clp@wjh12.harvard.edu (Charles L. Perkins) (09/24/90)
I wrote this a few days ago, but thought the group might like to see it:
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For me, the day begin at 5:15am setting up a breakfast we were hosting to
"watch the dawn on a new era in computing." From about 6 to 8am, about 50 NeXT
employees and enthusiasts came to watch the sun rise from the roof garden, and
then I was off to Davies Symphony Hall for the Event.
Soon after 8, they let us in, and (having luckily gotten some press cred-
entials from NeXTWORLD) I ran to the first row and sat closest to the podium
(I knew I could almost touch the great man's shoes from there :-). During the
tense minutes waiting for the presentation to begin, R. Perot (billionaire for
many years and an investor in NeXT) came down the row, shaking everyone's hands
and welcoming them. What a thrill! Two years ago to the day, Steve had, in
this very same hall, first introduced the NeXT computer, and in that time I had
gone from an admirer to a developer, reporter, and enthusiast here in "the
front ranks" of the crowd. I was thrilled but also worried someone would throw
me out of there! :-)
Finally, the crowd was quiet and the lights came down, and Steve appeared.
He began simply: "This is the future of NeXT." (A quite serious statement,
since so much was riding on this introduction and the momentum it would
produce.) He went on to begin his slow dance with the audience, using the
gentle introduction of slides with more and more information to punctuate each
point in his usual dramatic style. You could almost taste the anticipation in
the room...
First, he began with the main thrust of the introduction: lessons learned.
NeXT had listened to its customers and had in January of this year started a
program code-named Warp 9 to correct their concerns. After only 9 months of
effort, their new products were substantially complete and the new version of
the system software was in place, quite a feat in itself, but within NeXT's
lean/mean corporate reach. He then specifically pointed out the feedback, how
users loved multitasking, UNIX, ease of use, Postscript, etc., but how they had
four serious complaints:
(1) Too slow (2) Too expensive
(3) Not enough applications (4) No color
He then turned to address each of these in turn and explain how their new
procucts, new software, and third party developers had solved them.
On the speed issue, NeXT has the first shipping 68040s in quantity and is
very pleased with their speeds (note that the numbers below are at the LOWEST
end of the range Motorola publishes about the 68040, so I think NeXT is being
conservative (or realistic) about these numbers). A slide shows the Mac II ci
and fx at about 4 and 7 MIPS (I'm trying to write this all from memory, so
forgive silly errors), the average of the IBM and Compaq 386 and 486 PCs at
around 7 and 12 MIPS, and the SPARC SLC and about 12 and the SPARC 1+ at about
15 MIPS. Now remember that NeXT wants to be a "Super PC" not a traditional
workstation, thus the comparison to other PCs, and thus also its positioning at
15 MIPS -- equal to the SPARC 1+ and exceeding all other available PCs. (With
more than 2 MFLOPS on-chip, this accelerates the NeXT integer ops by a factor
of 3 and F.P. by 5-10 which makes all Postscript drawing 2-4 times faster (I've
seen drawing speed on the 68040 myself)). As a final touch, NeXT points out in
a subtle way that actual throughput is more than MIPS (remember those 12 DMA
I/O controllers and separate paths?) but just showing a complex Mathematica 3-D
color plot and how long it takes to procude it on the screen (mostly F.P. but
some V.M. I/O and a little drawing): 250 seconds on the Mac II ci, about
linearly less on the fx, 386, 486 according to MIPS, 50 secs. on the SPARC SLC,
40 on the 1+, and ... 26 on the NeXT 68040. And that is on the smallest new
model with minimum memory. So in summary, Steve believes they have turned "Too
slow" into "Fast."
On the price issue, he showed the same MIPS slides with the prices written
above them for comparison. I believe they were approx. $8k for the ci, $12k
for the fx, about $7k and $10k for the 386/486 pair, $6500 for the SLC (all
machines had the cheapest disk added to them to get them up to the 105 MB
included in the NeXT), and $9k (?) for the 1+. The lowest cost NeXT comes in
at only $4995 retail price. This includes:
- 68040 with 8 MB RAM - DSP 56001 / CD sound out
- 105 MB disk with 2.0 pre-installed - MegaPixel 17" display
- SCSI-2 interface and connector - 2 improved RS-423 ports
- Usual (LOTS) of bundled software - Integrated microphone
- 2.88 MB floppy disk drive - Twisted pair and BNC ethernet
These last two items were also user feedback -- the optical disk has become an
option and the new 2.88 floppy is fully DOS and UNIX compatible for both 1.44
and 720k floppies, and the twisted pair on every NeXT means no rewiring for
ethernet will be necessary throughout corporate offices. Considering once
again the DSP, sound, and bundled applications, and noting that the SLC is
$1.5k greater without any of these, I go along with Steve when he concludes
"Too expensive" has been turned into "Low cost."
For the applications issue, there were four main thrusts. Steve presented
the four areas of interest as: (1) business productivity apps (traditionally
dominated by the PC market), (2) desktop publishing and layout apps (Mac),
(3) custom-designed and tailored high-powered apps (Sun), and (4) To-be-
discussed-later. I'll talk about each presentation in turn:
(1) By far my favorite part of the Intro was when Jim Manzi gave his talk
about Lotus' new product. He began: "We are here today to try to answer some
deep philosophical and theological questions. First, "Why?" <dramatic pause>
Then, "Why the NeXT?" ... And finally, "Does Bill Gates exist?" <loud suprised
laughter> My time does not allow me to explore the third question, but...."
and then later in the talk: "Why did Lotus abandon compatibility and step back
to reinvent from scratch the very meaning of the Spreedsheet? Because God told
us to." It was a dry, understated, wonderfully cosmic-religious-comic intro-
duction to the whole new approach Lotus had taken, delivered with brilliance
and style. I hope someone was recording it.
The actual demo of Lotus (done I believe by the product manager), was just
as stunning. It is hard to describe in words how simple and flexible Improv
is... First, it has generalized formulas that use English, like "Net = Gross
- Costs" which apply EVERYWHERE those catagories appear, it has catagories of
rows and columns that organize and document the information (no numbers and
letters), and if you view the grouping of these catagories dynamically as
providing a multi-dimensional space of information, you can "flip" the axes of
this information space by pulling category names around in real-time. It is
impossible to describe how cool this is...imagine that you have your spread-
sheet organized by product type and the subcategories for price, cost, etc.,
then have columns that are Q1, Q2, Q3, etc. You can flip the x and y axes and
have Q1 at the left with columns for the various products and sub-columns for
the price, cost, etc. This reorganization takes the blink of an eye, and
allows you to play with the many ways your data can be viewed, graphed, etc.
in real time as easily as pulling it into the new form (literally). And for a
final touch, Lotus announced that until the end of this year, all new machines
and all 68040 upgrades will get a free copy of the product!! (it normally costs
$695) This will be more impressive when I tell you about up-front sales later.
Also on the list of these apps was PowerStep, a traditional spreedsheet by
Askton-Tate, WingZ by Informix, various organizational and client tracking
tools, etc. (Read the Fall 1990 product directory to see new shipping apps.)
(2) Next up was the head of WordPerfect who not only gave the talk for his
product, but demo'ed it himself. This was one of only a few glitches in the
seamless presentations -- he was a little nervous and messed up the demo, but
later Steve seemed to have noticed and showed off a little more of it himself
as part of his demos. The thing that WAS amazing about this presentation
was the speed at which re-laying-out was occurring. For about a five-page
document, he made it multiple columns, strecthed them, made it four columns,
adjusted, changed to flush right, left, center, etc. and EVERYTHING took less
than a blink. I literally could not seen any perceptible delay in any opera-
tion reorganizing the document. So not only was typing perfect and fast, every-
thing was. I thought this was a good demo of 68040 speed (and, I guess, good
algs. developed by WordPerfect). Also in this category was Quark Xpress for
the NeXT, new Framemaker, a new tool for precise layout of text by Glenn Reid
(Mr. Postscript), 1500 new fonts available for the NeXT via The Font Company,
Adobe announced Illustrator 3.0 will ship first for the NeXT, etc. In general,
an impressive list of apps for this type of activity, all fully compatible with
their PC or Mac cousins.
(3) Steve himself gave the example of how NeXT can do custom apps. (Though
in the previous talk, Mr. WordPerfect said an amazing thing---they had STARTED
their development effort for NeXT 6 months ago, and are going to be Beta this
month and shipping in 3...an effort fully 50% shorter than they had planned
for. Other developers site speed-ups as high as 3-to-1 in ports and much
faster for new development. REALLY! I'm one of them!)
He began showing the new custom, dynamically loadable objects in Interface
Builder. This allows your new Objective-C classes to be interpreted in real-
time and tested in I.B. (like a simple interpretive environment), and then be
placed in pallettes for other to use just like the standard buttons in I.B.
The demo he gave was using some Database Kit objects NeXT had thrown together.
Though simple in concept, if you stop to think what's happening in a COMMERCIAL
not a reserach computer, this is exciting. He placed a browser for retrieving
data and allowing selection, pulled down an icon representing the database,
used the Inspector to set which database and what data field he wanted to view,
connected the browser to the database, and then went into test mode. In
seconds, the data popped up from the database queries in the browser. He
popped back into Edit mode and added some fields and an RTF scrollable text
area for ancillary data and comments about the browser's current selection,
attached them all to the browser, and then tested again. Now when he selected
a browser entry, the various fields filled with their values from the database,
including a full multi-font comment popping into the RTF text area. Obviously,
editing, manipulating, etc. is now trivial.
The neat idea here was people selling large sets of pallettes, not just
apps, so that other developers can leverage directly on each other's ideas and
interface objects. Imagine a kit for Database, for Graphing, for Imaging in
3-D, added to the standard kits NeXT supplies for Music, Sound, Printing, etc.
each as easy to use as pulling buttons off the pallette and connecting them
together! This is the vision of fast, easy user and customer customization
that NeXT provides: they hope to do what more traditional workstations have
been doing but much, much better.
(4) Finally, Steve described a new area for applications he felt woule be as
important as the above three in the 90s: interpersonal computing. Claiming
that in the 80s, personal computing solved most of an individual's productivity
needs, that the 90s will solve more group and collaborative productivity needs.
(This is the research we began in the Smalltalk group when I was there around
'84/'85, we even used the same words... :-) The general concept here was one
of providing the environment for small, focused applications tools to interact,
creating a flexible set of services the user can call upon from anywhere, and
allowing the free and easy trading of these apps and their documents over nets.
He began by demoing some of the new features that 2.0 provides towards
such an environment. These ranged from a new FAX option (anything that can be
printed can just as easily be FAXed now, and the receiver gets a MUCH nicer
looking FAX since Postscript can image directly and avoid scanning errors;
FAXes can also be received and filed automatically, examined and edited) to a
whole dynamic structure for allowing applications to register as providing
services to other apps--old apps and new apps alike will see the new services
and will be able to take advantage of any future apps as well. Services pop-
up automatically for all available applications in a menu of that name in each
applications' main menu. One of the most powerful demos of these features
was when Steve popped up a received FAX in TIFF format (bits), selected the
service provided by a scanning app for OCR from the bitmap editor, requested
conversion to text, and a few seconds later, the text popped back in a fully
editable form!! This service would be available to any app that requested it.
The new workspace in 2.0 has a new "shelf" on which commonly used documents,
apps, and directories can be placed...like the radio buttons in a car radio,
these allow easy wandering and remembering of past locations (like pushd/popd).
The browser also allows multi-threaded copy/move/delete so the browser is not
tied up during long disk operations (it also shows progress in nice ways and
gives more status information and more options in general than before---it is
very nice). The Mail application has been improved and extended to live more
closely with other mail systems and to allow Icons to be dragged in AND OUT
of Mail. In general, 2.0 now allows any app to drag icons for files or for
directories into and out of any view, and what happens is up to the app. For
Mail, it does the tar/compress/uuencode on one side and uudecode/uncompresss/
un-tar on the other, so sound, music, graphics, bits, EPS, whole directory
structures, etc. can be trivially transported. Combined with services, this
is a powerful metaphor. One mail message suggested trying out some new legal
files in somebody's home path...Steve workspace-browsed over the Net to the
machine and the area suggested, messaged the Digital Librarian service to
add the directory into it's targets, it popped up loaded with the new files,
and he then searched around a little with it's standard full text search
(which, by the way, was 3-5 times faster than before!! They've re-optimized
the searching so it is almost blinding now.)
So, in summary, Steve said that "Not enough applications" had become
"Great applications."
And, to address the fourth complaint, no color, Steve saved the best for
last. He introduced a version of the $4995 NeXTstation called NeXTstation
Color (both of which look like Pizza boxes in black with a display on top).
This moderate color workstation has 16 bits (12 color, 4 alpha channel) of
depth per pixel, and uses the same Sony Trinitron awesome-sharpness 16" monitor
that the really-cool thing I'll describe in a minute uses, 12 MB of memory,
and costs only $7995. Note: all B&W and color NeXT products I'm telling you
about here have fully interchangeable software environments---the SAME code
running on the Postscipt above the depth 4 MegaPixel will work on the depth 16
color and the depth 32 color described below; they even do automatic dithering
and other tricks to make it look better than you's expect. All the color
machines use a TrueVu RAMDAC chip for window-by-window color depths, so for the
16-bit machine this means that ALL windows look good even if they have color
maps with incompatible entries---true RGB goes out the back correctly! This
"simple" color machine is obviously already better that the low-end Sun color
(and blows away PCs and Macs of course), but wait there's more!
The really exciting thing was that not only was there a new version of the
Cube with floppy, etc. (updated to be like NeXTstation and about $8k), but that
into this or any old cube could be added a NeXTdimension board. Now you might
be tempted to say, Yeah, so it's another RGB color board. Well...listen up.
NeXTdimension has 32 bits, with 8 bits of alpha, allowing all sorts of magic
special effects in draw and layout programs (like air-brushing in a pattern
behind a car and seeing THROUGH the car windows the pattern behind the car but
modified suitably by the color of the glass!). These are true 32 bits, no
color tables. It has an Intel i860 built-in that does a minimum of 30,000
Gourand-shaded polygon fills per second, and that allows the standard NeXT U.I.
to run as fast (and faster!) that the B&W U.I. even though it's pushing arount
8 times more data for every window! Full 32-bit color windows can be dragged
around in real-time just like the B&W windows can. Steve showed all sorts of
really striking color images, and when you look up close, it is truly photo-
realistic color like one of the best of the monitors at SigGraph.
Then came the section that brought the house down...Steve was looking at
a door in B&W in the bitmap editor, and he pressed what looked like a large
CD play button...the door was a frame from the Wizard of Oz just as Dorothy is
about to enter Oz, and as we watched, it came to life and played full-motion
color video in full-CD sound in real-time in the window. The Wizard of Oz ran
and ran as people clapped and clapped. The damn NeXTdimension has real-time
display of video on the screen, built-in JPEG compression in a VLSI chip that
performs up to 100-to-1 reduction on the fly for I and O, it has two RCA video
inputs (with an S-video slaved to one of them), and an RCA video output with
S-video as well. Also RGB output. Also any color monitor can be used for
output. Also, here's the price:
===> $ 3995 <===
When Steve announced that and then took a live video feed of himself, showed us
it updating in real-time, captured a frame into the editor, and then composited
in Donald Duck sitting on his hand, all in a few seconds, the crowd went wild.
This was a moment of Myth. All of the hardware and software ideas of that
momentous 1968 demo by Doug Engelbart were finally becoming available on an
afforable platform, and we could feel the world changing around us. It was
a feeling I won't soon forget.
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Well, as you can tell from my reaction above, I am buying a NeXTdimension
board and color monitor as soon as my budget allows. Along with my Digital
Ears, this will give me full-motion, real-time editing in CD-sound to/from
my VCR, any laserdisk, output to normal or S-video monitors, etc. I didn't
mention, but developer and educational prices will be 30-35% LOWER than the
above, so we are talking $3k for the cheapest NeXT and only $5.5 for the full
upgrade to NeXTdimension for current NeXT cube owners (including the amazing
Sony monitor). A brand new NeXTdimension LIST PRICE is $14k, about 1/3 to 1/4
the price of comparable ANYTHINGs, workstations, personal IRISes, PCs with all
those extra boards, etc.
I think this really is the beginning of a new era, just as PCs brought down
the price of individual computing, this will bring down the cost of individual
multi-media, integrated environments that can as easily download and utilize
the latest movie, MTV video, and local songwriter's MIDI performance info. as
they can create their own programs, music, video, and movies. All information
services can now begin to combine distribution channels, all forms of media
can now be edited. I forget to mention, the NeXT also has a cheap CD-ROM. And
don't forget the integrated networking, multi-media mail, and services. You
can see the possibilities as well as I...it is an exciting time we live in.
Charlesbarry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) (09/25/90)
Thanks for the report. It nearly brought tears to my eyes---the promised land is here! -- Barry Merriman UCLA Dept. of Math UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)
UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) (09/26/90)
In article <398@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>, barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) says: >Thanks for the report. It nearly brought tears to my eyes---the promised >land is here! Yeah, I felt the same way. I have to keep reminding myself about Jobs' Reality Distortion Zone. 8-) 8-)