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From: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: What do I want to see in the Apple of the 90's?
Message-ID: <23179@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 18 Dec 89 01:25:25 GMT
References: <22438@ut-emx.UUCP> <3333@hub.UUCP> <1989Dec17.064813.16650@nueces.cactus.org> <37341@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
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>the NeXT machine is 4-bit mono, not grayscale,
What please is the difference between 4-bit mono (or for
the sake of the argument n-bit mono) and grayscale?

>My counterpart who works for NeXT in Atlanta will even say that the
>optical drive is slow; he has to me.  

You can't really compare the optical to a hard drive, compare
it to a floppy, then you get what it is meant to be: removable
and portable, not necessarily fast.


>Competing technologies today are much faster and are approachine 30ms
>access times,

and then again: compare the costs: a disk costs around 250-300$
vs. 100$ (50$ for universities) and a single drive unix costs
about the same as an entire NeXT system. And third they often
state as capacity what can be writen on a double sided disk.
But as they have only one r/w head you have to turn the disk
to access the other half of your capacity. This is very 
unpractical, as you can not even access the whole information
if you had a second drive, because you can't split the media.
Except for the little space you save, you traded a lot of hassle
if you chose to use one of these 1.5 sided optical systems.
As long as they can't access both sides at once, double sided
disks are nonsense, and quoting the capacity of both sides to
be the capacity of the drive is close to a criminal act...

Ronald
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man." - Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@cogsci.bitnet