rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) (09/25/88)
I assume that by "erasable" they mean that the optical disk can be
erased, but can it be re-written? I dont believe anyone has done this
before, except for the Tandy thor drive, but that could only be written to
30 or so times, and is 1-2 years away from release. Would Jobs really
sell this computer with a write-once disk as the main means of storage?
I also heard that optical disks were much slower than hard disks. I
would rather see this ship with a 120 Meg hard disk, and later add an
optical disk when the technology is more reliable.
I would also prefer a seperate monitor. What happens when I want
to add a color display? I have to either have it external, or have a
dealer swap them (with an official NeXT display, not my choice of after-
market ones.) He is able to control the price and profits by making it
hard for others to market monitors for it. What about when I want to
upgrade X-Windows? I cant simply get a copy of the new version, I have
to buy the official NeXT ROMS. 15 Megs of ROMS + dealer markup= $$$.
He learned from the mistakes of the Mac by adding expansion slots,
but also learned that if you make things like the display and ROMs
proprietary, you can control the prices.
Any comments on this? I may be wrong.
--Rob.
Robert Silvers.
Box #1003 University of Lowell.
Lowell Ma, 01854
(617) 452-8823 Rm. 322 "Live free or live in Massachusetts." chari@juniper.uucp (Christopher Michael Whatley) (09/29/88)
In article <9291@swan.ulowell.edu> rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) writes: > [Speculation on optical disk feasability] Who knows? > > I would also prefer a seperate monitor. What happens when I want >to add a color display? I have to either have it external, or have a >dealer swap them (with an official NeXT display, not my choice of after- >market ones.) Have you seen the box? Is it one piece? I was really hoping to use my current Sony 19" that I have on my Mac II right now. I can't imagine getting a grayscale monitor of that size and resolution for much cheaper than it is. If you want color on it, you have to buy the Pixar card anyway. If it is a one piece, then you'll have to have two monitors. > He is able to control the price and profits by making it >hard for others to market monitors for it. What about when I want to >upgrade X-Windows? I cant simply get a copy of the new version, I have >to buy the official NeXT ROMS. 15 Megs of ROMS + dealer markup= $$$. I don't think upgrading will be a problem. Probably all that is required is to have the x-server on disk override the ROM version or something. Is the 15 megs of ROM an accurate amount or were you just speculating? As far as prices and profits, $3500 for a 25Mhz Workstation with UNIX, 4mb RAM, a large screen display and a 300mb disk is pretty damn cheap. I don't see how they will make any profit at all! Of course if you are not a student, its $6000 but that's still about the price of an SE 2/40 and half the price of a PS/2 model 70. > He learned from the mistakes of the Mac by adding expansion slots, >but also learned that if you make things like the display and ROMs >proprietary, you can control the prices. I think the machine will be kind of a giveaway at this point, so, why worry about price control and the like. Personally, I would rather install a few SIMMs worth of ROM that load up 50 floppies or wait two hours for a tape to load Maybe we will have pop and play unix instead of a need for a guru just to get the machine up and running. Note: I have nothing to do with anything and my opinions are mine and nobody else's. Chris -- -- $---------------$--------------------------------$-------------------------$ | Chris Whatley | mail chari@juniper.uucp | "Ever seen the chicken | | 512/453-4238 | chari@killer.dallas.tx.us | walk?" -Jeffrey | $---------------$--------------------------------$-------------------------$
dtani@bbn.com (Dan Tani) (09/29/88)
From article <9291@swan.ulowell.edu>, by rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers): > > I assume that by "erasable" they mean that the optical disk can be > erased, but can it be re-written? I dont believe anyone has done this > before, except for the Tandy thor drive, but that could only be written to I would have to assume that this drive would have to have full read/write functionality. From his past track record, Jobs seems to put only dazzling technology in his machines (Granted, the old 400K drives were sssllloooowwww) Think of the flack he would get if he put a worm drive in NeXt. He is out to PROVE something to Apple and the world. Of course, these are all rumors and the drive may not even exist. > > I would also prefer a seperate monitor. What happens when I want > to add a color display? I have to either have it external, or have a I have never heard that the display would be built-in. In fact I understand that it is just the opposite. NeXt has been talked about as a black cube. I imagine a featurless cube with only cables coming out of it. I, too might be wrong. Lets wait and see before we critisize. Only 2 more weeks!!!! > --Rob. > --dan
ward@cfa.harvard.EDU (Steve Ward) (09/29/88)
... Just to add another erasable optical disk to the list: Maxtor has announced a new optical disk product. I don't have the spec. sheet in front of me, so contact Maxtor for the nitty-gritty. Here are a few tidbits of info: 1. standard full height 5 1/4" peripheral footprint and power connection. 2. SCSI host computer interface. 3. high speed WRITE as well as read -- sorry, the spec sheet is in my other office, so I can't attach "reality" to line 4. can read/write two optical disk formats -- lagest capacity is something like 640 MB/side 5. I believe list price will be about $5995.00 and list price for cartridges about $250.00 6. Data sheets are available from Maxtor; you might even be able to get a drive or two, but the last I heard, distributors would begin to see the drive in January. 7. Due to the WRITE "high speed" of the unit, Maxtor is touting it as an alternative to tape for very high volume data archiving. The fact that it is erasable is nice, but for high volume archiving the write speed (time to write Bigabytes) is more important. After all, you want to backup those disks in hours, not days. Steven Ward ward@cfa.harvard.edu
rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) (09/30/88)
In article <5022@juniper.uucp> chari@juniper.UUCP (Christopher Michael Whatley) writes: >> I would also prefer a seperate monitor. What happens when I want >Have you seen the box? Is it one piece? I was really hoping to use my current >monitor... Actually, someone just told me it had a built in monitor, I do not know this for a fact. I thought the monitor would be in the black cube, like a giant Mac. >Is the 15 megs of ROM an accurate amount or were you just speculating? Just speculating. Someone else on the net made this guess. >I think the machine will be kind of a giveaway at this point, so, why worry >about price control and the like. Personally, I would rather install a ... I am still a student, $3600 is very cheap, but lets say that I pay it, and a year later X12 comes out. How will I install it without replacing the ROMS? I cant even copy it from a friend. If it was on tape, I could. (only, of course, if the licensing agreement allowed me to) >Chris --Rob. Robert Silvers. Box #1003 University of Lowell. Lowell Ma, 01854 (617) 452-8823 Rm. 322 "Live free or live in Massachusetts."
mtarlton@hi3.ACA.MCC.COM (Mark Tarlton) (09/30/88)
From article <30260@bbn.COM>, by dtani@bbn.com (Dan Tani): > From article <9291@swan.ulowell.edu>, by rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers): >> >> I assume that by "erasable" they mean that the optical disk can be >> erased, but can it be re-written? I dont believe anyone has done this >> before, except for the Tandy thor drive, but that could only be written to From EE Times, May 30, 1988 (reprinted without permission) "Tokyo - Sony Corp. will start marketing in Japan a 5 1/4" erasable, magneto-optical disk subsystem as external memory for its News workstations in late October. ... The capacity of the system is 297 Mbytes for a one-sided disk, and 594 Mbytes on a double-sided disk. The unit is connected to the News system via the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI). ... The format is : 31 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector and 18,751 tracks per side, with a revolution speed of 2,400 rpm. The average latency time is 12.5 ms, and the seek time is an average of 90 ms. User data transfer speed is 640 kbytes/s (continuous) and 1.2 Mbytes/s (burst). -Miyoko Sakurai " This may be the unit that NeXT is using in their system. mark tarlton mtarlton@mcc.com "These opinions aren't even my own"
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (09/30/88)
I brought the recent posting about the rumored NeXT specs to an
astrophysicist I work with and he got really excited out it, especially
after I told him about the bundled copy of Mathamatica. But, as soon as he
found out that there was no Fortran compiler, he got real turned off.
God, I just know I'm going to get flamed for this (and I can hardly
believe that I'm saying it myself) but unless the NeXT has a good Fortran
package (i.e. production quality compiler, symbolic debugger of dbxtool or
better quality, and complete math function library) it's just not
interesting to us except as a cute toy. The rumored specs didn't say
anything about floating point support, but I'm assume that this thing comes
with a 68881 or 68882 as standard equipment.
Oh yeah, rogue would be nice too :-)
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"sullivan@vsi.COM (Michael T Sullivan) (09/30/88)
Can we please keep the flaming and speculation about the NeXT box down
to a minimum until October 12. There's no use complaining about something
that we just haven't see yet. Once it comes out there will be plenty
of traffic. Patience, patience.
--
Michael Sullivan {uunet|attmail}!vsi!sullivan
V-Systems, Inc. Santa Ana, CA sullivan@vsi.com
Just say to yourself over and over, "President Quayle". I can't do more than 2.bob@acornrc.UUCP (Bob Weissman) (10/01/88)
I saw the funniest tee shirt on a lady at the Tied House brewpub
in Mountain View, CA, last night.
You know the NeXT logo, which is the four letters in a box, like
N e
X T
Well, this lady's shirt duplicated the logo, but the letters said
N e
V R
--
Bob Weissman
Internet: bob@acornrc.uucp
UUCP: ...!{ ames | decwrl | oliveb | pyramid }!acornrc!bob
Arpanet: bob%acornrc.uucp@ames.arc.nasa.govrsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) (10/01/88)
I was concerned before about what people meant by the NeXT's disk being "erasable". To me, I assumed this to be a WORM drive, since you can erase a WORM drive by setting all 0s to 1s. The correct way to refere to the drive on the NeXT is "re-writable". You can write it many times. I am 99.99% sure that it is a 297 Meg. removable Magno/Optical drive that can be re-written and was developed by Sony. I wonder how fast it will be though? I heard that optical drives are generally slow. Any comments on if this is true or not? I am refering to magnetic/optical drives, not CD ROM or WORM drives. --Rob. Robert Silvers. Box #1003 University of Lowell. Lowell Ma, 01854 (617) 452-8823 Rm. 322 "Live free or live in Massachusetts."
dilvish@Portia.Stanford.EDU (Jay Shrauner) (10/02/88)
In article <3520@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > > God, I just know I'm going to get flamed for this (and I can hardly >believe that I'm saying it myself) but unless the NeXT has a good Fortran >package (i.e. production quality compiler, symbolic debugger of dbxtool or >better quality, and complete math function library) it's just not >interesting to us except as a cute toy. I hardly think it wise to chain the newest technology to antiquated languages. Many people know Fortran but it would be about the dead last thing I would consider in buying a computer. In my humble opinion it is a pretty sad language and only so prevalent still because it's the only language many people bothered to learn. Other languages are much more powerful and also much more widely used and taught in the EDUCATIONAL community, which is supposedly what the NeXT computer is aimed at market-wise. I'd just as soon not have to pay for the addition of a 'good Fortran package' in the basic computer package as I would hopefully never use it. Jay Shrauner jas@dadent.wustl.edu
daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (10/03/88)
in article <9377@swan.ulowell.edu>, rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) says: > I am 99.99% sure that it is a 297 Meg. removable Magno/Optical drive that can > be re-written and was developed by Sony. I wonder how fast it will be though? That'd be my guess, too. Though that new Sony drive ain't exactly what I'd call cheap. And it's slow, too, just a bit slower than the super-el-cheapo discount 20 meg hard disks around these days for < $200. Then again, if you think of it as an expensive ~300 meg floppy disk, it's not a bad thing. But it's gonna need a real hard drive, methinks. > --Rob. -- Dave Haynie "The 32 Bit Guy" Commodore-Amiga "The Crew That Never Rests" {ihnp4|uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: D-DAVE H BIX: hazy "I can't relax, 'cause I'm a Boinger!"
jpdres10@usl-pc.usl.edu (Green Eric Lee) (10/04/88)
In article <9291@swan.ulowell.edu> rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) writes: > I assume that by "erasable" they mean that the optical disk can be >erased, but can it be re-written? I dont believe anyone has done this >before, except for the Tandy thor drive, but that could only be written to >30 or so times, and is 1-2 years away from release. Several companies have real-live existing magneto-optical disk drives, most of which are promised for "Real Soon Now". The ones I'm most familiar with are the Maxtor drives. They have a 160mb drive with 85ms access time, and a 1 Gb drive with 40ms access time. Supposedly they are writable as many times as ordinary disk drives. There are several other companies out there using the same technology (which is different from the technology Tandy is using). I don't have the article with me right now, alas, so I can't tell you which is which. Tandy has better publicists, apparently. >I also heard that optical disks were much slower than hard disks. They are definitely slower, insofar as step rate is concerned -- which is about double that of equivalent capacity "normal" drives. However, as far as price/speed ratio is concerned, they still beat normal drives. The Maxtor 1gb, for example, will be priced somewhere around $2K-$3K... 1/4th the price of an Eagle, double the capacity, and less than 1/4th slower. > I would rather see this ship with a 120 Meg hard disk, and later add an >optical disk when the technology is more reliable. The technology is reliable. The problem is that production hasn't ramped up for any of the manufacturers yet. For example, Maxtor is promising production quantities in the spring... -- Eric Green {backbone}!killer!elg
chari@juniper.uucp (Christopher Michael Whatley) (10/04/88)
In article <4923@cbmvax.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes: >in article <9377@swan.ulowell.edu>, rsilvers@hawk.ulowell.edu (Robert Silvers) says: > >That'd be my guess, too. Though that new Sony drive ain't exactly what I'd >call cheap. And it's slow, too, just a bit slower than the super-el-cheapo >discount 20 meg hard disks around these days for < $200. Then again, if you >think of it as an expensive ~300 meg floppy disk, it's not a bad thing. But >it's gonna need a real hard drive, methinks. I had heard that it was a 12ms drive with transfer rates of about 1meg/second. Is that wrong? I can't put my finger on where I heard that though, so I could be off a bit. I really wish October 12 would come so that some of this speculation would turn into a productive discussion of the machine's strengths and weaknesses. I am dying to get my hands on one and see what its made of. I don't like this kernel in ROM stuff though, I'd like to be able to tinker with it some. Chris -- $---------------$--------------------------------$-------------------------$ | Chris Whatley | mail chari@juniper.uucp | "Ever seen the chicken | | 512/453-4238 | chari@killer.dallas.tx.us | walk?" -Jeffrey | $---------------$--------------------------------$-------------------------$
anand@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Anand Iyengar) (10/04/88)
In article <30260@bbn.COM> dtani@bbn.com (Dan Tani) writes: >the world. Of course, these are all rumors and the drive may not >even exist. I read somewhere (I promptly forgot where) that the drive does indeed exist (297K on the "single sided" one, 594K on the double The drive is said to use "magneto-optical technology" (whatever that means): that's as detailed as it got (pretty lousy article). Anand.
anand@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Anand Iyengar) (10/04/88)
In article <3520@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: >... But, as soon as he >found out that there was no Fortran compiler, he got real turned off. > > God, I just know I'm going to get flamed for this (and I can hardly >believe that I'm saying it myself) but unless the NeXT has a good Fortran >package ... it's just not >interesting to us except as a cute toy. The rumored specs didn't say No flame: this is *scary*, but unfortunately not an isolated situation (people keep telling me about all of the wonderful FORTRAN libraries that they keep using). If it runs Mach (& -> Unix), it's likely to have a C compiler. I'm sure that somewhere there's a PD FORTRAN (even if it's YACC fodder). >with a 68881 or 68882 as standard equipment. Why not: it seems to have everything else. > Oh yeah, rogue would be nice too :-) Hack would be nicer (and cheaper!)... >"The connector is the network" "The journey is the adventure" -- Steve Jobs Anand Iyengar. -- Disclaimer \-'kla-mer\ n [AF, fr disclaimer v.] 1a: a denial or disavowel of legal claim: relinquishment of or formal refusal to accept an interest of estate b: a writing that embodies a legal disclaimer 2a: denial, disavowel b: repudiation { Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary }
mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard) (10/04/88)
You're all wrong. Idle specualtion and rumor propagation will get you nowhere. I, on the other hand, "KNOW". I have it on good authority. I've heard from several sources. What I know will blow your socks off, refute everything that's been said so far: The case is pink, not black. -- void *Wayne_Mesard(); MESARD@BBN.COM BBN, Cambridge, MA GNU Emacs--it's in der.
dtani@bbn.com (Dan Tani) (10/05/88)
I heard the NeXt will have its power cord on the left side of the back. A "friend" of mine was thrilled to hear about the machine but as soon as he heard about the cord, he turned right off. He refuses to buy a machine with a cord on the left! How could Jobs have made this huge oversite? Oh, sure, lets all re-arrange our workspaces just for Him! jeez, what nerve. And to think, I was considering buying one! DT