Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!tektronix!reed!mdr
From: mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXT alternatives
Message-ID: <12192@reed.UUCP>
Date: 27 Mar 89 01:15:31 GMT
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Lines: 38

I thought I would be a little more explicit in my assertion that many of
the desirable features of the NeXT box are making it into other commercial
products very quickly.  I think this is occurring because NeXT's product
has seduced some interested parties and shaken up the competition.

The Microsoft/OSF/Motif interface, which uses the good parts of the
Microsoft Presentation Manager "look and feel" looks surprisingly
like NeXT.  It actually looks solid and 2.5 [sic] dimensional.
I'm sure there is a better picture, but check out the March 1989
Electronics (page 92) for a picture that you might confuse with a
NeXT display in aesthetic quality.  Sun seems to be similarly working
to move away from the "dot matrix printer" user interface on the 386i.

DSPs and fast floating point crunchers like the i860 are making it into
a variety of products.  My understanding is that some of the mc56000 DSP
boards for the Mac are under $1000, which suddenly makes the Mac very
attractive for scientific data acquisition and processing.

Finally, the ease of application development that NeXT claims through
use of Objective-C and their (large) library of predefined objects is
apparently to be matched by Microsoft, according to what I've seen.
Like NeXT, Microsoft has the experience of it's first generation windowing
systems to build on in constructing the object oriented second generation.

And most of these NeXT features will be available without purchasing a
new $8000 machine.  I would say that I was sounding like early critics
of the Macintosh but that I like the NeXT features and am simply seeing
them as rapidly available in more standard platforms.

Mike

I should note that I have not done native NeXT programming - I have
used it only for numeric work.
-- 
Mike Rutenberg      Reed College, Portland Oregon     (503)239-4434 (home)
BITNET: mdr@reed.bitnet      UUCP: uunet!tektronix!reed!mdr
Note: I represent no organization or person other than myself.
		And that's fine with me!