adkins@cis.ohio-state.edu (Brian Adkins) (05/10/91)
I am a CS undergrad intending to specialize in computer graphics in grad school. I am considering purchasing one of the following systems for home use. Monochrome (2-bit) NeXTstation $3,295 or Color (16-bit) NeXTstation $5,725 They both include: CPU 68040 15MIPS, 2MFLOPS Memory Mono 8 meg, Color 12 meg (expandable to 32 meg) Floppy 2.88 meg Hard Drive 105 meg (for more $$ 200 or 400 meg) Monitor 17 inch non-interlaced (1120 x 832) Software (included): C++, Objective-C, GNU Emacs, TeX, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Mathematica 2.0, Postscript previewer, Oxford dictionary of quotations, Interface builder, Music & sound kit, etc. etc. I can get X for the NeXTstation. It seems to be a good buy, but I want something with which I can do some productive work in graphics research and development. I will have access to the "real" thing at school for the final product etc. At this point I am more interested in geometric modelling than rendering so not having 24-bit color at home isn't quite as bad. Is anyone out there doing some productive work on a low-end graphics workstation such as this? What types of problems have you run into in porting code to 24-bit color and vice-versa? Am I better off just using the workstations at school than trying to buy one to work on at home? Any advice, opinions etc. would be appreciated. Brian Adkins