Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!csdev!ll1a!spl1!laidbak!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!grads.cs.ubc.ca!manis From: manis@grads.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough? Message-ID: <8582@spl1.UUCP> Date: 29 Oct 88 15:45:54 GMT References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> Sender: news@spl1.UUCP Reply-To: manis@grads.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 46 In article <471@wucs1.wustl.edu> conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu (H. Conrad Cunningham) writes: > 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. I keep hearing this canard, and, frankly I can't buy it. Basically, the issue for `revolutionariness' is not the operating system, but the under- lying physical architecture. By that metric, Unix/Mach is neither more nor less revolutionary than the Mac OS (whose original file system was so un- revolutionary that it reminded one of William F. Buckley). 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). It comes from large mass-storage devices and high-bandwidth networks. It even comes from high-resolution displays and printers. It also comes from lowering costs. On the other hand, even a machine as bourgeois as the IBM PC can wreak revolutionary changes in its users. Ask any humanities scholar who uses word processing, data base, and electronic mail programs on one of those obsolete clunkers (which I'm in fact using as I type). 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. They also claim to have developed better interfaces, but one can presumably use their machine without their interfaces (I've done it on a Mac lots of times), if one wants different ones. NeXT seems to believe that if one can put a machine of this sort on peoples' desks, they will do interesting things with it. That claim will have to wait for enough machines to be delivered before we can test it. ____________ Vincent Manis | manis@cs.ubc.ca ___ \ _____ The Invisible City of Kitezh | manis@cs.ubc.cdn ____ \ ____ Department of Computer Science | manis%cs.ubc@relay.cs.net ___ /\ ___ University of British Columbia | uunet!ubc-cs!manis __ / \ __ Vancouver, BC, Canada | (604) 228-2394 _ / __ \ _ "In the U.S.S.R., newspapers all print the same thing because ____________ the government tells them to. American newspapers all print the same thing even though the government doesn't tell them to."