dcarpent@sjuphil.uucp (D. Carpenter) (10/23/90)
Since no one has as yet posted anything about NeXT at Educomm'90, I thought I'd offer a few comments. Educom's annual conference on information technology in higher education was held this year in Atlanta, GA, hosted by Georgia Tech (home of BuzzNUG). It was a great conference, and NeXT was there in force. They ran both a display of some 12 machines in the vendor exhibit area and anothersix or so machines in their hospitality suite. They had the entire new product line present, including the NeXTDimension color system: beautiful! Steve Jobs gave the closing talk, "Interpersonal computing for the 90s," which turned out to be a version of the demo he gave at the introduction of the new products in San Francisco. An impressive performance, though more of a sustained advertisement for his wares than a keynote address. The audience seemed appreciative, however. NeXT seemed successful in generating a lot of interest and enthusiasm. As the conference wore on, the new black turtleneck NeXT T-shirts appeared in greater and greater numbers, and people seemed interested in the new NeXT. Jobs' speech, which was the last event of the conference, was well attended. A few things I learned, which may or may not come as news to others: 1. OCR software is now available from HSD, the people who make the grey-scale scanner for the Cube. It is added automatically to the "services" menu item so that OCR becomes a kind of standard, system-wide service (although it must be purchased separately). 2. Database kits are on the way, i.e., objects for interfacing with either the Sybase or Oracles database servers. They were being demonstrated at the conference, and I was told that they would be available fairly soon at a low price. 3. NeXT will probably not be supporting SLIP in the foreseeable future. I was told that they are aware of the problem of un- networked cubes, and that a solution would be made available at some point, but that support of SLIP was not in the works. 4. The upgrades will evidently ship with dust filters that will extend the life of the OD drive by several years. The third-party filters already available tended to raise the temperature inside the cube to unacceptable levels. The NeXT filters do not, and are safe. 5. I got the impression frotalking to some NeXT people that the 2.0 release of the system software had been hard-ware driven, and was too rushed to include many of the enhancements that NeXT wants to make. So we can look forward to really goodhings (on the level of system software) in 3.0. All of the above is based on casual conversations with people from NeXT who were at Educom. I make no guarantee for its accuracy, nor do I have any "inside" information. Other subjective impressions: Improv made a big hit, and NeXT was really pushing it. To an untrained eye, the NeXTStation color is hard to distinguish from the NeXTDimension color, i.e., the 16 bit color looks really good. As usual, there are a lot of "extras" in 2.0, including a nice calendar/scheduler that I may well end up prefering to Calendoscope. The whole mood was upbeat, both among the people from NeXT and among those who were seeing the machines for the first time. The NeXT hospitality suite was jammed. I left with a very good feeling about NeXT's prospects for long-term success. People were talking about buying the machines; many said they already had them on order. In short, things seem to be looking up. -- =============================================================== David Carpenter dcarpent@sjuphil.UUCP St. Joseph's University dcarpent@sjuphil.sju.edu Philadelphia, PA 19131
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (10/25/90)
In article <1990Oct23.013521.28555@sjuphil.uucp> dcarpent@sjuphil.UUCP () writes: >3. NeXT will probably not be supporting SLIP in the foreseeable >future. I was told that they are aware of the problem of un- >networked cubes, and that a solution would be made available at >some point, but that support of SLIP was not in the works. If this is true, they just lost a lot of NeXTstation orders from our campus (people looking for a "home computer"). No kidding. -=EPS=- -- Even A/UX supports SLIP.
jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore) (10/29/90)
/ comp.sys.next / dcarpent@sjuphil.uucp (D. Carpenter) / Oct 22, 1990 / > 4. The upgrades will evidently ship with dust filters that will > extend the life of the OD drive by several years. The third-party > filters already available tended to raise the temperature inside > the cube to unacceptable levels. The NeXT filters do not, and > are safe. Unfortunately, it looks like this filter goes on the back of the drive. In early cubes, where the fan sucks the dust through the optical drive and then blows air out of the back, the filter will make sure that the dust stays in the drive. Next solution? Jacob -- Jacob Gore Jacob@Gore.Com boulder!gore!jacob