🚀 go-pugleaf

Here is a little file I got off of a local BBS about the NeXT machine that
should help to answer some questions and give more details.  Forgive the
language, I tried to catch it all, but if I missed something, well, I tried...

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folks might be interested in...he does like to use emphatic language, which
i have left in.
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Here is	my basic technical evaluation of the NeXT machine.
(All the stuff the papers will be too clueless about to	print...)

Forward	this to	anybody	not on the list	who might want it.

Oct 12,	1988

Small review:  This is the next	generation of computers.  Don't buy a Mac.
  Don't even think about it.

Price: $6500 (education	price, basic machine) $2000 (printer)

Overview:
Like the original Mac, the view	subscribed to is that of Least Common
Denominator.  That is, software	developed for the machine will be written
so the audience	is the largest,	which means, for the basic no frills machine.
Thus the basic machine is all frills.  All of which count.

Physical Characteristics:
Mouse, keyboard, monitor and 'box' are part of the basic package.  The color
scheme is black.  The box is a 'tower' type box, meant to sit away from
everything, connected by one thick cable to the	monitor.  The keyboard and
mouse are connected to the monitor.  There are several connetors on the
back of	the monitor:  mini headphone jack, stereo RCA connectors, mike in.
The monitor is 'perched' on a swivel stand, with space enough underneath for
the keyboard.  The box is unusually small for a	machine	of this	caliber.
It is a	little larger than a vaxstation.

The monitor is a megapixel monitor, 17 inch diagonal.  Execellent white
rendition.  It is gray scale, driven with 2 bits/pixel.

The keyboard is	a very good keyboard.  Those who have used it say they type
faster on it than on most keyboards.

The mouse is a 'curvatious' two	button thing.

Hardware:
The machine is f***ing amazing.	 Remeber this is the BASE machine:

I guess	I should start with the	processor.  Watch it, this comes fast and
furious.
Memory:	4 MB standard (I think)	16 MB possible.
Processor: 68030@25Mhz,	68882@25Mhz, Custom NuBus chip @25Mhz, 'Mainframe
on a chip' @ 25Mhz, video @100Mhz, 52008 (?) DSP @25Mhz.
Yes, the whole board is	at 25Mhz, but that is only part	of the story.  The
NuBus if FULL NuBus (not stripped like the apple version) at a FULL 25 Mhz.
All of the control for the NuBus is on one big giant chip. (Apple's NuBus
goes at	barly 10MHz)!
The DSP	is f***ing amazing.  Stereo, 16bit, 44Khz, raw CD compatible
(speculation has the machine playing CD's like a stereo), can write
raw CD to the optical drive to be read elswhere.  The chip has a
FFT instruction	- enabling REALTIME FFTs!  A/D's 16 bit are part of
the chip too. (There is	a built	in microphone to use them)  All	with
DMA to memory possible.
The 'mainfram on a chip' is actually two custom	chips.	The do ALL the io.
Everything in the system has an	IO controller.	NOTHING	goes through the
68030!	You can	have everything	in the system going (optical disk read,
stereo synthesis, video	action,	and keyboard input) and	still have about
half the processor's time for anything else.  Throughput of the system is
therefore about	37 MIPS!!!
The system architecture	is based on the	memory being the bottleneck, not
the IO.	 With all the IO on it's own chip, this is true.  So the system
is going to be at least	2 * any	other 25MHz system.
The memory for the display (which is part of the main board) is	VRAM,
driven by the video chip, which	means NO CPU cycles go for
display.

Drive: 250MB r/w optical removable drive.  (Yes, 250 not 25)  The disks
are CD-sized, with a protective	casing.	I don't know the speed of the drive.
Two winchester add ons are availiable (300 MB and 600 MB).  No external
r/w CDs	were announced.

IO ports:  4 Mbyte SCSI, serial, 4 NuBus slots.
The SCSI is very fast, and is pin compatible with the Mac SCSI port (AH!).
NeXT uses one of the NuBus slots for itself.
There IS ethernet on board.  And the machine can boot from there if there
is no disk in.

If that	wasn't  enough, all of the following software is bundled:

OS: Mach.  Really.  It fast, and it does true multitasking.  Not the
diddlyshit that	Apple and IBM are playing around with.

Right on top of	the OS is Display PostScript.  Everything on the screen
is either blitted there	(like icons) or	drawn by DPS (like everything else:
menus, windows,	scrollbars).  Which means rotated text at different scales
is possible, without looking like crap as it does on the Mac.  Which means
images and graphics can	easily become part of any document.

The NeXT toolkit is there, which provides the UI.  The UI is very clean	and
well though out.  Icons	are nice and big, menus	are all	tearaway, scroll
bars are obvious and clean.  When you drag a window, it	drags a	window,
not an outline.	 The 4 gray levels make	things nice, and the way they are
used gives everything a	three-d	look to	it (scrollbars and buttons stand out,
arrows and menus sink in.)  Besides helping to make PostScript images look
photographic.

Also in	the bundles software is	the application	builder.  This is sort of
like MacApp, only better.  Every tool has an action, which is contained
in a big menu. (i.e. I want to place a button here, and	make it	a 'stop'
button...)  A very good	application can	be built very quickly.	At the demo
is SF, they built a physics demo where molecules bounced around	in a
cylynder in real time, with a piston at	one end	compressing and	expanding,
with sound for the collisions, a strip recorder	in another window displaying
the pressure on	the piston.  This is a very polished, very well	though
out program.

Another	demo used the microphone.  In real time, the voice was input,
the frequency displayed	in a window acting as a	digital	oscilliscope,
and another window showing the real time FFT of	the sound input.
All done with nothing but the base machine.

Also included are a dictionary,	thesaurus, and encyclopaedia, which contains
pictured.  Along with these is Mathmatica (Macsyma only	better), and an	SQL
database.

There are a couple of more things I can't remember.  There is a 'finder'
program, of course, which is what MultiFinder was supposed to be when people
were still dreaming about it.

That's what is bundled in the basic package.  There are also a couple of
applications availiabe:	Write Now, Frame (Pagemaker only better), and some
other things.

The LaserPrinter is a 400 dpi printer.	The price comes	from the fact that
it doesn't have PostScript on board, it gets the bits from DPS on the main
box.  Which means, to use the printer, you need	a box.	Which also means,
who cares?  For	$8500 you can have something that would	take over $30000
to put together	any other way.

There is more bang for the buck	in this	machine	than in	any other machine
due to be out in the next year.
As for Sun's 'next killer' - Hah!
I'd sell my Sun stock as soon as possible.  Their SPARC based machine may
have a processor rated for more	MIPS than the 68030, but machine throughput
won't be as high, and the machine will cost 2* as much.
DEC is the only	company	that has a machine in the works	that could
possibly compete.  But it won't come with enough stuff to make it
usable in the way this machine is.

The machine is a miracle at the	EDU price.  I would pay	up to $11000 for the
box and	printer.

They also announced the	involvement with IBM at	the show.  Basically, the
deal is	that IBM gets the toolkit, so that programs should be compile-
and-go (really port-and-go) to the RT.	Which is getting another update.

They did what they set out to do.

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and that's the way it was described...

And there you go, hope this helps.

Mark Cookson