pete@relay.nixctc.de (Pete Delaney) (04/15/89)
Would someone be so kind as to explane the difference between Sun MicroSystems NeWS package and NeXt's NextStep. I know NeXtStep is written in Display Postscript and I have ordered Adobe's DP book. I just scan thru the NeXt news group and expected a bit more postscript programs being exchanged as in the comp.windows.news news-group. Perhaps I should have checked out the postscript news-group. Anyway, any bits of wisdom about NeXtStep as compared to NeWS would be interesting. For example does NeXt step provide a postscript level debugger like the gem Don Hopkins posted last week. Are NeWS and NextStep programs interchangable with a library of defines to map from one world to the other? Grasshopper et al seem to think that display postscript is about the same as NeWS with just some names changed. So, NeXT Landers, why is NextStep our next step in human interfaces? What new ideas does NextStep offer? Is IBM makeing NextStep it's user interface as implied by Jina Lytton in UNIX World? What about the other UNIX developers? Unix Interntional? OSF? Where is NextStep going to fit it? Is it going to be licensed like NeWS is? Or will it be a propriority interface used by NeXt and IBM? Is NeWS so similar that it won't matter? Just currious :) Pete Delaney - Nixdorf UCC | pete@relay.NIXCTC.DE Prefered Addr Loffel Strasse 3 | pyramid!nixctc!pete UUCP from Calf 7000 Stuttgart 70 West Germany | Phone: +49 (711) 7685-128
patterso@hardees.rutgers.edu (Ross Patterson) (04/17/89)
> I just scan thru the NeXt news >group and expected a bit more postscript programs being exchanged >as in the comp.windows.news news-group. Perhaps NeXT has a slight problem getting their machines out into the field? Several people here at Rutgers have been trying for some time to purchase one, unsuccessfully. These folks are the ones that end-users call with questions like "I just got $25,000 in my grant for a computer, what should I get? I hear these Sun's are neat, and I've been reading all about those NeXT's in the <insert local newspaper name here>." It seems the local marketroids are too busy giving mass demonstrations ("... and here, if you could see the screen from the back of the lecture hall, you'd see this neat little icon we drew ..."), and can't find time to send price lists to purchasing agents. Perhaps now that BusinessLand is selling them (albeit at a higher price) they'll start selling a few. But not likely very many here. Too bad for Jobs, who said he was counting on the traditional University-developed software pool to make his machines worthwhile. Ross Patterson Rutgers University Center for Computer and Information Services