tom@csustan.UUCP (Tom Carter) (10/15/88)
Following are some general technical notes on the NeXT system, gleaned
from the Wednesday morning intro, the late Wednesday reception, and a
couple of handouts . . . It should be considered non-authoritative,
but I am doing my best not to put in anything I'm not reasonably sure
about. Overall, I was quite impressed (i.e., I WANT one . . .)
Hardware:
25 MHz 68030 & 68882 FPU
8 Mbytes memory (up to 16 MB on main system board)
10 MIPS M56001 Digital Signal Processeor (note - the music in
the intro was generated on the fly, not sampled . . .
There was an impressive demo of a real-time FFT
of voice input -- you could see the frequency spike
when someone in the audience whistled)
2 VLSI chips (by NeXT) -- one Integrated Channel Processor, handling
twelve DMA channels,
one Optical Storage Processor, controlling the
Canon optical disk, including error correction code.
(This chip is why you probably won't see any of the
competition come out with one soon).
Jobs calls these `mainframe on a chip'
Thin ethernet
SCSI (claimed to be able to give burst transmission rate of 8MByte/sec)
Printer port for laserprinter
2 serial ports (Mac style, with those `funny little round connectors')
I/O channel to DSP
All this stuff is on a single cpu board -- there are 3 empty
`enhanced NuBus' slots in the standard configuration,
which includes:
256 MByte read/write optical disk (Canon, controller by NeXT).
(This is *not* a SCSI device)
The disk is encased in a special carrier, about 5 1/2"
by 6" by 3/8". `When writing to the disk, a magnetic
field is applied, and the laser is used to heat up a
very small portion of the substrate to its Curie point,
the temperature at which it is susceptible to change
by the applied magnetic field. When the substrate cools,
the crystals remain in that alignment until the next time
they are heated beyond their Curie point.'
Seek time: about 80 millisecond . . .
Media price: $50 (yes, that's fifty :-), under 25 cents/MB!).
There is room for a second drive in the system box, and
the price for a second drive will probably be under
$2000.
Monitor: `megapixel' (1024x1024, 2-bit grayscale), single 3 meter
cable to system box (including power), single speaker,
two (stereo) rca jacks for sound out, `walkman headphone
jack,' microphone jack (included microphone).
Keyboard & 2-button mouse -- full keyboard, including numeric keypad.
mouse plugs into keyboard, keyboard to monitor.
All this is $6500 to educational institutions. (Jobs says they intend
to stay with the educational market for quite a while.
People wouldn't even talk about a `commercial' or
`government' price . . .)
Optional: up to 16 MBytes memory, 330 MByte winchester, 660MByte winch.
330MB - $2000; 660MB - $4000
Memory - `reasonable' (and I believe them on that . . .)
Laserprinter: 400dpi, `full postscript', `universal paper feed tray'
Made by Canon. $2000.
Note that this printer will *only* work with the NeXT
system, since it doesn't actually have postscript, or
processor or memory in it -- the processing is done
in the system box (it keeps the price down . . .)
Software: (Remember, this is *all* on the one distribution disk,
including the `Digital Library' stuff, and they can
mail you an update of the whole system on a single disk . . .)
Mach OS -- `compatible with UNIX 4.3BSD; includes TCP/IP and the
standard UNIX utilities as well as Mach extensions'
NFS
System administration tools
Objective-C 4.0 (Stepstone Corp.) preprocessor
GNU ANSI C and debugger and Emacs
Window-based text editor
DSP tools (assembler, debugger and array processing routines)
Window Server including Display Postscript (Note: this is not
an X-windows implementation, but it probably wouldn't
be too hard put X-windows on top of it, if you *really*
wanted too . . .) (No `trashcan' -- a `black hole'
instead :-) . . . it is actually a `grey
hole,' in the sense that it does give you the ability
to retrieve stuff if you get rash . . .)
Application Kit, Interface Builder, Workspace Manager, SoundKit,
MusicKit
Digital Librarian (for indexing and searching `large text databases')
Electronic Mail -- `compatible with standard UNIX mail' -- includes
ability to play and record voice mail.
Jot -- personal text data base manager
WriteNow -- `full featured word processing package'
Mathematica -- `a numeric, symbolic and graphical system for mathematical
computations'
SQL Database Server (from Sybase, Inc.)
Allegro CL Common Lisp (Franz, Inc.)
Digital Library:
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary -- (including pictures . . .)
Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Oxford University Press Edition of William Shakespeare: the Complete
Works
`All NeXT technical and user manuals as well as other relevant technical
documentation'
Jobs didn't say a word about color. Later on, NeXT people said "We don't
want to talk about color yet, but of course we are looking into it --
what kind of features would you like to see in a color system? What kind
of price would you like to pay for a color machine?"
Well, enough for now . . .
Tom Carter csustan!tom@lll-crg.llnl.gov