jayrajan@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Vijay Rajan) (02/04/89)
I am visiting the US from Australia for a short time and I was very eager to see the NeXT machine before I return as I gather it may be some time before NeXT ship to overseas unis, especially Australia. I went to the microcomputer centre here at the U of M and asked to see their new NeXT which was hidden away in a back room. The guy in charge refused to let me see it run, he showed me the computer but told me it took ages (5-6 min) to boot and crashed at every given opportunity, only the compilers were a bit more stable and they looked liked compiling on any unix machine. Needless to say I was VERY pissed off at the .... person. He seemed to think that the computer was not even worth turning on to show as the demo programs and apps were just soooo unstable. Oh well, since I'm returning to Oz next week it seems unlikely that I'll get to play with it, for a couple of years at least! From reading the messages I understood that the software was still under development, OK, but not even worth turning on?!?! Malcolm Pradhan (Hate this Minnesotan winter)
george@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU (02/06/89)
In article <11076@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> jayrajan@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Vijay Rajan) writes: > > I went to the microcomputer centre here at the U of M and asked to see >their new NeXT which was hidden away in a back room. The guy in charge >refused to let me see it run, he showed me the computer but told me it >took ages (5-6 min) to boot and crashed at every given opportunity, only >the compilers were a bit more stable and they looked liked compiling on >any unix machine. Well, I know there will be plenty of responses to this message. Myself, I am going to assume that you probably just didn't get talk to the "right" person. And maybe there isn't a "right" person at U of M... It takes a lot of staff time to evaluate a new system, let alone show it off to the world and say nice things about it, let alone develop applications for it. Some universities might just not have the resources to do all of that. To provide a contrast, we opened our NeXT workstation lab (25 clients, 5 servers) on 1/23. I.e. open to the entire campus. No back rooms here... George Boyce, Workstation Resources, Cornell Information Technologies