26 Jun
1998
26 Jun
'98
7:09 a.m.
Sounds cool. Many of the greatest design concepts are
stopped... not
because of bugs, not because of tiredness of developers, but because of the
only thing obstructing innovation: Money.
Actually, the 88000 was killed off because Sun went with the SPARCs for
their next generation of machines, the Sun-4 series. SGI was not much of a
player at the time, and NeXT never really got a good foothold in the
workstation market. Data Generals AViiON machines, at least the first
series, were the only 88000 based boxes to hit the market, and they failed
horribly.
Folks, I do not want to bad mouth a fine series of machines from NeXT, but
lets face it - they really never had a chance. It took a company the size
of IBM to muscle into the workstation market in the late 1980s/early
1990s. NeXT just could not do it.
Some mistakes from the NeXT engineers did not help (but we have covered
those before).
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net