🚀 go-pugleaf

I have to confess that I'm more than a bit distressed at NeXT about
their approach to unbundling.  One of the main reasons I bought a cube
was because it came with much more software than the competition.
Now, NeXT is gradually dropping that software from their upgrades.
First they decided to stop shipping Mathematica to all customers.
That was acceptable, because they still supported existing customers,
but it was a sign of things to come.  Now, having suckered us into
creating at least occasional WriteNow documents, they've dropped it
from 3.0.  At least I've been warned, so I can squirrel away my 2.1
version before I lose all the files (fortunately not many) I've
created over the past several years, but once again I have to wonder
about Jobs' commitment to supporting existing customers, and about his
general ethical quotient.  When I was in the existing-customer
business, I (and more importantly, my employer) bent over backwards to
make sure that future releases were still available to the people who
had been with us since the dinosaur days, and that no significant
functionality was lost to people who had grown to depend on it.

I can see the basic NeXT of 1996:

	$500 (compared to $50 for a basic 1996 PC)
	128 Meg RAM (enough for kernel and 2 nbufs)
	72 Gig disk (enough to hold only the "starvation" release)
	Mach kernel (/etc/init and /etc/rc optional)
	NextStep 7.2 available installed or via telepathic modem
	Backup by copying bits from the screen to a yellow pad.

How come the release keeps getting bigger, yet the functionality
continues to shrink?
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   uunet!desint!geoff