracle at the EDU price. I would pay up to $11000 for the box and printer. They also announced the involvement with IBM at the show. Basically, the deal is that IBM gets the toolkit, so that programs should be compile- and-go (really port-and-go) to the RT. Which is getting another update. They did what they set out to do. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- and that's the way it was described... And there you go, hope this helps. Mark Cookson