Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!math.lsa.umich.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Subject: Re: MacWeek Article Revisited
Message-ID: <1990Jul14.060523.13513@math.lsa.umich.edu>
Keywords: MacWeek Color
Sender: usenet@math.lsa.umich.edu
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
References: <1990Jul9.033654.24628@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 90 06:05:23 GMT
Lines: 74

In article <1990Jul9.033654.24628@portia.Stanford.EDU> declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan McCullagh) writes:
>Of course, the NeXT community may feel similarly about the Macintosh, but we've got a better product, no?  $-)
>
I'd definitely take a NeXT over a Mac (I have, in fact  }-), but ...
until *this* is delivered:
>
>>- System 2.0, with high performance file system and task scheduler 
>>  algorithm thoroughly revised. You'd be surprised how much performance
>>  is lost to poorly optimized schedulers.

I wouldn't recommend either to anyone else. Running find on my winchester
(ostensibly looking for core files, but there are lots of valid reasons)
brings the entire system to a crawl, if not a halt. The display manager
takes upwards of 20 seconds to respond to window/mouse selections, and you
can watch window redraws one widget at a time. This is pretty sad performance
for a machine that supposedly has mainframe-style I/O channels and a 25MHz
data bus.

A simple getty sitting on an open (floating, temporarily disconnected) serial
line eats up huge amounts of CPU time when it *should* be sitting idle. But
for some reason, it prefers to spit out "Next Login" endlessly, cutting in to
my compile performance. I've got a little RS232 tester connector on the line,
it shows that DCD is low, and that getty is set on a dialup device, but it
always succeeds in opening the device. Pretty poor. (And this stupid Mac
mini-din serial connector drives me nuts too. No ring indicate, no RTS/CTS
flow control, what a stupid idea.)

>>- New Canon 32 ms, 512 M floptical to fix persistent complaints.
>>- The 68040, of course, at 25 Mhz and maybe 33 model, depending on
>>  Motorola's production capability.
>>- Low prices. Major price cuts can be achieved while still preserving
>>  profit margin because one very expensive cost, our "free" NeXT
>>  software, has been amortized and paid for by us pioneers.
>>- A show of strength from major software vendors, with applications
>>  available for immediate delivery, to once and for all silence
>>  critics of the "no apps" variety.
>
>Then, the NeXT community will have a machine that can do what it originally promised to.
>
At long last. But there's no denying, it certainly NEEDs all those
improvements.

>There are a few interesting upgrade problems that will arise, though...  Will NeXT offer a Greyscale -> Color upgrade, and if so, how will they handle them?  Personally, I don't want to have to trade in MY greyscale monitor for a color one - I want BOTH on my desktop.
>
You either have a huge desk, or a paperless office, or maybe both.  }-)
My current desk is a fair size, but just barely deep enough for the monitor
and keyboard. (Hey, I guess we need voice or eye-tracking input too, eh?)

>Might the color upgrade entail a separate board?  It would be nice (although perhaps not feasible) to fit all the support chips on the main processor board.  And how will NeXT handle the problem of TWO monitors attached to one cube - at the moment, the power supply is built to work with only one monitor; the second one might have to plug into an AC outlet.
>
Oh, horrors, then they might have to actually provide a primitive power switch!
I think this soft-power switch stuff is nonsense. At least on my good old HP41
it made sense - you could program the thing to turn itself both off and on. It
doesn't seem to serve much good on the NeXT, and it's damn frustrating when the
machine goes off the deep end. (Then I have to crawl around down dark corners
looking for the plug...) Of course, I have a similar gripe about MacIIs. So it
goes... (Don't know what it is, but these things tend to crash pretty often in
my experience. Am I cursed?)

>Of course, this unbridled speculation IS very premature...  One thing that will probably come about, though, is that Sun and others will have a hard time competing against the kind of intrinsic value offered by a low-priced color '040-based NeXT.  Just about everything a Sun comes with can be found on a NeXT, and the converse isn't true: A NeXT comes with bundled NextStep applications, a DSP, cheap optical drives, a low-cost 400 dpi printer, and so on...

There's nothing preventing any other company from creating really slick software
bundles for their systems; Apollo had a pretty nice package for their 2500/3500
products. And there's nothing to prevent anyone from adding some whiz-bang
floating point unit to their workstation; the DSP doesn't need to be tightly
coupled to the CPU, it wouldn't be a difficult add-on. The other guys may take
a long time realizing there's a demand for DSP-equipped workstations, but it's
no great hardship to supply the rest. Most optical drives are SCSI compatible,
after all...
--
  -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan
  one million data bits stored on a chip, one million bits per chip
	if one of those data bits happens to flip,
		one million data bits stored on the chip...
