rwn@utacfd.UUCP (Ralph Noack) (11/30/88)
Today I attended a demo by NeXT personnel at the Univ. of Tx at Arlington. It was put on by Tom Bettes(regional sales manager), a software engineer Scott ?(who started sept 1) and an engineer who was in the design of the automated production facility. I don't have their names, sorry. It's a neat machine. I'll try and relay some of the highlights. The demo started with the cube synthesizing a Bach fugue and displaying stuff on the screen. Tom talked awhile with a few slides about generalities. Then the automation engineer talked about the manufacturing facility with a video tape of the assembly line. Starting from when the PCB is picked up and loaded to when it comes off fully assembled. Finally Scott got on the machine and demo'd various packages, spending the most time on the Interface Builder. The fully automated production facility was pretty amazing. The use of robots gives them a very low defect rate resulting in high yields. Claimed the defect rate was 10 times lower than any other surface mount board manufacturer. There is approx. 20% through hole components with the rest surface mount. The robot which places the surface mount components places 150/min! The optic. drive has an access time of 92ms. But if the data being accessed is within 5-10MB, the laser can be simply refocused. Resulting in an average access time of 35-50ms. You can boot the machine over the net. They boot from a Sun. When asked further about diskless, the response was it will have a disk, the required optical. I didn't press as to where the system file system had to reside. The software on the machine was 0.7. I was extremely impressed with the window manager, and the rest of the software. With the exception that you only get two types of shell windows. One is the history type (cmdtool on sun) where you can scroll back to see the past. Can't run GNU emacs from it though. The other is fixed 24 line vt100 emulator. You can run emacs here but I like 50-80 lines at times. The machine had GNU v18.51 emacs, gcc, and gdb, but did not appear to have GNU make(-v flag failed). Also no GNU source code to be found. But it is a demo machine. The digital library was impressive. The online thesaurus, dictionary, works of the bard, etc. He did a search in the dictionary for all occurrences of mammal. Scrolled them in a window and popped up windows with pictures of the animals. The dictionary also contains all the pictures. I was impressed with how fast they were popped up and moved around. There are no limits on the number of open windows other than the swap. With 0.8 the manuals will all be online in the digital library. The dict. and thes. take ~30MB. the dict. itself is 4MB and the index is 12MB. The Interface Builder was very impressive. You are able to cut and paste from pallets and build a graphical interface to a process in very little time. Said they had given a machine a while by to Richard Crandal(SP?) who was on their advisory board. He let a grad student work with it one afternoon and he developed a poker game. Cards are dealt, chips flipped out etc. It will be bundled along with a digital oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer package. Scott showed how you can take an existing app(a gas molecule bouncing in a container with a piston top), look at the attributes and build your own interface. Very impressive. Fortran is being done by a 3rd party due out in Jan. One other way NeXT is keeping the cost down is by making the university provide the support for the users. Recall: > From: rosenblg@cmcl2.NYU.EDU (Gary J. Rosenblum) > Newsgroups: comp.sys.next > Subject: Experience with NeXT > Message-ID: <33907@cmcl2.NYU.EDU> > Date: 14 Nov 88 22:25:53 GMT > . > . > a) we provide two names of people for software support > b) we provide 1 name of person for hardware support > c) our two software support people attend "training camp", currently > given only on the west coast, but maybe coming east The university signs a contract buy's the machines and must provide staff to help the locals. That way NeXT supports only the university support staff. If a student is to buy one, the university micro-computer store must be reselling them. If not you can't buy one. The store will add on it's required percentage for providing support, etc. So... the $6500 price is a bit low for what you will actually pay. *If* you can convince the university that there is enough demand... Finally, when asked how the pictures were entered into the machine (BTW you can include a picture with e/voice mail), the reply was with a Mac. When asked when they would have one, the response was that a laser printer looks a lot like a scanner... I have no connection with NeXT other than the desire to own one.... -- Ralph W. Noack (817)-273-2860 Univ. of Tx at Arlington, Aerospace Eng. Dept. Box 19018 Arlington, Tx 76019 ..!{killer,texsun}!utacfd!rwn