Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!alberta!ubc-cs!fornax!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@fornax.UUCP (Ken Mcdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Various questions...
Message-ID: <883@fornax.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 89 02:45:04 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 82

I have some questions about the NeXT which I hope some kind soul will
find time to answer...

1) When and how (in terms of hardware) will NeXT support colour?

2) When will the Renderman standard be incorporated?  How will it be
integrated with PostScript?  (i.e. will renderman translate three-d
images into PostScript to display them on screen?)  Is renderman
powerful enough to be a permanent base for all three-d graphics, or
will it only be a stopgap solution?  What the heck is it, anyway?

3) Can NeXT support multiple screens a la the MacII?

4) What is performance like with only the optical drive?  A hard drive
would be nice, and I agree their hard drives are a heck of a bargain,
but unaffordable is still unaffordable.  At $6500, a NeXT may be just within
my reach.  At $8500, I doubt it.

5) What will be the policy towards support of students who buy NeXTs, and then
take the machines with them when they leave campus?  If NeXT wants any students
to buy a machine (and I hope they do), this question needs to be answered.

6) How easy is it to program a NeXT?  This, of course, is a highly subjective
question, but hey, I'll take highly subjective answers.

7) How well is UNIX hidden?  How well will it be hidden in the final release?
Will I be able to say, program, debug, compile, etc, without really having
to think about being in a UNIX environment (aside from I/O, I mean).  For
people who have used LightSpeed Pascal 2.0 on the Macintosh, that or something
better is the kind of thing I'm looking for--not just the power, but the ease
of use.  I did some programming on a VAX running UNIX a while back, and while
all the tools were there (sybolic debuggers, smart editors, etc) I never really
used them, because wading through the documentation was just not worth it.  Thatis the kind of thing I want to avoid.  So I guess this question could be, will
the NeXT be like the Mac in that to use the major part of most programs, you
don't even need to read the docs?

8) Any chances any of the compnent prices will come down in the near future?
(Say the next six months?)  I realize this is kind of looking a gift horse
in the mouth, but like I say, an unaffordable bargain is unaffordable first,
and a bargain second.

9) Are there any plans to introduce a LCD shutter high-res printer for the
NeXT.  Given the inherent simplicity of these devices as compared to the
laser printers, it seems to be the way to go, for that quality of output.

Also, since everyone else is commenting on the source code issue, I suppose
I might as well say something too...

In my opinion, providing source for the NeXT on any except a very restrictive
basis will be death to this machine, at least in terms of the market it is
intended for.  Most of the people who are supporting easily available source
seem to be very familiar with UNIX, at least to the point that they start
talking UNIXese, and I can't follow past the first two sentences--and if I
can't follow, do you think an anthropology professor will be able to?  If
NeXT releases their source code to all and sundry, then the NeXT box will
become "just another workstation"--a wonderful toy for those willing to leanr
and hack UNIX, and useless, to a large degree, to anyone else.  Take a look
at what the lack of standards did to the IBM micro graphics world.  Take a
look a what standards, with a strong incentive to follow them, did for Macintoshsoftware.  In order for decent commercial programs to be developed, NeXT
MUST NOT be a "moving target".  It must be stationary in the same sense the Mac
is, i.e. if you follow the guidelines laid down by NeXT, your program will work
on all NeXTs, and I just hope NeXT has a lot fewer guidelines than Apple!

The need to modify the way the machine works is important, of course, but I
don't think access to the source is necessary to accomplish this.  The Mac
OS has lots of "modifications" available to its OS, which all work by
intercepting OS calls, and doing something extra in addition to what the OS
call normally does.  This isn't even a formal scheme, it is kind of an ad-hoc
setup to let you do things that couldn't otherwise be done, and it generally
works very well.  And if there is a problem, you can just remove the programs
that do the intercepts, and be back to a vanilla, but guaranteed working, system.  If NeXT was to adopt a similar idea, but in a more formal manner--i.e. do
compile-time type checking to ensure OS patches take the proper number and
types of args, provide rules to handle what happens when there is more than
one patch to apply to an OS call, and in some manner ensure that the a modified
OS call will always carry out at least the standard functionality built into it,
then I think that would provide a solution for most cases where source would
otherwise have been needed, without compromising the NeXT core.

Well, 'nuff said.  Thanks for any comments on the questions I asked.

Ken McDonald
{...ubc-cs!mcdonald@fornax.uucp}