vargish@umd5.umd.edu (Nick Vargish) (10/27/88)
Yesterday, at the EDUCOM conference being hosted in DC I saw the NeXT machine in action. Tech-specs are readily available, so I'll spare those details. In fact, I'll just make one or three comments: (1) I want one. I want one NOW. (2) The hype does not do it justice. When you first see it running, you will be stunned, no matter what you may have heard. It is a very intense machine. (3) Who needs color? The resolution is so sharp that with black, white and two shades of grey everything is sharp enough that color is really not necessary. And oh yes, Display PostScript is PLENTY fast. Nick Vargish vargish @ umd5.umd.edu p.s. I spoke to Steve Jobs! Transcript follows: V : That's a sweet machine! J : You really think so? V : Yes... I do. J : Thank you. [ How's THAT for false modesty!? ]
dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Donald Hosek) (10/30/88)
In article <4179@umd5.umd.edu> vargish@umd5.umd.edu (Nick Vargish) writes: >(3) Who needs color? The resolution is so sharp that with black, white > and two shades of grey everything is sharp enough that color is > really not necessary. And oh yes, Display PostScript is PLENTY > fast. Even more important to consider is, how useful is it to have color on the display if you can't print in color? Sure it might *look* nice to have display color, but is it really something that one *needs*? I think not. -dh
bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein) (11/01/88)
>Even more important to consider is, how useful is it to have color on the >display if you can't print in color? Sure it might *look* nice to have >display color, but is it really something that one *needs*? I think not. > >-dh Wait a minute, not everything that gets displayed on a screen is destined to be printed (besides, you can print in color, there are several good color printers on the market and some not very expensive, I believe under $10K, maybe not a home item but certainly office or lab priced.) I remember several years ago seeing a demo of a network monitoring system at BBN which used color character terminals. Basically, as certain conditions were noticed by the software items on the screen would move thru the colors green/yellow/red or thereabouts. As might be expected yellow was some warning condition and red indicated that the monitoring software had detected a real problem. A lot of the time the screens just flickered various stats on the networks in blue. The obvious advantage was that an operator could sit in a room with a dozen of these monitoring stations and just scan them from across the room every so often. Any yellow/red demanded more attention, none, go back to the crossword puzzle. I can't think of any other very good way to do something like this although I suppose various highlight attributes (bold, blinking) might be useful, then again these may have also used those as well. Anyhow, information is information. -Barry Shein, ||Encore||