Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!gatech!rutgers!att!alberta!ubc-cs!fornax!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@fornax.UUCP (Ken Mcdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXT impressions
Message-ID: <888@fornax.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 89 01:56:23 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 60

After finally having had a chance to play with a Next box for a couple of
hours, I was, well, underwhelmed.  So, I thought I'd shoot off about what I
see as its problems (and pluses), and find out if maybe some of these will
disappear in the future.

--Number one:  it uses UNIX. OK, I don't expect this problem to disappear,
but it is worth noting, because I suspect it causes many of the other problems
that make me less than completely enthusiastic about the machine.  UNIX is
big.  That means thay you pay (in terms of hardware necessary) for the ability
to use UNIX, even if you hardly use any of its features, and the vast majority
of UNIX users don't.  I think that to many people, the incredible power of UNIX
is actually a detriment--if you can do anything, but can't figure out how to
do it, then you CAN'T do anything.  Most people I know who use UNIX, including
most of the computer science professors at my university, would probably be far
happier with a much simpler system that did basic computation and networking.
The exceptions to this rule seem to be UNIX support people--hackers, gurus,etc.
Which raises an interesting question about the ultimate utility of UNIX, but
hey, I'll leave that for another time.

--Number two:  functionality has been sacrificed for somebody's conception
of appearance.  As in, icons in the icon dock don't have any names.  As in,
hierarchical menus come up with their tops aligned with the tops of their
parent menus--a real pain if you have a short hierarchical menu which pops
up in response to the last item on a long parent menu.  The little dot you
drag on to move the split in the window of one of the standar applications
(quotations?  I forget) is a pain--why not drag anywhere in the split?  That
weird monitor stand might irritate some people (though, to be honest, I don't
mind it.) 

--Number three:  this machine can be really slow!  Slow to bring up apps,
which is a real pain, because its not even giving you feedback that it's at
least working on starting up the app.  Slow in execution--I quite handily got
several words ahead of the computer in Write Now, and I'm not a very fast
typist--45wpm, max.  I can't even get a single character ahead, on my mac.
(Of course, this doesn't apply to everything--more comments in the 'pluses'
section.)

On the pluses...

--One:  display PostScript is good.  Peformance is quite adequate, and will
improve when (I expect) they bring in special hardware to do colour DPS.
Its really nice to KNOW that what you see on the screen is what is going to
print out, and from a programmer's point of view, it must be heaven not to
have to write code to print to both the screen and the printer, seperately.

--Two:  The sound capabilities, plus the DSP hardware, make a nice package, and
about time someone did this!

--Three: all the other hardware, of course


It seems to me that what NeXT did right was in the low-level stuff--hardware,
display software, etc. (If there is anything else to the low-level).  What
they did wrong was at the higher levels--OS, to some degree the interface,
maybe a few other things that I'm not aware of yet.  This means they can
still rectify their errors.

Comments, anyone?

Ken McDonald