Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdahl!fai!ronc
From: ronc@fai.UUCP (Ronald O. Christian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT source, how will they be used?
Message-ID: <1861@fai.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 89 19:19:53 GMT
References: <890@blake.acs.washington.edu> <882@fornax.UUCP>
Reply-To: ronc@fai.fai.com (Ronald O. Christian)
Organization: Fujitsu America, Inc.
Lines: 37

In article <882@fornax.UUCP> stevec@fornax.UUCP (Steve Cumming) writes:
>Where does this leave me? I am going to wait until the
>FSF has a kernel working. I will then buy the highest-
>powered biggest-disked system that I can afford, install
>GNU, and do something obscene yet decorative with the
>distributed OS.

Sadly, this will probably be a 386-based machine, not a NeXT.

>And about two years later, if not sooner, some outfit will
>start selling iron that FSF kernels are specially good with.
>They will sell iron and peripherals only. Overheads will be
>low, cause they won't need mammoth, expensive systems 
>development shops, and the whole nine yards. And a large
>and growing community of GNU/Mach/FSF users and experts 
>Trailblazed together will help each other out.
>A fairy tale? I don't think so.

It might be a fairy tale, but to the extent it can be achieved,
it's worth working for.

But hell, maybe we're counting out the NeXT too quickly -- perhaps
some bright CS student with MACH source and access to the cube
will take the time (to the detrement of his or her social life)
to port MACH to the NeXT.  -- I mean a real port, one for which
source code is available.  Then, what next?  X11, that's what.
Probably necessary.  There's no guarantee that a different port
of MACH will be binary compatable with Next Step.  Sigh.  Too
bad, really, I hear Next Step is a pretty good interface.



			Ron
-- 

      Ronald O. Christian (Fujitsu America Inc., San Jose, Calif.)
      {amdahl, pyramid, sun, unisoft, uunet}!fai!ronc -or- ronc@fai.com