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"Paul" == Paul Camp <pjcamp@coastal.edu> writes:
"One of the big advantages to NeXT, and the primary reason we used it
originally for our development tools and assembly, were the large
groups of self-contained multimedia handling subsystems, such things
as the image-handling library," said Roy Eyman II, a Trilobyte
software engineer.
"It made object-oriented subassembly of large products a snap," Eyman
said. "You could slap things together quickly and easily." Code
objects were written rapidly and reused to handle typical operations,
such as loading and decoding objects within a multimedia program.
That streamlined the grunt work in the development process, letting
Trilobyte engineers meet tight schedules and still have time for
cutting-edge experimentation.
Eyman also lauded the networking capabilities in OpenStep. "It's an
almost invisible networking system," he said. "You could put a bunch
of NeXT machines on the same network and have them talking to each
other right away."
The presence in the OS of preassembled networking modules for programs
is useful to companies developing content for online use, Eyman said.
Display PostScript also made multimedia projects easier to put
together. "I know we used Display PostScript for a lot of our
on-the-fly text generation," Eyman said. "We would 'snapshot' the text
combined with graphics to produce a final frame that was then
compressed with our proprietary compression software."
"There were a couple of drawbacks," Eyman said. "The bigger one in my
mind is that the OS is slow. It requires some pretty strong hardware
to really get effective use out of the OS."
NeXT's own hardware was somewhat expensive, he said, and to run the
Intel version of OpenStep on 486-based machines, "you had to have such
a beefed-up 486 that it wasn't really worth it."