aberno@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Anthony Berno) (10/19/90)
Hello everyone. As usual, I'm thinking about my next computer purchase (no pun intended) about a year in andvance. When I buy, I have, basically, a choice between the non-upgradeable station and the upgradeable cube. I was quite impressed by the fact that you could just take out an 030 motherboard from a cube and replace it with the 040. My question is this: How far can this "modularity" go? I would like to buy a cube rather than a station, simply because I can go for all-internal stuff, spending a few grand per year and eventually accumulating an optical, a GB+ hard disk, the NeXTDimension board, and if it ever arrives, things like RISC coprocessing boards and speech recognition hardware. Suppose, three years down the road, I want to replace the motherboard. Is the cube designed with such generality that I will be able to simply mix and match motherboards/coprocessing boards/mass storage, etc? I would hate to have dinosaur hardware lying around. What are the limitations to what can be plugged into the cube with assured compatibility? It seems to me that this is getting especially important with the huge changes taking place in workstations. Already, I have heard of a prototype 64Mbit DRAM chip. (!) Of course, everything you buy is as useful 5 years from now as when you bought it, but when something a LOT better will cost you only $1000, it sure is a nice feeling to be able to upgrade parts rather than throwing away a whole machine, even if it is worthwhile abandoning old hardware.
charlie@wam.umd.edu (Charles William Fletcher) (02/13/91)
I finally got my 2.0 and 040 upgrade. I decided to use the Upgrade application and put 2.0 in a few days before the 040 upgrade. (I did this mainly to preserve my TeX fonts, which I see are included in the new distribution, ie don't have to be made, so if I did it over -given that you should back up anyway-I would probably do a BuildDisk. My thanks to Scott, Mark and others for there advice on this matter.) Once the 040 board went in I was bitten by the "Alert 90-1" problem(boot block not correct). Very easy to fix, just a moment of panic. So remember: 030 -> 2.0 -> 040 -> NeXT Tech. Alert 90-1 -Charlie