derek@stdb.jhuapl.edu (Derek at SFA) (03/08/91)
I attended the FOSE convention at the convention center in Wahington, D.C. I
have been waiting on a B'Land cube for 2 weeks now so I thought I would check
out NeXT's setup at FOSE, here is somethings I found out.
-There were no Dimension boards there, there was'nt even a CUBE. There were
9 Slabs all networked together, each showing off a particular piece of
software (i.e. WordPerfect/Lotus Improv...)
-I asked specifically about the Dimension board and it's problems with JPEG. I
was told that the JPEG chip was being removed from the board and that shipping
was due to start soon (month..). I was also told that the price for the board
will NOT drop whatsoever, even w/o the chip. :(
-The 040 seems to be quite quick. Last year I played with an 030 Cube at the
B'Land setup and thought it performed pretty good, this thing cruises.
-Nitches..... When working with DIAGRAM I noticed that the machine starting
bogging done tremendously, I believe this was largely due to swapping/ lack
of sufficient RAM. I think 16Meg is needed for the NeXT.
The Mono sceen seems really fast! There was a demo of cat scanned images that
were rotating. The machine was handling four at one time plus music. It was
real nice. The colorstation seemed to have an excellent look to it but seemed
to drag a little on graphics. (due to more data I'm sure)
Also I had the soundplayer lock up on me a couple of times when doing some
things with Scene, this did not seem to happen on 030/1.0
-Lastly the NeXT Rep said that release 2.1 was coming soon (No more specifics, I
tried believe me) and that a color laser *might* be in the future.
-derek
The Johns hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory
PS: Any info on the Color graphics board (Daewoo) that is in the software/per.
catalog on page 48. It looks pretty neat but lacks alot of info.