pfkeb@ebnextk.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Paul Kunz) (02/28/91)
Today, I gave a public demonstration of my NextStep application, Reason,
to the IBM mainframe users group meeting in San Francisco (SHARE'76).
The IBM Rs/6000 is considered a mainframe as far as this group is concerned,
and thus NextStep applications runing under AIX are part of this meeting
of 5000+ people.
With 5000+ people at one meeting, there are lots of parallel sessions.
About 30 people showed up to hear my spiel which was how great NextStep
was and of course, what a great job I've done :-). Hey, I was invited
to give this talk, I couldn't turn it down.
Anyway, everything went very well and we impressed lots of IBM types
of the power of NextStep. IBM is a big company and lots of them haven't
got the message about NextStep which the company has a license to port
and distribute.
The fun part was that we did our demos on a RS/6000 model 550. For
those of you that don't follow IBM product annoucements, the model 550
is 53 Mips, 23 MFLOPS. Boy, did our application fly on this machine.
Our complex Panels popup with no delay. Our benchmark test runs a factor
of 10 faster than the '030 cube on which it was developed. Like I mean
this machine really handled our NextStep application really fast. Of
course, the model 550 only costs about $135K. Not exactly what you
had in mind for use at home.
One point of all this is that NextStep 1.0 on the IBM platform is
for real, if you can get it. NextStep 2.0 I'm anxiously on the IBM
waiting for. In the meantime, a NeXT cube occupies my office
and it wouldn't be displaced by anything from IBM. 53 Mips alone
wouldn't tempt me away from the NeXT development enviroment.