Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!ucbvax!renoir.Berkeley.EDU!munson From: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Ethan V. Munson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: My ramblings on the NeXT machine Message-ID: <26812@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 15 Nov 88 06:20:44 GMT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Ethan V. Munson) Distribution: na Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 127 We had a seminar here at Berkeley on the NeXT machine. I had a few thoughts about the machine and the company. I should mention that I am a long time Macintosh owner and have fond feelings for that machine and its manufacturer. If I sound somewhat sour about NeXT, some portion of that is just jealousy and regret that I may no longer be on the cutting edge of personal computing (Yeah, Yeah, ... I probably never was, but I felt like it). Good Things =========== 1) It's the first multimedia computer. The Mac brought window/mouse user interfaces to retail computing. If NeXT can find a way to sell outside of the university, it will do the same for multimedia. 2) Good Operating System -- I have only heard good things about Mach. 3) Well designed mother board -- By this I mean that the mother board crams lots of things into a medium-sized space. It is this, plus their much-ballyhooed automated plant that may allow the price to stay at $6500. 4) The Magneto-Optical Disk -- While this is not a particularly fast device, it is clearly an important addition to the memory hierarchy. Hopefully, it will get a couple of orders of magnitude faster. 5) A cheap laser printer Bad Things ========== 1) Not enough memory -- Mach + UNIX + Display PostScript requires about 3 meg. When printing, 2 meg of page buffer is required. Also, I suspect that these fancy applications (i.e. Interface Builder) are large. Common Lisp is at least 3 megs. If you want to avoid lots of paging, you want more than 8 meg of memory. 2) Needs a magnetic disk -- According to the guy who gave the seminar, only about half of NeXT's software developers have the magnetic disk. I think they all want one. The optical disk has an average seek time of 80-90 ms and throughput of (I think) 1 Mbyte/sec. Also, it has a three step write (erase,write,verify). Paging to the optical is not going to be fast. I think the NeXT people would claim that their DMA chip will speed things up quite a bit. It may. Personally, I would rather page to a fast magnetic disk anytime. 3) Thin Ethernet -- NeXT has a Thin Ethernet connector. Here at Berkeley, neither the EECS department or the academic computing service has anything but thick ethernet. As of last week, even NeXT didn't know where to find converters. Each converter will cost about $200-300. Since these machines are targeted at professors, rather than students, it may be hard to build short Thin Ethernets which share one converter. 4) Network connections -- NeXT talks a lot about using networking as a means of software distribution and sharing. That is a very nice thought, but I believe that many universities have only limited network connections at best. Does NeXT plan to help customers bring up a TCP/IP connection to the Internet? I realize that the top 100 universities in the country probably all have CS departments with at least tenuous Internet hookups. This is probably a large enough market to keep NeXT growing for several years. Beyond that, I don't know. 5) Software Distribution -- This one has been beat to death on the net. If software is only sold on the optical disks, then there is a problem with software distribution. If each program comes on a separate disk, then there is high overhead. This can be reduced by somehow bundling larger amounts of software. Apparently, this is the plan. Programs will be made safe from piracy by some kind of system where you unlock those programs you really want by phone. The overhead is not what bothers me. How much of a rake-off will NeXT take from each piece of software it distributes? 6) Memory Parity -- This has also been beat to death. One of my architecture (computer, that is) friends says the lack of a parity bit is a very bad idea. 7) Limited Printer -- Unlike the Laserwriter, the NeXT printer can not be used as a plug-compatible printer for non-NeXT systems. Also, how do multiple machines share one printer? If one machine runs the printer and the other machines just send it PostScript, then it may do a lot work supporting other people's printing. If the 2 Mbytes of data for the printer is transmitted over the net, then network load could get very high. I presume that the first solution is the one used. Other Things ============ 1) No support for X -- I think that Display Postscript is a much better imaging model, but the lack of an X server will make it very hard to justify buying many of these for research in our department. 2) Proprietariness -- NeXT does not plan to release sources of any of their operating system. They have no particular plan to adopt a "standard" UNIX. It will not be an "open" system. I think that Steve Jobs thinks that you can only make money with systems that are largely proprietary. I think he may be right. I should mention that they do plan to make the details of their bus architecture freely available. 3) I think it will be slow -- Think about other operating systems that are similar. Think about NeWS. It is fast enough, but it can be leisurely. Think about object-oriented programs. They are not renowned for speed. Think about the optical disk. Finally, think about other machines which Steve Jobs has championed. Neither the Apple, the Lisa, or the early Macintosh were blazing fast. In fact, one interesting thing is that none of them were cheap, while the NeXT machine appears to be. Anyway, Steve's track record indicates that the machine will not perform as well as one might wish. In summary, if had a budget that could afford a $10-12,000 workstation, I would be sorely tempted by the NeXT machine. It is an exciting design. However, I think there are some things waiting to bite us, like real operating cost and software costs. Also, I think that you must drop the extra $2000 for the "small" hard disk and will most likely need to buy a printer (can they print to any PostScript printer?). I guess I'm glad I don't have a budget big enough because I'm probably safer not being the first one on the block with a NeXT machine. Ethan Munson munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU ...ucbvax!renoir!munson