jensen@gt-eedsp.UUCP (P. Allen Jensen) (10/18/88)
To try to clear up some of the questions, I have summerized some of the information from a document provided by NeXT: Physical: One-foot cube that houses tha main CPU plus room for three expansion boards of the same size. Universal Power supply for world-wide use. Room for up to two 5.25-inch full-height mass storage devices. Standard in the cube are 8Mb of main memory expandable to 16Mb on the main CPU board. Processors: Motorola 68030, 25MHz, 5 MIPS Motorola 68882, 25MHz Motorola 56001 DSP (10 MIPS). Integrated Channel Processor (ICP). The ICP manages and optimizes the flow of data within the system between main memory, the CPU and peripheral devices. There are 12 I/O channels in the NeXT Workstation. These are buffered DMA channels with built in memory buffers. A burst mode that transfers 128 bit chunks (instead of 32). Optical Storage Processor (OCP). This is the controller for the Optical Disk. Provides ECC and double buffering. Disk: SCSI interface is rated at up to 4.8 MB per second. Display: The display is 17-inch, two bits/pixel. It includes 44.1kHz, 16 bit two-channel digital audio output. It has a headphone jack and built-in line-out jacks. There is also a microphone jack for voice input. Laser Printer: 400/300DPI (dots per inch). Imaging is done directly in the computers memory. Images are creatred in the computer and sent to the printer via a high-speed, custom laser printer port. The printer has NO LIGHTS, BUTTONS, POWER SWITCHES, ETC... All control features have been moved inside the computer. Single universal paper tray, straight paper path, standard toner cartridges, universal power supply. Software: System Software Mach OS, BSD4.3 compatable Sun NFS Application Development Tools Objective C 4.0 (The Stepstone Corporation) GNU ANSI C compiler (Free Software Foundation) GNU C debugger with Objective C extensions Standard 4.3BSD utilities Terminal Emulator Window-based text editor GNU Emacs DSP Tools - assembler, debugger, and array processing routines NextStep Window Server (DisplayPostscript) Application Kit Interface Builder Workspace Manager SoundKit MusicKit Applications Digital Librarian Electronic Mail (include VOICE mail) Jot (Notepad, text database manager) WriteNow word processing Mathematica (Wolfram Research Inc.) mixes text, graphics and equations NeXT SQL Database Server Allegro CL Common Lisp (Franz, Inc) --------- This list is not complete and may contain errors. I am not associated with NeXT. The list is intended to help answer some basic questions and to generate more discussions on the NeXT Workstation. P. Allen Jensen -- P. Allen Jensen Georgia Tech, School of Electrical Engineering, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250 USENET: ...!{allegra,hplabs,ulysses}!gatech!gt-eedsp!jensen INTERNET: jensen@gteedsp.gatech.edu