Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!wucs1!conrad
From: conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu (H. Conrad Cunningham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXT not revolutionary enough?
Message-ID: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Date: 28 Oct 88 14:53:25 GMT
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 21


	Following an on-campus presentation (not a demo) by NeXT last
week, I had an interesting "discussion" with one of the professors in
the CS department. (He is a Macintosh owner and one of his current
research interests is in visual programming languages.)  The following
is from my, perhaps faulty, recollection of the discussion.

	He maintained that the NeXT computer will be a failure because
it not revolutionary enough.  Its only advantage is a short-term
hardware capability/pricing advantage over the other available
UNIX-based workstations.  He sees the NeXT as trying to impose a
visual, object-oriented overlay ("a Smalltalk-like environment") onto a
text-oriented UNIX base.  These he contended are incompatible
notions--they mix like "oil and water."  The UNIX base insures that
the visual and sound-oriented capabilities can't be used in any truly
revolutionary way.

	Thoughts anyone?

H. Conrad Cunningham, Research Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science,
		      Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.