lclarke@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Lawrence Clarke) (02/01/91)
On January 30, 1991, the Vancouver BC NeXT User's Group held their monthly
meeting at the Granville Island Hotel.
Following is a summary of highlights of the meeting:
- NeXT will be selling their machines locally through Advantage
Computers (tel: 604 685-NeXT).
- NeXTstations with Hard Drives in sizes 105 mb and 200 mb are
currently being shipped
- colour NeXTstations are due to be shipped on the 15th. of
February, 1991
- NeXT dimension boards will probably ship sometime between April
and December, 1991 :-) (There are problems with the "C-
Cube" chip and the JPEG compression.)
- There was a demonstration on how to install external SCSI
drives. Apparently the SCSI drive number in the NeXTstation is
1, (not 0 as it is in the cube) as this allows for an external
SCSI drive addressed as device 0 to be used as the boot disk.
The external drive connected to the NeXTstation during the demo
was set to device 2 in order to use it as the second hard
drive. (There was some discussion as to the need for
termination on MAC external drives.)
- Lionel Tolan from SFU stated he has available 5 hours of video-
tape and some software to demonstrate the capabilities of the
NeXT system
- There was mention of an undocumented command <scsimodes> that
is apparently used to partition Hard Drives.
- There was some discussion about Optical Drives. Concern was
expressed by users with optical drives only, that it appeared
NeXT was dropping optical drive support, as NeXTstep 2.0
software does not support two optical drives, and Improv and
Mathematica will only be shipped on floppy disks.
- The DB Toolkit (demonstrated by S. Jobs in the Next demo
videotape) is currently under development by NeXT, and is not
yet shipping.
- There is a new issue of "RMnug" newsletter on the archive
sites.
- The NeXtView newletter is looking for articles for the next
issue of their publication.
- The FrameMaker update application does not work with releases
prior to 2.0b: 2.0b will be converted to 2.0d but there will be
problems with printing (extremely slow). The local NeXT rep
should be consulted for an update to 2.0d.
- Version 2.1 of the NeXTstep operating system will include
routines for the NeXTdimension board, but no bug fixes.
- One of the users mentioned he had a 105mb NeXTstation for sale.
- A Kanji version of NeXTstep is available in Japan. It will not
be available in North America, but can be specially ordered.
- A Kanji Postscript font is available for documents. (Menus
remain in English.)
- The Dove faxmodem is now available; Abaton's faxmodem is
expected to be shipping within two weeks.
- UNIX "man" pages are not available on the 105 mb NeXTstation,
but are available from some of the archive sites.
- Contrary to information in "InfoWorld" magazine, IBM *is* going
with NeXTstep and Microsoft has officially dropped OS/2
development.
- Lotus Improv is expected to ship within two weeks, and
Mathematica is expected to ship sometime in February.
- The NeXT offices for Vancouver, BC will be moving from their
Granville Island location to the Park Place tower, 13th. floor.
(The telephone numbers remain the same.)
- The next meeting of the User's Group will be held at Advantage
Computers on the 27th. of February, 1991, at 7:00 p.m. (Their
address is 4664 Lougheed Highway, Suite 148, Burnbaby, B.C.)
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\==============================================================/melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) (02/01/91)
In article <0iLNw1w164w@questor.wimsey.bc.ca> lclarke@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Lawrence Clarke) writes:
- Contrary to information in "InfoWorld" magazine, IBM *is* going
with NeXTstep and Microsoft has officially dropped OS/2
development.
This is the second time that I have heard this? Is MS dropping OS/2
entirely? As in, they will never write another line of OS/2 code?
-Mikelacsap@plethora.media.mit.edu (Pascal Chesnais) (02/01/91)
In article Re: Highlights of Vancouver BC NeXT Users Group Meeting, Jan. 30, 1991 bennett@mp.cs.niu.edu (Scott Bennett) of : Northern Illinois University writes: In article <0iLNw1w164w@questor.wimsey.bc.ca> lclarke@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Lawrence Clarke) writes: >On January 30, 1991, the Vancouver BC NeXT User's Group held their monthly >meeting at the Granville Island Hotel. > >Following is a summary of highlights of the meeting: > > [text deleted --SJB] > > - There was some discussion about Optical Drives. Concern was > expressed by users with optical drives only, that it appeared > NeXT was dropping optical drive support, as NeXTstep 2.0 > software does not support two optical drives, and Improv and WHAT????? Do you mean rel. 2.0 has /dev/{r,}od0a but not /dev/{r,}od1a? If so, then how are people with the same very common configuration that I have ('030 w/OD and 40MB magnetic) supposed to back up their systems? --- rod{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}a does not refer to the _physical_ optical drives, but rather the optical disk _volumes_ (the physical disk you remove from the drive) look at man od(4) if you have the unix man pages on line. This concept of volumes is extended to scsi disk drives and floppy drives in 2.0 How many people run a _two_ optical _drive_ system? That precludes putting an internal swap disk, and unless running an external scsi drive would be slow. pasc
news@NeXT.COM (news) (02/03/91)
In article <0iLNw1w164w@questor.wimsey.bc.ca> lclarke@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Lawrence Clarke) writes: > - The FrameMaker update application does not work with releases > prior to 2.0b: 2.0b will be converted to 2.0d but there will be > problems with printing (extremely slow). The local NeXT rep > should be consulted for an update to 2.0d. Actually, 2.0d is quite fast. It was 2.0b that had slow printing.
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (02/04/91)
In article <0iLNw1w164w@questor.wimsey.bc.ca> lclarke@questor.wimsey.bc.ca (Lawrence Clarke) writes: > - A Kanji version of NeXTstep is available in Japan. It will not > be available in North America, but can be specially ordered. After both Sun and NeXT have screwed us by "improving" their keyboard designs (how rendering them virtually unusable is an improvement is beyond me), the marketroids are at it again. San Francisco has a *huge* Asian population--and they're more than proportionally represented here. With the recent decision to change from Sony to Philips monitors, I think I now have *three* good reasons to seriously consider Sony NEWS workstations in our future plans. So much for NeXT being the "perfect" workstation for Higher Education. > - A Kanji Postscript font is available for documents. (Menus > remain in English.) I want it! I want it! I want it! -=EPS=-