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Re: Computers

NeXT does have some rather serious technical drawbacks.

An interesting perspective on the NeXT OpenStep OS comes from a
company that used to make heavy use of it, Trilobyte software, makers
of multimedia games. They used the OS due to its heavy emphasis on
object-orientation so complex multimedia projects could be easily
assembled out of large groups of self-contained multimedia-handling
subsystems -- divide and conquer. That and Display PostScript mader
NeXT desirable. However, they have scrapped most of that, retaining
only a few high-end HP RISC-stations for data compression tasks. The
reason is that OpenStep is SLOW. It requires some pretty hefty
hardware to get effective use out of the system and the company was
unwilling to put $25,000 workstations on every desktop. Furthermore,
due to lack of resources, NeXT was apparently never able to advance
the object-oriented development environment as far as the developers
needed it to go.

The fact remains that deep in its heart of hearts, OpenStep is unix.
In many respects, that is a step into the past, not the future, and
is probably the reason for the OS being a resource hog. It is a
failure in the sense that nobody uses it (and in the end, for a
business, that is the only sense that counts).

But it presents an interesting quandary: Apple proposes to take a slow
operating system and superimpose on top of that an inherently slow
software technology with the emulation of System 7.x. This does not
bode well.

Interesting, Trilobyte, a major producer of games destined for the
Mac (Seventh Guest, Eleventh Hour) has switched almost all of their
development efforts onto PCs.

At 2:01 PM -0500 2/25/97, Paul Camp wrote:
On the other hand, from a business perspective Apple has serious
problems and it is not yet clear that they will be able to dig their
way out. The last significant technology to come out of Apple
research was Quicktime, five years ago. They spent four years working
on the next generation operating system only to fail and hastily
purchase another failed OS as a replacement.

In what way was NeXT a failure? In the market, maybe; technically,
absolutely not.

Larry


Paul J. Camp "The Beauty of the Universe
Assistant Professor of Physics consists not only of unity
Coastal Carolina University in variety but also of
Conway, SC 29528 variety in unity.
pjcamp@coastal.edu --Umberto Eco
pjcamp@postoffice.worldnet.att.net The Name of the Rose
(803)349-2227
fax: (803)349-2926