🚀 go-pugleaf

It seems to me that Sun's entry into low-cost desktop machines may certainly
speell doom for NeXT hardware.  IMHO, when NeXTstep gets ported to SPARC,
there really won't be much of a reason to buy a real NeXT.  At $10000 SRP
($7330 here at the UCSD bookstore), a 19color,16/424 SPARCstation LX offers
acceptable graphics capability (GXplus only, though, and not apparently up-
gradeable to 24 bit/#D solids) for NeXTStep, for less than a NSTC 16/400. 
The advantages with the sun being expandability, speed, etc.  The stats may
not tell the whole truth, but I think that there is a difference between the
Sun's 59 MIPS and the 25 MIPS of the NSTC.  The only thing lacking from 
these new Suns is an OS that's worth as much as the CD-ROM it's published
on :-)  I figure that by the time NeXT ports to SPARC (they'll probably be
taking their own sweet time :-), my NSC will be obsolete anyway, and I'll
have to buy a Sun.  

If NeXT pushes their software the right way, (first to PC owners, then to
Sun owners--and especially new Sun owners, who buy these new desktop machines,
and then to buyers of Taligent/PowerPC machines, as an intaligent:) OS option)
they could wind up with the default OS of the NeXT decade.  

Like Case, in Gibson's Neuromancer, who must transcend the "meat" existence
of his body and exist only in the information paradise of the net, the NeXT
needs to transcend its hardware-bound existence, and live as a pure, un-
compromised operating system.  (Forgive the Lit-Crit analysis, it's just I've
been writing these papers...:-)

Chris Stecker						gstecker@ucsd.edu