Many critics complained about NeXT only offering greyscale initially. I think the general public never did understand the NeXT boxes. They offered a bunch of stuff that PeeCees and Macs did not offer, or were not common at the time, so much of what they saw was a big price tag. Engineers and college types saw machines with a few too many flaws and disadvantages. Sun-3xs (3/80 and 3/480, specifically) offered much the same features, plus color and an established applications base. The SPARCstations put the final nails in the NeXT coffin. The SGI 4D/s also helped keep the NeXT down, as the Irises simply blew the Next away in the graphics and speed departments. It really was a nice try, but too late in the workstation world. William Donzelli william(a)ans.net

Mach is a Micro Kernal. The version of Unix running on top of it is based on BSD (version 4.3 IIRC). Instead of having X-Windows running on top of UNIX, NeXTStep/OPENSTEP has it's own GUI that uses Display Postscript. The original NeXT machines will run OPENSTEP 4.2, since the next version of the OS after OPENSTEP 4.2 is Rhapsody, it's unlikely they'll be supported by any further OS releases. You can also run the OS on Intel hardware and at least some of the OPENSTEP environment will run on Sun's, HP's and WinNT. Beware, if you're used to UNIX networking, you're likely to be lost trying to set up a NeXT box. I know I was pretty much lost. Of course the great documentation that I got with OPENSTEP 4.2 didn't help much with anything except building a compatible system and installing. Zane | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator | | healyzh(a)ix.netcom.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | For Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | see http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/ | | For the collecting of Classic Computers with info on them. | | see http://www.dragonfire.net/~healyzh/museum.html |