21 Apr
2002
21 Apr
'02
2:04 p.m.
Perhaps, but why would one have wanted one of them back then? In fact, why
would one want one now?
BTW, when the NEXT boxes first came out, we had a few of them sitting around
for people to look at and play with. I personally was not impressed. They
were EXTREMELY low on gigaflops per picobuck and, aside from the OS, I don't
remember any applications that didn't have the same look and feel as a small
mono-MAC costing ~1/10 as much.
The problem with these machines, as borne out by the market, is that they
weren't what the home user wanted. They weren't what I wanted either. I
recently saw a NEXT cube for sale in a thrift store complete with its original
(Black) laser printer for $10 for the whole shootin'match, and it was running.
AFAIK, nobody bought it. I haven't been back to see whether it's sold yet,
but it's been a couple of weeks. The laser printer had been there a week or
two longer.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Hellige" <jhellige(a)earthlink.net>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers (was: OT email response format)
>No, I wouldn't pay that much, but I
wouldn't pay out more than, say $25 for
>all the UNIX boxes on the planet either, and that only if they were already
>broken down into their varous scrap types, e.g. steel, aluminum, plastics,
>etc. I've yet to see even one piece of software that would be of serious
use
>to me that runs under UNIX. I know that I could
force myself to use
Netscape,
but I really
don't want to.
Not comparing them to today's Windows machines but to the PC
offerings out during the same timeframe, I doubt you really could've
found a PC comparable in capabilities to Unix workstations such as
the SGI machines, for running applications such as Lightwave 3D, or
the NeXT machines, for such things as Mathmatica and other
scientific-type apps. The hardware on PC's has only in the last few
years caught up to the various workstations in video capabilities and
the CPU's have yet to come near the MIPS and DEC Alpha processors
except in terms of raw clockspeed. Of course, you paid for machines
of this level, but you got a lot more as well.
With Mac OS X, more new machines are shipping with a UNIX
derived OS than ever before. With so many home machines being
networked, a secure OS is becoming a must....something Windows has
shown time and again to fall short on. Plus, I'd use the freely
downloadable and time-proven Apache webserver over the similar
NT/2000 offerings any day given it's better track record and wider
installed base.
Jeff
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