SLVQC@CUNYVM (Salvatore Saieva) (10/12/90)
I spent most of my day this past Wed. at the Jacob Javits
Convention Center in NYC. The Javits Center was hosting
Info '90. And the most exciting display at the show: the
NeXT Inc. booth, of course... (IMHO.) NeXTdimension was
on display and being demonstrated. The color images this
box is able to display are awesome. The Icon program has
been totally reworked and is now a full 32 bit color
application. So, not surprisingly, most of the demos done
on the NeXTdimension cube were done with Icon. Images of
Donald Duck, a tree, a chair, a Corvette, a beach scene, etc.
were all brought-up in Icon to demo the impressive colors,
high-res, and image transparency features of the NeXTdimension
board.
The Icon program is also able to capture video. Yea, it's true.
There is a submenu `Video...', somewhere off the main menu,
that brings-up a panel for video capture options. Unfortunately,
I didn't get to see any of the video capture features working.
The NeXT reps at the show couldn't get their camcorder connected
to the NeXTdimension board properly, so, there was no way to
sample video.
The NeXT rep told me that NeXTdimension is able to capture
full-motion video, but, it can't do it at the moment. Apparently
NeXT is still developing the routines, which make use of the
i860 and C Cube chips, to do real-time image capture. So, even
if the NeXT folk at the show were able to hook-up their camcorder,
they would have only been able to capture still images.
All-in-all, the NeXTdimension and 2.0 system software were working
fine together, but there were a few bugs. The system did hang
once and had to be rebooted and there were times when phantom
cursors were left behind after clicking within a window on
the screen. This didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd,
everyone was very impressed at the quality of the color images.
Other applications being demonstrated on NeXTstations:
- Improv by Lotus: an amazing program which is built to
do what you spend hours getting conventional spreadsheet
programs to do.
- WordPerfect: the interface is terrific, graphics can be
inserted any where in your text just by dropping the image
into your document, multi-column doc's are very easy to
setup.
- PowerStep by Ashton-Tate: reminded me of Excel, charting
features are really nice, easy to work with.
- Others included: Conextions 3270 emulator, Boss Document
Management System, Objective Technologies, Who's Calling, and
BusinessLand. (Hope I didn't forget anyone.)
I don't remember seeing any old cubes there, as a matter of fact,
I think the only cube was the one running NeXTdimension. All
the other machines there were NeXTstations (I guess about 9 or 10
machines in total), no NeXTstation Color machines were at the show.
The new machines are really nice, and the applications seem to be
shaping-up. Keep up the good work NeXT!
Sal.
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Salvatore Saieva Internet: slvqc@cunyvm.cuny.edu
Queens College, Academic Computer Center BITNET: slvqc@cunyvm.bitnet
65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, N.Y. 11367 DeskNet: (718) 520-766234X3TAN@CMUVM.BITNET (10/18/90)
Presently, I am working on an astronomy project using a NeXT as
controler and recorder of astrophotographic observations. Where can I
get more data on the new system and NeXTDimention boards???
Jeff Kavanaugh