Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!nrl-cmf!ames!eos!labrea!siegman@sierra.Stanford.EDU From: siegman@sierra.Stanford.EDU (Anthony E. Siegman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Not MY NeXT Computer Message-ID: <5@sierra.stanford.edu> Date: 26 Oct 88 06:35:12 GMT Reply-To: siegman@sierra.UUCP (Anthony E. Siegman) Distribution: comp.sys.next Organization: Stanford University Lines: 112 This group might be interested in some contrarian views on the NeXT computer, from someone who turned down an invitation to the Davies Hall extravaganza -- I had a class to teach. (Much the same message was posted earlier on info-mac.) The gist is that Jobs' NeXT computer won't be MY next computer, not for a while and not for educational use anyway. And, as a faculty member very much interested in educational uses of computers, I hope my university (Stanford) won't spend very much of its academic funds buying NeXT computers in the next few years -- even though it has a million or so endowment dollars invested in NeXT. Why? 1) In 30 years at Stanford before 1984 I put perhaps $2000 into personal computer equipment: a couple of dumb terminals and modems, a Model 100 laptop, an Epson printer (oh, and a gift TRS-80 from our Dean of Engineering, which never got used for much). Since the Macintosh came out in 1984 I've probably put $20,000 of personal and personally controlled university unrestricted funds (i.e., NOT counting research contract funds) into Macintosh hardware, peripherals, and software, for personal, educational and research use. That's a LOT of money, even for a nominally ``prosperous'' senior EE professor. I have 3 Macs in my home, 2 in my office, 1 in my secretary's home, half a dozen in my research lab, maybe 100 Macs total in this building, along with 100 MB or so of personal files and applications -- plus, hundreds of hours invested getting this all working reliably and more or less automatically. I like the capabilities we now have, very much. We're supposed to start all over? Not just invest a lot of additional dollars we don't have, but learn a whole new bunch of stuff? Recable modems and printers, rewrite logon scripts, reformat databases, learn new programs? Sorry, we've got too much work to do, using what we already have. (And, I've wasted too much time in past years playing with building up what I have.) 2) More important: I've seen the MIT Project Athena style of using of computers for education: centrally developed and controlled educational softwave, runnable only on high-performance workstations, which are available only in clusters that students have to go to; and I've seen the more open Stanford approach: near-universal availability of PCs at low cost through the Bookstore's Microdisc program, multiple ``let a thousand flowers bloom'' program development efforts at many places on campus, upward evolution of a Macintosh standard through consumer choice, low-cost software distribution through Kinko's and and bboards and user groups, networked Macs in every other dorm room on campus, floppies handed out in class. I like the Stanford approach a LOT better. I'm not interested in workstation clusters that students have to trudge off to. I want soon ( in fact, we almost have it now) EVERY engineering student -- in fact, every student --to have an entry-level machine of the same brand as the faculty use, on their own desk, or at least on their roommate's desk. Dartmouth admitted 1100 freshman this fall. During orientation week these students took delivery of over 960 personal Macintoshes (divided 50/50 between Plusses and SEs) which they had preordered (at their own expense) through the university before coming to campus. (And as someone said, the other 140 probably already owned their own Macs.) That's the way to go! An entry-level price of around $1000, today's dollars, is about the break point for making it possible to have a personal computer on every student's desk. What does a $6500 NeXT machine (AT the educational discount) have to do with that? (Don't tell me about what something with capabilities of the current NeXT machine will cost 10 years from now; I'm interested in the next decade, not the next century.) As long as Apple has the brains to keep an affordable student-grade Mac in their product line -- and I do worry a little about that -- we should focus our efforts on learning how to do the best educational things we can do with the excellent capabilities and machines we have now (and there's a lot to be done). 3) NeXT will undoubtedly be a great machine, when it starts to come out next year. But the Macintosh is pretty good also, right now. And, Macs will continue to improve steadily with time. The same expanded memory and storage capabilities and jazzy peripherals available for NeXT, or any other machine, will be equally available for the Mac. Direct analogs of the easy-to-use educational program development tools available on the NeXT machine will be available on Macs too (some are available right now). In short, I'm not knocking the NeXT machine at all, technically or otherwise. And, I'm not a Mac fanatic pushing Macintoshes. The NeXT machine clearly has some very significant technical advances. If the computer types at Stanford decide they want to put THEIR OWN funds (personal or research or whatever) into having the latest supertoy, I don't object at all. But given the real limits on university resources -- and I'm absolutely amazed at the casual views expressed on this net as to how much money we big university types supposedly have to spend on the latest computers; sure doesn't look that way from inside -- I very much hope that when it comes to academic funds for EDUCATIONAL uses of computers, Stanford will put most of its currently available funds into doing bigger and better and especially much more widespread things with the good Macintosh environment we already have (such as more widespread support for program development, and getting Macintosh display units into many more of our classrooms), and not into acquiring a bunch of new, and different, supertoys just because they're the latest headline. What we've done educationally with the Mac so far doesn't nearly match what we could and should do with the superb environment that we've already invested so much in. Perhaps Steve or some other tooth fairy is going to offer me 65 K$ to buy 10 NeXT machines for my teaching needs. I think my response would be, "Thanks very much. I'll take the cash, spend part of it on upgrading our Mac environment, and the rest on meeting a lot of other unmet needs around here." Since I think this is what other schools should do also, and since I don't see where any big new funding sources are going to come from anyway, I don't see how Jobs/Perot are going to increase their wealth very much on this NeXT venture.