The NeXT machine has been announced! (long)
this message was posted on Usenet in October 1988. NeXT Inc was the company founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple Inc
Well, I just got back from the NeXT introduction at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco and thought I would update the net on what Steve Jobs announced about the NeXT computer.
The machine is based on the Motorola 68030 with a 68882 floating point chip as well as a 56001 DSP chip, all running at 25 MHz. It will support up to 16 MB of RAM with 1 Mbit chips, maybe 64 MB with 4 Mbit chips (they haven't tried this yet). Mass storage is on a 256 MB removable erasable optical disk! Jobs said that the removable media goes for ~$50. The display is a gray-scale mega-pixel display (no exact sizes given). There was no mention of color. Everything is displayed with Display PostScript, developed jointly by NeXT and Adobe. This apparently runs with a proprietary window system. There was no mention of X Windows. Also standard are audio input and output, ethernet, and SCSI. Jobs said that with the standard sound capabilities, all that is needed for a 9600 bps modem is some software and a phone connection.
The entire CPU board consists of 45 chips as compared to 100+ for a fast PC and 300+ for a typical workstation. Everything has been crammed onto a 12 inch square board through the use of very dense surface mounted devices, and a few large custom CMOS chips. Two of these chips implement what Jobs called a "mainframe on two chips". These basically provide fast I/O processors for all I/O systems including the optical disk, SCSI, ethernet, sound processors (I assume the DSP and A/D-D/A converters) and the NuBus. The NuBus is run at 25 MHz (Jobs compared it to a 10 MHz NuBus, is this what the Mac II uses?). The SCSI interface was reported to have a 4 MB/sec. transfer rate. There are 12 I/O processors total.
The CPU box has 4 slots, 1 is used by the CPU board, the others were empty.
The box itself is a black cube a foot on a side. The display, keyboard and two-button mouse are also black. The display has an integral adjustable height and tilt stand. The display is connected to the CPU box with a single 3 meter cable which transmits the 100 MHz video, power, sound, keyboard and mouse data. The back of the display has connectors for the keyboard and mouse, along with a speaker, microphone and headphone jacks and gold-plated RCA stereo jacks.
The sound capabilities of the system were impressive, being able to record and playback high-quality sound. Using the DSP chip some very realistic sounding music was generated on the fly in real-time.
The box, display, and everything else looked very modern and high-tech - all black.
The operating system is based on MACH with NFS support. On top of this is Display PostScript. Above this is what NeXT is calling NextStep. This consists of their window server, interface builder, application builder and workspace. This is what was licensed by IBM. On top of this are the applications.
When you login, you get a browser, several icons, and a menu on the screen.
The browser lets you move quickly from directory to directory, and to run applications or open icon based directory windows. The root menu is always on the screen, always on top, and may be positioned anywhere on the screen (and even off the screen). The menus cascade, and the submenus may be torn off and left on the screen. Along the right edge is what I think Jobs called the icon dock. It is a set of icons for commonly used applications which are kept on the left edge, and are always on top. If you need the screen space, this column of icons may be slid down off the screen, leaving only the NeXT icon showing. Icons may be freely moved in and out of the dock so you can keep what icons you use a lot there.
Jobs said that the new environment should cut the time used in coding the user interface of a program from 90% to 10% of the total coding time. With the application builder Jobs said it would go to zero. The environment is object oriented, I believe based on Objective-C. You can modify existing stuff with subclassing and inherit much of the base application. The application builder lets you build an application just by placing buttons, sliders, and any other graphic objects into a window, and then attaching the input and output objects to object messages.
Software that comes bundled with the system include MACH, Display PostScript, NextStep, the sound and music tools, the digital library, WriteNow, Mail, Mathematica, Sybase and Franz Lisp.
The digital library consists of Webster's 9th Collegiate Dictionary, Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare on-line. There is a built in spell program and dictionary/thesaurus lookup application. A word can be selected in any window and looked up. The dictionary even includes the pictures.
WriteNow is a word processing system, Mail is arpanet compatible mail, including the capability to send speech, Mathematica is for (obviously) mathematical problems and such. Sybase is a sequel database server.
A PostScript laser printer was also announced the can run at either 400 dpi or in 300 dpi "draft" mode. The printer is markedly smaller (shorter) that most laser printers. No mention was given of speed.
Several demos were run with rotating molecules, smooth scrolling text, voice storage and playback, speech waveforms and FFTs, etc. Everything ran well, and ran fast.
Jobs announced the following prices (apparently education prices):
NeXT computer: $6500
NeXT PostScript Printer: $2000
330 MB winchester disk: $2000
660 MB winchester disk: $4000 Jobs said that machines will start shipping in early November '88, the 0.8 pre-release of the software for developers will be available in Q4 '88, the 0.9 pre-release for developers and aggressive users in Q1 '89, with the 1.0 release for general consumption in Q2 '89.
All in all, the machine looked good and fast, although I wonder about the fact that several desirable things were not mentioned, i.e., color monitors, X-Windows, some kind of floppy drive for software distribution, etc. I imagine a typical SCSI tape drive could be used for archival storage.
I'm sure I must have left something out, but I'm sure someone will fill in the gaps and correct any mistakes I made (sometimes it was hard to hear from the nosebleed seats in the back row of the top balcony).
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Standard Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with NeXT except being a possible software developer that got invited to the announcement.
--
Jeff Lo
..!{ames,hplabs,uunet}!elan!jlo
Elan Computer Group, Inc.
(415) 322-2450
