Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wucs1!conrad
From: conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu (H. Conrad Cunningham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough?
Message-ID: <485@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Date: 31 Oct 88 19:53:01 GMT
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> <4391@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: conrad@wucs1.UUCP (H. Conrad Cunningham)
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Lines: 61

In article <4391@ubc-cs.UUCP> manis@grads.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) writes:
> ...Basically, the 
>issue for `revolutionariness' is not the operating system, but the under- 
>lying physical architecture. ...
>...
>It's clear that the leverage we need for truly revolutionary applications 
>comes from massively parallel systems, either loosely coupled (in a network) 
>or tightly coupled (e.g., Transputers or the Connection Machine).  ...

	I have no disagreement that wide-scale availability and usage of
massive parallelism is one of the potential revolutions somewhere over
the horizon. Innovative computer and communications architectures and
designs must play a big part in that revolution.  However, without
devising new ways to exploit the parallelism on a wide-range of
problems, all the fancy parallel hardware won't be so revolutionary.
The revolution will be as much--maybe moreso--a "software" revolution
than a "hardware" revolution.  New languages, operating systems,
tools, theories, methodologies, algorithms, and/or techniques are
needed.  (Of course, my biases as a researcher in concurrent
programming languages may be showing thru here. :-)  Will the sudden
advent of group of ideas cause rapid change in computing?  Or will the
change be more multifaceted and evolutionary?

>On the other hand, even a machine as bourgeois as the IBM PC can wreak
>revolutionary changes in its users. 

Maybe.  My use of revolution is more from a cultural/social/economic
perspective than a purely technological one.  From that perspective
the introduction of the relatively inexpensive personal computer was
revolutionary.  I don't think I would consider the IBM PC as a
revolutionary product however.  It wasn't one of the first successful
products in that category.

>What NeXT claims to have done (the proof will be in the pudding), is to
>produce a state-of-the-art workstation for a lower price than others will
>charge.

I have no problem with that.  I tend to doubt that there will be much
of a price advantage by the time they start shipping in quantity
though.  I imagine that Sun, Apple, and other companies will respond
with price adjustments and new products in the "next" few months.
I tend to think that the success of NeXT depends more upon the
appeal of the overall package (NextStep, sound-support, the optical
disk, bundled software, Mach, reliability, Objective C, etc.) than upon
price.

But I am disappointed that it came out costing nearly twice what I had
been hearing.  If I could have bought one for US$3500, I might have
bought one to take home.  Oh, well.

>... NeXT seems to believe that
>if one can put a machine of this sort on peoples' desks, they will do 
>interesting things with it.

To some extent Jobs has bet his company on college "hackers."  The
approach worked by accident with UNIX.  It was somewhat successful by
intention with the Macintosh.  Maybe it'll work with the NeXT cube, too.

If they can put lots of machines into environments and application
areas which have not been greatly touched by computers as yet, then
they can be considered revolutionary.