***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #1255 *****

Journal: PC Week May 18 1992 v9 n20 p189(2).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Third-party software crucial to NeXT's step into 486 turf. (NeXT
Computer Inc.'s NextStep 486 operating system for Intel
80486-based workstations)
Author: Morrissey, Jane.

Abstract: NeXT Computer Inc's introduction of NextStep 486, an Intel
80486-based version of its Unix-like operating system, will help
the company enter the mainstream market, but users and analysts
say that the product's high price and lack of third-party
applications will keep it in niche markets. NextStep 486 is
expected to be popular among developers but faces significant
competition from IBM's OS/2 2.0 and Microsoft Corp's upcoming
Windows NT. The product is scheduled to go into beta test in Jun
1992 and ship to OEMs in Sep 1992, but may be delayed one month.
NeXT workstation users are pleased that NeXT has opened up its
programming environment but have no plans to purchase large
quantities of the 486 version; many complain about the company's
poor marketing. Analysts note that third-party applications are
crucial to the operating system's acceptance. The few third-party
programs currently running under workstation NextStep are all
expected to be ported to NextStep 486.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Marketing).
Product: Intel 80486 (Microprocessor) (Computer programs)
NeXTStep 486 (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Marketing Strategy
Market Entry
Operating systems.
Feature: illustration
graph.

Record#: 12 161 344.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #1611 *****

Journal: PC Magazine May 12 1992 v11 n9 p113(20)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: PLATFORMS: how the PC stacks up. (overview of four evaluations of
microcomputers and workstations) (Hardware Review) ( includes
related articles on performance tests and on suitability to task
ratings)(cover story) (Evaluation)
Author: Seymour, Jim; Cohen, Julie; Thompson, M. Keith; Zilber, Jon;
Crabb, Don.
AttFile: Table: L09P1T1.WKS Performance Tests.

Abstract: Four desktop platforms including the Apple Macintosh Quadra 700,
Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 2GX, NeXT NeXTstation and a
representative IBM-compatible PC are reviewed and compared.
Intel-based PCs remain the best value for overall office
productivity and price/performance, but the other systems are
useful for specialized tasks. The Mac is a superb graphics
machine, while the Sun is ideal for engineering and scientific
applications. Most PC users have been tempted by another platform
at some time, and Macintoshes have gained many unit sales since
Apple began broadening its product line. Sun and NeXT machines
use Unix, a notoriously difficult operating system, but mask its
cryptic commands with graphical interfaces. Unix stations perform
more millions of instructions per second than PCs but are not
faster with such real-world applications as WordPerfect.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Apple Computer Inc. (Products)
Sun Microsystems Inc. (Products)
NeXT Inc. (Products)
Dell Computer Corp. (Products).
Ticker: AAPL; DELL; SUNW.
Product: Apple Macintosh Quadra 700 (Microcomputer) (evaluation)
Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 2GX (Workstation) (evaluation)
NeXT NeXTstation Turbo Color (Workstation) (evaluation)
Dell Computer PowerLine 450DE (Microcomputer) (evaluation).
Topic: Microcomputers
Evaluation
Comparison
Workstations.
Feature: illustration
table
graph
photograph.

Record#: 12 076 704.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

It's so tempting. You see Beauty and the Beast and marvel at that gorgeous
photographic-quality background in the ballroom dancing scene. Then you read
that the background was created with a Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo
workstation.

Or you see an elegant technical document, 890 pages long, and learn that it
was put together on a NeXT workstation with the desktop publishing program
FrameMaker.

Or you go to a conference and watch a dazzling multimedia presentation, and
at the end the speaker says she assembled it herself on a Macintosh.

Or you sit down with the space planner, who shows you the plans for the
reorganization of your company's office space. He takes you on a
three-dimensional walk-through so realistic that you see in an instant how
much better his new plan is than the present one. And he is running it on a
Sun SPARCstation.

Ooh. Envy. Lust. But wait a minute. Don't these people understand?
Desktop computing is done on IBM-compatible personal computers, not on weirdo
engineering workstations or a computer named after a fruit. Don't they get
it?

Or maybe, just maybe, there is something you don't know? Is it possible that
the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence?

We wondered about that. So we rounded up three exemplary platforms-- the new
Apple Macintosh Quadra 700, the Sun SPARCstation 2GX, and the dazzling
NeXTstation Turbo Color--to compare with today's best PC-platform machines.
And we compared the four platforms on the closest thing we could find to a
level playing field--several level playing fields, in fact.

The result? Nice machines, impressive in some ways, but no sale: We'll stick
with the DOS/Intel world, thanks. We want to get our work done, not make
movies or design aircraft manuals.

And we think you do, too.

Unless, of course, your work is making movies or designing aircraft manuals
(in which case one of these niche machines may be right for you).

MACINTOSH DREAMS

Rare is the PC user who hasn't been tempted by another kind of system. The
Mac is the obvious seducer: Though outnumbered in unit sales about eight to
one by PCs in 1991, the Mac has gained attention far beyond its numbers. As
business computing's second standard behind the PC, it has achieved critical
mass and seems likely to hold that standing by virtue of its easy-to-use
applications and Apple's relentless emphasis on pushing the Mac into every
emerging niche market. In fact, Apple often creates those markets (desktop
publishing, desktop presentations, and multimedia are examples).

For the real power user, though, it is not the Mac--which pays a terrible
price in sheer computing performance for its pretty face--that grabs our
attention, but the Unix-based workstations from Hewlett-Packard, NeXT,
Silicon Graphics, Sun, and others.

This is not surprising. Workstations, which have their roots in the
performance-at-any-price school of computer design, now compete in a
price-performance contest that rivals anything in the deep-discount
direct-sales PC marketplace. Now driven primarily by RISC (reduced
instruction-set computing) chips--themselves products of the
performance-is-all school--these Unix workstations dominate the scientific
and engineering desktop-computing world.

Unix is not a friendly place for the unwary, though, and neither business
users nor business software applications have taken many steps across the
Unix line. Unless you can live without the great majority of standard
software packages you have grown used to, the workstation market can still be
a pretty lonely place.

What is a jaded PC user to do? If you're bored by the notion of 50-MHz 486s,
300MB hard disks, and 8MB to 16MB of RAM in your desktop machine, should you
look into workstations or maybe the Mac as the next logical step up the
power-computing ladder?

In a word, no. And let's get that straight from the beginning: No sane PC
user abandons the world of DOS machines for workstations simply to get more
power.

Workstations and Macs do have a place, to be sure, but not as a step up for
PC users. Moving to a Mac or a workstation makes sense only if you must have
one of these machines for a specific vertical-market or technical
application. It makes little sense for the experienced PC user to leave the
world of PC-platform machines--and especially the world of DOS
applications--for the world of workstations.

Though much of that decision is based on the far smaller universes of
software packages available for these non-DOS platforms, that
applications-centered view dodges the raw power issue: Aren't these
workstations a lot more powerful than even the highest-end DOS machines? And
won't they always be a lot more powerful? No.

PRICE/PERFORMANCE TODAY

Sure, high-end workstations, which can cost $50,000 to $75,000 when fully
configured, have more raw computing firepower than today's 50-MHz 486
machines--which when similarly configured cost maybe a tenth as much as the
workstations.

Remember that this power is not necessarily accessible to you and to the
applications you want to use. For example, take a look at the test results
for WordPerfect running across these platforms. Even when the mips are
higher, the performance in standard applications isn't. The workstation's
extra power is applied to faster graphics processing or to running Unix
itself. Unix is an incredible power hog that requires 16MB of memory as a
bare minimum (32MB if you would like to do some serious work), plus 80MB or
so of disk space for the operating system alone.


You're not going to get faster Lotus 1-2-3 recalcs on these machines than on
your trusty $3,000 33-MHz 486 clone. In fact, there is little difference in
recalc speeds on any of these platforms.

PRICE/PERFORMANCE TOMORROW

The second side of the coin is what happens over the next few years. On the
workstation side, things are sure to get faster. As indicated, the
workstation market--especially the under-$5,000 and under-$10,000
machines--is viciously competitive. In the first category, vendors will sell
you a diskless workstation with 8MB of RAM and a monochrome monitor, but you
will never get any work done on it. In the under-$10,000 class, you will get
16MB of RAM--enough to run your programs--and at least a small disk and
mediocre color. That's where the real competition is these days. But on the
PC platform side, things are even more interesting. Most of the easy
performance gains made possible by moving from CISC (complex instruction-set
computing) to RISC chips in workstations have already been made. From here
on, it's grind-it-out time. Intel's P5, or 586 chip--the next-generation
flagship of Intel-based computing--is expected to appear late this summer.

Look for 586 machines at Fall Comdex. These are going to be very hot
machines, indeed. Intel has talked about 100-MHz 586s coming before very
long, and those are going to be screamers. The 586 chip looks as if it will
deliver 100-mips PCs.

But wait; there's more.

The P6, or 686 chip, is waiting in the wings. Normally, the 586 would have
appeared in 1993 and the 686 two and a half to three years later--say, in
late 1995 or 1996. But Intel did something very smart. When it started work
on the 586, the company split its development teams. Rather than following
the traditional microprocessor development cycle--a serial process in which
once the design for a new chip is locked up, the design team moves on to
begin work for the next-generation silicon--Intel developed the 586 and 686
in tandem. Thus, the 686 will likely be available years sooner than most PC
designers and makers had anticipated, with the result that far more powerful
PCs are coming in two waves: the 586 boxes later this year and the 686
machines late next year and in early 1994.

It would be foolish to try to predict exactly how machines not yet built,
using chips not yet designed, will perform against other machines. But it is
a fair guess that by a year from now, high-end Intel-based PCs will have
caught up with comparable workstations, and that a year later, new
Intel-based machines may be pushing into the lead. And they will do it
without forsaking compatibility with the vast range of DOS, Microsoft
Windows, and Microsoft Windows NT applications that will by then constitute
the universe of available software for Intel machines.

CROSS-PLATFORM COMPARISON

It is always difficult to construct cross-platform tests that really compare
apples to apples. For our tests, we began by looking at how implementations
of same-name commercial business software packages performed on each machine.

We readily acknowledge that this is not a perfect test of relative computing
power. Although different implementations of the software might have the
same name, the versions of FrameMaker, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, Wingz, and
WordPerfect that we used for cross-platform testing are very different
animals. As much as software publishers like to be able to reuse and share
code among products (Aldus, for example, says that about 70 percent of the
code in PageMaker for both Macs and PCs is the same), there are always
critical differences in how and how well programmers bring up old- favorite
products in new environments.

Although WordPerfect may be a stellar word processing product for the PC and
the Mac, its implementation on the SPARCstation, for example, is pretty poor.
It is no dazzler on the Turbo Color, either. On the Quadra 700, WordPerfect
begins to look better. Yet, like every other cross-platform general-business
application we tested, it really came into its own only on a PC-platform
machine.

Even in cases where the quality of a product's implementation is
approximately equal on two or more platforms, we found it simply ran faster
on the DOS machine. Aldus built its business with PageMaker on the Mac, for
example, and the current Mac implementation (Version 4.2) is very, very good.
Yet when we loaded the current version of PageMaker (4.1) on the Dell
PowerLine 450DE, the software had a snap, crackle, and pop that we never saw
on Apple's Quadra 700. Changing pages, moving among different-magnification
views, and reformatting text all were snappier on the PC. That's quite
different from a few years ago. PageMaker has become better as the PC has
become faster, but it has not improved as rapidly on the Mac.

To be fair, there are advantages to the PageMaker/Mac version that don't show
up in the PC version. Being able to access a variety of typeface weights
directly by font name on PageMaker for the Mac is vastly better than picking
a font under PageMaker for the PC and then applying Windows' often-ambiguous
bold and italic "styles" to that font.

Not everything in computing is a matter of going faster; sometimes it's all
about doing the job better, more easily, or in a more familiar way. And the
Mac, especially, won points for such nonquantifiable measures.

Machine configurations also affect performance. The PowerLine 450DE, for
example, had 16MB of RAM. The Quadra 700 had 4MB; the NeXT, 16MB; and the
SPARCstation 2GX, 32MB. Those were the recommended RAM sizes, according to
the machines' manufacturers. We acknowledge that the results might have been
slightly different if we had stripped RAM out of the PowerLine 450DE or
stuffed more RAM into the other machines. On the other hand, when we added
16MB of RAM to the Quadra 700, we were able to load larger files, but the
programs didn't do their work much faster.

8 MILLION PCs

Quality implementation of brand-name business applications on various
platforms is an interesting issue and goes right to the heart of the
appropriate use of these machines.

As our "Market Share by Platform" chart shows, International Data Corp.
estimates that sales of PCs totaled about 8 million machines in 1991. About
1.3 million Macs were sold, and the combined sales for all RISC-based
workstations, plus all Motorola 680x0-series workstations (such as those from
NeXT), totaled only about 346,000 machines.

If you were a software developer, where would you spend your development
money: on applications for the DOS-Windows-OS/2 market, which now exceeds 65
million machines, or on the far-smaller Mac and workstation markets?

Nonetheless, the Lotuses and WordPerfects of the world do port some of their
products over to some of these other platforms. Why? Not, you can be sure,
because the people who run WordPerfect think anyone is going to buy a
SPARC-station for word processing, nor because people at Lotus think people
are going to buy Unix workstations to run Lotus 1-2-3.

Rather, the software developers create these packages as accommodation
versions of their products. If an engineer using a SPARCstation needs to do
a little bit of word processing now and then, WordPerfect would like him to
use its product because then the company can tell the Information Systems
managers at that company that WordPerfect can supply all their word
processing software needs. Similarly, Lotus developed a version of Lotus
1-2-3 for Unix because it wants to be a corporation's sole supplier of
spreadsheet software.

The sales appeal of cross-platform interoperability is also an issue here.
When Lotus, for example, can say that its DOS, Windows, Mac, and Unix
versions can all exchange files more or less transparently--and Lotus
deserves credit for doing this better than most other major vendors--that
warms the heart of a network manager. Having struggled to get disparate
platforms talking on the same network, he now also wants to hear that the
users of those different platforms can make some sense of the files they can
now exchange.

Multiple-platform implementations of name-brand software are therefore an
effective selling strategy for software vendors. (The ultimate example of
this may be Lotus's release of 1-2-3/M, a mainframe version of 1-2-3 that can
be accessed and run by terminals connected to a company's mainframe computer.
It certainly looks like 1-2-3, and it can exchange files with other 1-2-3
versions. Wow! But PC spreadsheet programs are all about interactivity and
local processing power, not the batch approach and shared logic of big
systems. That fact is discreetly ignored here. Until, of course, you ask
Lotus how many copies of 1-2-3/M it has actually sold.)

In other words, it's not that these workstation and Mac-based versions of the
programs you use every day on your PC work better in those other
environments. It is just that the programs are available to run in these
environments if you really need to do a little of that along with your other
technically oriented work.

DOS: TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL?

We can't get away with talking only about the range and quality of
applications that are available for these machines, or about the underlying
hardware. We also need to address the glue that joins the two: the operating
systems.

Here, the 80x86 world looks pretty shabby. If you are a believer in
graphical user interfaces (GUIs), you owe it to yourself to spend a little
time with Mac, NeXT, and Sun machines so you can admire, respectively, their
Macintosh System Software, Version 7.0 (System 7); NeXTstep; and OpenLook
operating-system interfaces. And so you can get good and mad. By comparison
with any other operating system, Windows and Version 2.0 of OS/2 come off so
badly.

The Mac operating system, now a little long in the tooth after eight years of
evolution, is still much more logical and appealing than Windows. So is
Solaris, whose OpenLook strikes many Windows users as a GUI for grown-ups.
And as both development environment and operating environment, NeXTstep is
the model for the future.

Apple found its own way from scratch; the developers of Solaris and NeXTstep
found ways to civilize the beast that lies at the heart of Unix. All three
did much better under difficult circumstances than Microsoft has yet to do
with DOS and Windows--systems Microsoft invented, owns, and controls.

And while Windows NT should be a big leap up from Windows 3.0 and the new
Version 3.1 in reach and performance, it will face a technical challenge and
maybe a beauty contest, too, with NeXTstep because NeXT's founder, the rarely
predictable Steve Jobs, announced a few months ago that he is bringing
NeXTstep to PCs.

Clearly, NeXTstep for 486s will not be a primary source of revenue, but
rather a way of getting more applications written for his hardware.Of course,
NeXTstep for 486s will have to go up against the Microsoft juggernaut for
Windows, the IBM juggernaut for OS/2, and soon the Apple/IBM juggernaut for
their Taligent joint venture's new operating system. This makes the odds for
Jobs's success look pretty long.

In almost every way--from nearly intuitive operation to programmers' hooks to
the fit-and-finish "feel" for the user--Solaris, NeXTstep, and System 7 stand
as rebukes to Microsoft's dominance of the PC world with its half-hearted
Windows and DOS.

EASE OF CONNECTIVITY

Connectivity-- among the same kind of machines and among dissimilar
machines--is yet another issue to consider. At first glance, it seems that
since every Mac, NeXT-station, and SPARCstation ever built has some form of
networking built-in, these alternative platforms are way ahead of PC platform
machines. On second look, however, it isn't so clear at all.

Macs have a feeble but easy-to-connect system, called LocalTalk, built-in.
But for business-level performance, Mac users turn to Ethernet adapters--just
as PC users do.

Sun and NeXT computers have Ethernet on their motherboards. Moreover, one of
the benefits of the Unix operation system upon which they rely is that it
embraces connectivity: Unix was designed from the ground up as a networking
operating system.

Granted, then, all three of these systems allow easier out-of-the-box
connection among their own kind than do PCs. If you're working in the
engineering-design operations at Boeing, that may be all you need: You just
want to hook together a bunch of engineers who are all running Unix
workstations. Or if you are in a small graphic-design shop and need to
connect a half-dozen Mac-using designers, the Mac's LocalTalk system can make
your life easier, if awfully slow (we're betting you will still turn to an
Ethernet answer).

PCs, by turn, need network interface cards (NICs) installed, at a price of
$150 to $200 or so. And you have to buy a network operating system. (You
still have to pull wires, mount connectors, hook up a server, and assign
passwords and privileges, just as you do with networked workstations and
Macs.)

In the PC business, though, the reward for adding connectivity on both the
physical side (cabling) and the software level (network operating system) is
that you have a lot more choices. Cabling can be cheap and good (10Base-T's
unshielded twisted-pair) or costly and incredibly high-performance (fiber
optics). You can opt for a fast, easy-to-set-up peer-to-peer system, such as
Artisoft's LANtastic, or at the opposite extreme go all the way up to
Novell's NetWare. That range of choices also fosters easier connection of
dissimilar systems, allowing you to sweep the occasional Mac or workstation
into your PC-oriented network.

For those who argue that built-in networking and a native networkable
operating system are still better than freedom of choice and flexibility, we
have more bad news for you. Microsoft is adding peer-to-peer networking to
Windows NT, and at Microsoft's first Windows Hardware Engineering Conference
this March, the company started a push to get vendors to install network
adapters on the motherboard of every desktop PC intended for office use.

That won't change overnight, but the benefits Microsoft is dangling in front
of PC makers in promoting the "Windows PC" idea are likely to bring most
major producers into the built-in networking fold.

You can find lots more on networking and internetworking these alternative
platforms in "Across the Great Divide: PC-to-Mac Connections" in this issue.

SOFTWARE MIGRATES TO PCs

The final reason for thinking twice, or maybe ten or fifteen times, before
jumping ship to workstations or Macs is that the world is coming to the PC.
Software developers have noticed, even if we haven't always, that
improvements in processor speed, RAM capacity, bus width, disk size and
transfer rate, graphics resolution, color-palette depth, and screen-redraw
speed have turned PCs into very good platforms for their products.

If the only good reason to consider a non-DOS platform is a certain
application you need in your work--for example, solids modelling with full
three-dimensional rendering and near-real-time rotation of those models--ask
when the software vendor plans to release a version for the PC.

Not so long ago, that question would have been foolish. At one time, vendors
bundled custom software with workstation-level or minicomputer hardware.
Later, they unbundled those applications from their pricey proprietary
hardware and moved them to the "open systems" goal on Unix workstations.

The vendors are moving once again, and this time it's to the PC. They are
tired of seeing markets fifty, a hundred, or a thousand times as big as their
own crying for their software--if only it could be delivered on a PC. And
they've watched other companies make the trip with great success.

FOR INSTANCE

Interleaf, a producer of industrial-strength desktop-publishing software, is
a good example of that migration. In the early years of the company,
Interleaf software was only available bundled with a pricey, proprietary
workstation. Then Interleaf left the hardware-reselling business (they had
been buying the machines from Sun and Apollo) and started selling Interleaf
software unbundled for many Unix workstations.

In April 1988, IBM/Interleaf's Publisher was one of the first products
announced in IBM's PS/2 blitz. It wasn't a great product, to put it mildly,
but it got Interleaf into the PC world. Now, the company is in the PC
business in a big way, with Interleaf 5 for DOS and a 32-bit Interleaf 5 for
Windows coming when Microsoft ships Windows NT. Interleaf positions its
products as a big step up from the PC and Mac DTP (desktop publishing)
champs--PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, and QuarkXPress--and as a front end for
developing distributable, interactive electronic documents.

Interleaf is not alone in the high-end PC DTP market, of course. Frame
Technology, whose FrameMaker page-layout program started life as a Sun
application, moved into the Mac and NeXT worlds and is also trying to claim
the high ground in PC-based desktop publishing.

OTHER PLATFORMS' STRENGTHS

Experienced, happy users of these other platforms who have read this far
without throwing the magazine against the nearest wall probably think we have
given their favorite computers short shrift. Especially among Mac owners,
the level of machine loyalty--even machine fervo--can be very high.

So we do want to acknowledge that for specialized applications, these
alternative platforms have strengths and may be, at least for now, superior
choices. That acknowledgement is reflected in our Suit-ability to Task
ratings.

The Mac, for example, has a strong and well-deserved hold on the graphics
market. The Mac was the development platform, test-bed, and first delivery
platform for many high-end graphical applications; there was and still is
some synergy between the Mac's interface and graphical orientation and these
applications. It is also a good general-purpose computer, to be sure, though
an expensive and relatively slow (for the money) general-purpose machine.

The Sun workstations as a class, and the SPARCstations in particular, are
excellent engineering and scientific machines. Sun's commitment from its
first day in business to deliver open systems built from standard parts has
meant the company has led the workstation industry in driving prices down and
performance up. Sun's work in pushing for a standardized version of Unix, as
well as its leadership in developing the OpenLook Unix graphical interface,
is also admirable. For many technical applications, a SPARC-station is the
clear choice.

Steve Jobs's NeXT machines are cool, elegant, and powerful. Early models
were expensive and limited, but NeXT learned its lesson and now delivers more
machine for less money than the original NeXT cubes. And NeXT offers what
may be the best development and operating environment, NeXTstep, in the
desktop-computer business. NeXT applications offer a high degree of
integration but so far are limited in number and scope. That's likely to
change, though, as NeXTstep on the PC encourages more developers to use the
tool they would really rather use anyway to build new applications.

DOS FOR BUSINESS

This brings us back to PC-platform machines. While these other platforms do
have unquestionable strengths for special applications--and taken together,
those areas represent a sizable market--the overwhelming majority of desktop
computing in business today is performed on PC-platform machines.

The size of the DOS market means it will remain for the foreseeable future
the richest opportunity for software developers, so it is hard to see the
Intel-based machines losing the enormous advantage they have over all other
desktop platforms in terms of applications variety and depth.

And the technological guns of the hardware industry are clearly focused on
the 80x86 world. From faster graphics performance to powerful new
microprocessors, the world's technology industries are focusing on the
PC-platform market as an immense opportunity. That focus will mean the rate
of progress will be even more rapid than in the past.

Taken together, the current status of these machines and both the near-term
and further-out improvements that lie ahead argue persuasively for staying in
the DOS fold.

No matter how tempting the world of workstations seems, no matter how
seductive the ease of use of the Mac, the future of desktop computing lies in
the successors to the PC-platform machines on our desks today. The force is
with us.

Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to take my son back for our seventh
trip to Beauty and the Beast. We love that dancing scene.

SUITABILITY TO TASK

The Mac leads the pack for graphics, and nothing beats the Sun's engineering
and scientific applications. But for overall utility, the PC still wins.

Applications integration ranks each platform on its ability to incorporate
data from different applications into one document, using such technologies
as the PC's object linking and embedding (OLE) and dynamic data exchange
(DDE) or the Mac's Publish and Subscribe.

Engineering and science evaluates the availability, performance, and
connectivity options of engineering and scientific applications.

High-end graphics rates the availability, capabilities, and performance of
packages designed for desktop publishing and presentation graphics.

Office productivity assesses availability, speed, ease of use, and cost of
such programs as spreadsheets and word processors.

PC connectivity rates how each platform connects to a PC network. This
rating takes into account such factors as the need for special hardware, the
availability and cost of software, and ease of use.

PERFORMANCE TESTS

When you choose a platform, you will most likely select the software that
runs best on the system you buy; it does not usually matter whether the
package can run on all four platforms. But for the purposes of these tests,
we determined how well the platforms could share data, using almost all of
the cross-platform applications we could find.

We ran word processing, spreadsheet, and desktop publishing tests. For word
processing, each platform could run WordPerfect; we were limited to Informix
Software's Wingz for spreadsheets. No desktop publishing package was
available across all four, so we ran Aldus PageMaker, Version 3.0, on the
Apple Macintosh Quadra 700 and the Dell PowerLine 450DE, and Frame
Technology's FrameMaker on the Quadra 700, NeXTstation Turbo Color, and Sun
SPARCstation 2GX.

FILE CONVERSION

We tested how well each machine could convert DOS files to each of the other
platforms' formats. The Quadra 700 used the Apple File Exchange utility to
read the disk and translate the data; the SPARCstation 2GX used MOUNT/PCFS
and DOS2UNIX. The Turbo Color required no conversion utilities.

Our word processing document started as a 100K ASCII file. We formatted the
file with a 12-point Times typeface, pasted in two of WordPerfect's clip-art
samples, and added a 14-point Times header with a gray underline bar. We
formatted all but the first page in two columns. The file size increased to
112K.

None of the units translated a DOS document exactly, usually because of the
different fonts available. Also, although each computer translated the data
quickly, the Quadra 700 and SPARCstation 2GX had the overhead of starting up
the conversion utilities. Of the three non-PC platforms, the Quadra 700 was
slowest at this task and the Turbo Color the fastest.

We built a 1.2MB spreadsheet on the PowerLine 450DE and then converted it to
a .WK1 format for testing the remaining three machines. Every system
converted the spreadsheet perfectly, and only one glitch occurred: We had to
increase Wingz's memory allocation so the Quadra 700 could read the file.
This unit converted the file in 85 seconds; the Turbo Color and SPARC-station
2GX each took more than 6 minutes.

WORD PROCESSING

The Dell PowerLine 450DE outperformed the other three on all the WordPerfect
tests but one; on the spell-check test, it took 3 seconds longer than the
Turbo Color and tied the SPARCstation 2GX. With the cursor key, the Dell PC
scrolled from the top to the bottom of the 112K test document in less than a
quarter of the time it took the nearest competitor, the Quadra 700, and was
almost nine times as fast as the slowest, the Turbo Color.

SPREADSHEETS

We conducted the spreadsheet tests twice, once under Lotus 1-2-3 and then
under Wingz. For the recalculation test, a cell containing the formula (
*10E+11) + underwent nearly 3,000 mathematical manipulations, including
square roots, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. For the
second test, a dual-key database sort, each machine sorted 1,000 entries in a
10-column grid so that the first column ended up in ascending order and the
second in descending order.

Regardless of the platform, all four computers ran our spreadsheet tests at
about the same rate.

DESKTOP PUBLISHING

Because we could not find a single DTP (desktop publishing) program that ran
on all four platforms, we used PageMaker to compare the PC with the Mac. We
used FrameMaker to compare the other three platforms with one another.

For the PageMaker test, we constructed a 25-page file and attached 10 TIFF
images of various sizes to various locations. We then measured the time it
took to flow a 100K text file around the graphics. The PowerLine 450DE
han-dled the task in 15 seconds, compared with the Quadra 700's 29 seconds.
For our second DTP test, we measured the time it took to repaginate a
four-page FrameMaker document. Of the Mac, NeXT, and Sun platforms, the
Turbo Color best handled the task.

OUR CONTRIBUTORS

Julie Cohen is an associate editor of PC Magazine.

Jim Seymour is a contributing editor to PC Magazine.

M. Keith Thompson is a frequent contributor to PC Magazine.

Jon Zilber is the editor-in-chief of MacUser.

Don Crabb is the director of laboratories and a senior lecturer for the
Department of Computer Science and the College at The University of Chicago.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #1615 *****

Journal: PC Magazine May 12 1992 v11 n9 p153(3)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: The NeXT generation. (NeXT Inc. NeXTstation Turbo Color) (Hardware
Review) (one of four evaluations of microcomputers in 'Platforms:
How the PC Stacks Up')(cover story) (Evaluation)
Author: Thompson, M. Keith.

Abstract: Next Inc's NeXTstation Turbo Color is a powerful Motorola
68040-based Unix workstation that has tremendous untapped
potential. It costs $8,995 equipped with 16Mbytes of RAM, a
406Mbyte SCSI II hard disk, 2.88Mbyte floppy drive and
1,120-x-832-pixel color display. The machine runs NeXTstep 2.2, a
32-bit operating system based on the Mach version of Unix that is
fully compatible with Berkeley System Distribution (BSD) Unix 4.3.
It includes 15 development tools geared toward C and C++
programming; users can easily create and prototype applications
visually using the Interface Builder. There are few
shrink-wrapped applications yet available for the NeXT, although
Lotus Development Corp's Improv is an example of next-generation
multidimensional spreadsheets and the NeXT version of WordPerfect
includes powerful document-management features. NeXT computers do
not make good dedicated file servers, but resource sharing is
easy.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products).
Product: NeXT NeXTstation Turbo Color (Workstation) (evaluation).
Topic: Microcomputers
Evaluation
Comparison
Workstations.
Feature: illustration
graph
table
chart.

Record#: 12 076 752 OV: 12 076 704.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NeXTstation Turbo Color

NeXT Computer Inc., 900 Chesapeake Dr., Redwood City, CA 94063; 800-879-6398,
415-366-0900; fax, 510-438-4331. List price (tested configuration): $8,995.
Motherboard: Motorola 33-MHz 68040 CPU, 16MB RAM, 8K cache. Display:
1,120-by-832 16-bit color output, 256K video RAM; NeXT 68-Hz 17-inch color
monitor. Storage: 406MB SCSI-II hard disk, 2.8MB 3.5-inch floppy disk drive.
Software: NeXTstep, Release 2.2. CIRCLE 492 ON READER SERVICE CARD

With the NeXT platform's sleek design, striking new features, and advanced
operating environment, you would think that computer users would be flocking
to it in great numbers. But while some financial and educational
institutions have discovered NeXT, the general public has stayed away.

NeXT suffers from the classic chicken-and-egg quandary. To woo customers,
NeXT needs a wide variety of general-purpose software applications, but to
woo software developers, it needs the customers. Nevertheless, NeXT, with
its Unix-based operating system, NeXTstep, has begun to make inroads, and it
shows where the computer industry is headed, with built-in networking, sound,
and multimedia support.

PRICE AND PERFORMANCE

NeXT computers start with a 32-bit Motorola 68040 processor, accept up to
128MB of RAM, and run under the NeXTstep operating system.

All NeXT systems provide high-resolution graphics, sound, and built-in MIDI
(Musical Instrument Digital Interface) capability. A Motorola 56001 digital
signal processor (DSP) provides NeXT computers with built-in integrated
voice, sound, and music with CD-quality fidelity. The MIDI interface allows
you to connect MIDI-compatible music devices such as keyboards or drums to
the NeXT for recording, editing, and playback. Each NeXT computer also
includes jacks for a microphone, headphones, and audio output to a stereo.

NeXT computers have 24-bit color output, but are designed to provide 4,096
colors with 16 levels of transparency (in which all or some of the pixels
underneath the graphic show up on the screen) at 1,120-by-832 resolution.
Additionally, a SCSI (small computer system interface) port located on the
back of the computer allows you to connect SCSI hard disks, CD-ROMs, film
recorders, and tape drives.

NeXT offers more than a dozen configurations. The entry-level NeXTstation
contains a Motorola 25-MHz 68040 CPU, 12MB of RAM, a 105MB hard disk, and a
17-inch monochrome monitor; it sells for $4,995. The $6,995 NeXTstation
Turbo Color starts out with a 33-MHz 68040 CPU, 16MB of RAM, and a 250MB hard
disk. The $18,610 NeXTcube uses a 33-MHz 68040 chip, 16MB of RAM, a 660MB
hard disk, and a high-perfor-mance NeXTdimension video card that provides
32-bit true color--24 bits for 16.7 million colors and 8 bits for
transparency. We tested a NeXTstation Turbo Color system including a 406MB
hard disk, which has a list price of $8,995. The NeXT machine ended up
costing somewhat less than the Dell PowerLine 450DE, and included several
features that were not part of the basic PC, such as sound and multimedia.

On PC Magazine Labs' tests, reading files from DOS into NeXTstep had mixed
results. When we loaded a 100K ASCII file from a 3.5-inch DOS floppy disk to
the Turbo Color, the system took 42 seconds to read the file, open
WordPerfect, and translate the data. But when we tried to load a 1.2MB Lotus
1-2-3 spreadsheet into Wingz, the operation took more than 7 minutes.

Once the programs were loaded, the Turbo Color handled most tasks quite
well--particularly sorting and recalculating spreadsheets under Wingz,
performing spell checking and search-and-replace tasks in WordPerfect, and
flowing a 100K text file into FrameMaker. But the NeXT computer stumbled on
the more video-intensive task of scrolling text under WordPerfect.

On other performance measures, NeXT rates the NeXTstation Turbo Color at 25
mips and with a SPECmark value of 16, making the Turbo Color slower than the
Dell PowerLine 450DE or the Sun SPARCstation 2GX.

WHAT MAKES THE NeXT SPECIAL

NeXTstep 2.2, a 32-bit operating system based on Mach Unix, is fully
compatible with the Berkeley System Distribution version 4.3 of Unix, but not
with The Santa Cruz Operation's SCO Unix System V, found on the Sun
SPARCstation 2GX. Although NeXTstep features a straightforward graphical
user interface (GUI), the operating system's tools for object-oriented
software development differentiate NeXTstep from operating environments such
as Apple's Macintosh System Software, Version 7.0 (System 7), and Sun's
OpenLook.

This object-oriented design is apparent in every aspect of the system. The
system is designed so you can easily drag and drop parts of one application
into another and share tools among applications. The basic system comes with
Interface Builder, one of 15 development tools geared toward programming in C
and C++. Interface Builder allows you to easily create or prototype your own
applications in a visual manner, by simply choosing various tools. This
object-oriented design is integrated into the system, rather than added on
later, as with Windows or System 7. As a result, developers claim that
creating a NeXT application takes as little as one-third to one-sixth the
time required to create a comparable Windows program. NeXT also bundles a
variety of system administration applications with its machines.

All of these parts of the package are important because currently only about
250 applications run under the NeXTstep environment. In fact, NeXT was often
the stumbling block when PC Magazine searched for cross-platform software.
Though WordPerfect is available on all four platforms that we tested, few
other packages are. Neither Lotus 1-2-3 nor Microsoft Excel, for example, is
available on NeXT; if you are looking for a cross-platform spreadsheet, you
will have to choose Informix's Wingz.

To solve its chicken-and-egg software development dilemma, NeXT has worked
hard to teach developers to create powerful, easy-to-use NeXTstep
applications in a relatively short period of time.

On the end user side, the company has focused on specific markets at a
time--typically, high-profile areas, in which it can provide a few robust and
easy-to-use programs. NeXT also makes sure to bundle a plethora of
applications (among them the NeXTmail electronic-mail system and The Original
Oxford English Dictionary on Compact Disc) for the end user.

NeXT's efforts have begun to pay off. Though the vast majority of NeXTstep
applications focus on the scientific and educational markets, financial
institutions have started to use NeXT computers that have been customized for
that business.

The products available on NeXT are generally strong ones. Lotus's Improv,
for example, acts like a multidimensional spreadsheet, letting you view your
data in multiple views. It contains powerful tools for data analysis,
incorporates both sound and graphics, and can read Lotus 1-2-3 and other
spreadsheet files. While Lotus plans versions for other platforms, today
Improv is only available for the NeXT.

WordPerfect for NeXT provides NeXT users with powerful document-management
features from one of the leading PC word processing programs. Adobe
Illustrator offers robust graphics, drawing tools, and compatibility with the
PC version. Frame Technology's FrameMaker handles desktop publishing.
NeXTmail incorporates sound and graphics with mail messages, and represents
the future of electronic communications. NeXTstep lacks a powerful CAD
program, however.

PC CONNECTIONS

On our tests, we found that the NeXT-station provides simple but not always
quick integration with the PC. NeXT supports industry standards, using TIFF,
EPS, and JPEG formats to store information. The NeXTstation also recognizes
DOS floppy disks without the need for conversion utilities such as Sun's
DOS2-UNIX or the Mac's Apple File Exchange.

Most products that operate on multiple platforms, such as Adobe Illustrator,
FrameMaker, WordPerfect, and Wingz, store files in a format independent of
the operating system. Thus, data can be transferred from machine to machine
without any conversions. For example, when retrieving a WordPerfect file
from a DOS floppy disk, you simply choose the file from the file browser.

Each NeXT computer includes an Ethernet interface on the motherboard and both
a BNC and a 10BaseT connector to attach to the Ethernet. (Software in the
NeXT determines which connector you are using.)

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

You are not likely to use a NeXT computer as a dedicated server because it is
more cost effective to run Unix on a less expensive computer. NeXTstep's
strength is its user interface. But you can easily share the resources on
your NeXTstation with Unix's built-in support for NFS (Network File System)
and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), two protocols
for sharing files on a network of dissimilar computers.

Although NeXT computers can serve as clients on any NFS or TCP/IP network
without fuss, NetWare connectivity comes at a price.

Currently, the only way to connect a NeXT computer to a NetWare file server
is with NetWare NFS, a $4,995 option on a NetWare server. Once NetWare NFS
is running, connecting to the NetWare server is simple because the NetWare
server looks like just another Unix computer. Additionally, once connected
to the NetWare server, users on all platforms can share data easily.

While NeXT has announced built-in support for Novell's NetWare 2.2 and 3.11
and said it will support Macintosh connectivity in Version 3.0 of NeXTstep
(scheduled for release later this year), today the product does not work as
seamlessly with NetWare or with the Macintosh as other platforms do.

CONCLUSION

The NeXT platform has a lot of potential, but much of that potential remains
untapped. Its object-oriented design should make NeXT a good platform for
software development, though it has yet to find the widespread support of
software companies or applications developers. The NeXT platform has sound
and multimedia capabilities that are equal to or ahead of most of its
competitors, yet we have not seen as many multimedia applications for the
NeXT as we have for the Macintosh or for Windows.

Yet the platform's capabilities remain quite attractive, and it will be
interesting to see whether NeXT can gain more support. To do this, NeXT
plans to enhance its own machines and ship NeXTstep 3.0 for a variety of
486-based PCs. No matter how good the underlying system, applications
determine how much use you will get out of a particular platform.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #1741 *****

Journal: Computergram International May 11 1992 n1916
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Apt Data Services (UK) 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Compaq is taking long hard look at the NextStep environment.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Compaq Computer Corp. (Planning)
NeXT Inc. (Products).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Planning).
Topic: Unix-like operating systems
OEMs
Strategic Planning.

Record#: 12 143 248.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

COMPAQ IS TAKING LONG HARD LOOK AT THE NEXTSTEP ENVIRONMENT

Even though Houston, Texas-based Compaq Computer Corp is infatuated with the
NeXT Computer Inc's NextStep Unix-based object-oriented environment, claiming
that it delivers today what the Taligent IBM Corp-Apple Computer Inc joint
venture can only promise, and what Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard
Co have yet to materialise, it seems in no particular hurry to cut that OEM
agreement Steve Jobs is after. It has been working with NeXT since January,
tuning the software and getting the right hardware configuration - stuff like
modifying its QVision board. It also has to figure out how to bring the
thing to market, yet officials still claim that no decision's been reached on
whether Compaq will sign an OEM agreement for it at all.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #2059 *****

Journal: MacWEEK May 11 1992 v6 n19 p24(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Microsoft, NeXT discussions reported: technology swap may be in
offing.
Author: Swartz, Jon.

Abstract: Analysts are talking about a possible technology swap partnership
between Microsoft Corp and NeXT Computer Inc that would have
Microsoft port its Excel and Word programs to the NeXT platform in
exchange for partial rights to NeXT's NeXTstep operating system in
order to bolster the look and feel of Windows NT. Some observers
say that MIS managers have told NeXT they would be willing to
purchase the company's computers if they could run Microsoft
applications on them. They also contend that Microsoft could
benefit from NeXT's refined graphical user interface if
incorporated in Windows NT, while NeXT needs the Microsoft
applications in order to expand its market. Others think that the
Microsoft advantage is not so obvious and that the company only
makes deals if it has a clear incentive. Microsoft officials have
no comment on the possible swap and a NeXT spokeswoman denies
there have been such negotiations taking place.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Microsoft Corp. (Products)
NeXT Inc. (Products).
Ticker: MSFT.
Topic: Cooperative Agreements
Technology Transfer
Strategic Planning
Software Migration.

Record#: 12 131 696.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Technology swap may be in offing

By Jon Swartz

Redmond, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. and NeXT Computer Inc. could be discussing
a "technology swap" that would bring Microsoft's most popular applications to
the NeXT machine while bolstering Windows NT's look and feel, according to
industry sources.

Under the deal, Microsoft would port its Word and Excel programs to the NeXT
platform in exchange for partial rights to the NeXTstep operating system,
sources said.

A NeXT spokeswoman denied there had been talks concerning a possible
technology swap. Microsoft officials had no comment.

According to analysts, the potential Microsoft-NeXT partnership sounds as
implausible as an Apple-IBM Corp. venture did a year ago, but it would make
sense for many of the same reasons.

"Each company has something the other values," said Tim Bajarin, executive
vice president of Creative Strategies Research International of Santa Clara,
Calif. "Microsoft has the applications that NeXT needs to sell to big
business; NeXT has the refined GUI that Microsoft may want to incorporate
into NT."

Jeff Silverstein, publisher at Digital Information Group of Stamford, Conn.,
said: "It may be worthwhile for Microsoft to license pieces of NeXTstep for
Windows NT. NeXT has invested several years into interface technology, and
NT is hardly the ultimate interface."

In an effort to expand the market for NeXTstep, NeXT already has announced
plans to offer a version of the innovative operating system for Intel
486-based computers. But NeXT still lacks the wide range of productivity
software necessary to entice Fortune 1,000 companies to make a large-scale
commitment (see MacWEEK, May 4).

"IS managers have consistently told NeXT they would be willing to buy boxes
if Microsoft apps were available. It's an important [marketing] step for
NeXT to take," said a corporate user who asked not to be named.

For Microsoft, the incentive isn't as obvious. But sources said porting
NeXTstep to Windows NT would add a customization layer to NT and help
establish the forthcoming operating system as a cross-platform environment
for development of custom applications.

Nevertheless, some industry observers contend Microsoft would be giving up
far too much if it were to strike a deal with NeXT.

"Microsoft does not do deals unless it has a clear advantage," said Jessie
Berst, editor and

publisher of Windows Watcher in Redmond, Wash. "[NeXT CEO Steve] Jobs would
jump at the opportunity to do business with Microsoft, but I doubt Microsoft
would -- willingly or unwillingly -- help a competing OS in the workstation
market."

One source said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates also had met with Scott McNealy, CEO
of Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., earlier this year about
porting Microsoft applications to Sun SPARCstations. The source described
those discussions as "exploratory."


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #2235 *****

Journal: PC Week May 11 1992 v9 n19 p62(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT sends NextStep 3.0 into Beta, readies version for Intel-based
486s. (NeXT Computer Inc. beta testing NextStep 3.0 operating
system)(Intel Corp.'s 80486 microprocessor) (Brief Article)
Author: Sherer, Paul M.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product development).
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product development)
NeXTStep 486 (Operating system) (Product development).
Topic: Product Development
Enhancements
Beta Testing
Operating systems.
Feature: illustration
table.

Record#: 12 140 148.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

While there isn't much chance that the third version of NextStep will sell as
many copies as the third version of Windows, NeXT Computer Inc. hopes
NextStep 3.0 will propel its dark-horse offering to greener pastures.

NeXT last month began beta testing NextStep 3.0, a new version of its
operatinng system planned for release by the end of June, officials said.

Also by the end of June, NeXT will begin beta testing NextStep 486, a version
of NeXT's operating system that runs on PCs based on Intel Corp. 486 CPUs,
said NeXT Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs, speaking at a recent investment
analyst conferrence in San Francisco.

NextStep 3.0 will be bundled with Novell Inc. NetWare and AppleShare client
sooftware, as well as the TCP/IP, Network File System and Ethernet support
includedd in NextStep 2.0. The release will also enhance NeXT's primary
focus as a platfoorm for in-house corporate development by including the
Database Kit for creatingg applications that link to various types of
databases. NextStep 3.0, normally buundled with NeXT workstations, will also
be sold separately for $295.

NextStep 486 is due in the third quarter, but only preinstalled on 486 PCs,
saaid Ron Lang, director of software product marketing for the Redwood City,
Calif.., company. The shrink-wrapped version will be available at a later,
unspecified date. NextStep 486 will be priced at $995 for an end-user
version and $2,495 forr a developer's version.

Although NeXT is working on the ability to run DOS and Windows in NextStep
4866, the first release will not have that capability, Lang said.

NeXT has already lined up OEMs to sell NextStep 486, company officials said.
"We have several deals that are finalized," Jobs said. Although officials
declineed to name the OEMs, NeXT demonstrated NextStep 486 last month on PCs
from Compaqq Computer Corp. and Dell Computer Corp.

NeXT has been hindered by the scarcity of NeXT versions of popular
applicationns and incompatibility with widely used computers, observers said.

"It's not fun being an island in a sea of technology," said David
Blumenstein,, a director of PC Users Group, in New York. "I still think
NextStep has to provee itself. Nobody's giving gold stars anymore to be
pioneers. It's just too costlyy."

NeXT can be reached at (800) 848-6398.

--------------------

Additional reporting by Jane Morrissey


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #2240 *****

Journal: PC Week May 11 1992 v9 n19 p68(3)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Letters.
Author: Carson, David; Kerr, Orrin C.; McGoldrick, Chris; Jones, Darrell;
Betts, James; White, Christine; Hodges, Richard E.; Monson, John.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..

Record#: 12 140 206.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

QMS QUADRUPLES HP

To the Editor:

In reviewing a printer that features a resolution of 600 by 600 dpi in the
Marrch 9 issue ("QMS' 17-ppm Printer Throws Down Gauntlet at LaserJet"), you
state that it "doubles" the resolution of the HP LaserJet IIIsi, a
300-by-300-dpi printter.

This is incorrect. A 600-by-600 dpi prints four times as many dots in the
samee area as a 300-by-300-dpi printer, so the resolution is quadrupled.

David Carson

Westerman & Associates Houston, Texas

--------------------

NEXT IS WORTH A LOOK

To the Editor:

In response to the March 23 Looking Forward column, I must say I sympathize
wiith Mssrs. Catchings and Van Name on their wish to see Windows on a Unix
platformm. I also agree with them that Microsoft is unlikely to do such a
port, lusting as it does to be the One Big Company That Writes All the
Software!

However, why wait for that unlikely event? Take a close look at NextStep.
It has all of the practical capabilities of Windows, but it is better
designed. Now that it is no longer a proprietary environment with its port
to the Intel platfoorm, it's worth a good close look.

We have had a NeXT LAN running in our shop since last October. I have 12
yearss' experience in the computing industry, and this is the finest
interface I have run across. Never have I seen a platform that so smoothly
insulated the end userr from the intricacies of the operating system.
Windows is positively clumsy in comparison. And with all of the objects
included with the system (check out Interrface Builder to see true added
value), it is truly a delightful bargain.

Orrin C. Kerr

LAN Manager

Ottawa, Ontario

--------------------

WINDOWS' WORLD VIEW

To the Editor:

This letter is to all the readers who have resisted migration to graphical
useer interfaces. They obviously lack imagination and willingness to try,
for it is possible to have the best of both worlds. In Windows 386 enhanced
mode you can run multiple DOS sessions, each with different priorities and
memory settings. Iff you want fast keyboard response, alter the PIF settings
so that process is an "exclusive" application and lower the minimum time
slice setting in the SYSTEM.INNI file.

I routinely run a windowed DOS session because sometimes it is indeed faster
to type things in at the command line. In another session I have AutoCAD
running,, a third contains a drawing library utility, while a fourth may be
copying a whoole subdirectory of plot files to the laser printer. Of course,
don't forget abouut downloading new drivers in the background from a bulletin
board.

Once you begin to operate in this environment, the benefits become so obvious
that you cannot go back. If you still need to cling to your old ways, you
can doo so until you begin to realize the benefits of true Windows programs
sharing datta (this is where the real power is). There is no question that
working in this manner makes me more productive than my co-workers who drag
their feet in adoptinng new technologies.

Chris McGoldrick

Product Development Engineer

Rochester, N.Y.

--------------------

HIDDEN WINDOWS COSTS

To the Editor:

Before declaring Windows the winner on the desktop, be sure to add in the
costt of Windows 3.x Secrets, Mastering Windows 3.x, QEMM, and the time spent
readingg the books, mapping memory, debugging serial port and print problems,
and tinkerring with things so that your group of applications can actually
run together witth your network software and your hardware.

What happened to that print? Why does this machine just come back to the DOS
prompt after the Windows logo displays? Why aren't we coming up in enhanced
mode?? Why are we out of memory? What kind of memory?

Then there is the time one spends on the phone with one's favorite vendors
beccause the Windows version of their code doesn't behave quite right
(sometimes thee fault of another application).

Life is too short for some of these things, or at least for the sum of these
things.

Of course, it's great for the people who write these indispensable books and
columns.

Darrell Jones

Lead System Programmer

Regional Information System

Eugene, Ore.

--------------------

OS/2 EXCITEMENT

To the Editor:

I find it truly incredible that you gave front-page coverage in the April 13
issue to Paul Sherer's "OS/2 Eclipsed by Win NT Blitz."

If clouds (water vapor) can be said to eclipse the sun, then a truly
vaporwaree product such as NT can be said to eclipse a shipping product. For
years, PC Weeek was one of the first to criticize IBM for its FUD (fear,
uncertainty and doubtt) practices, and now you are starting to sound like
Microsoft's propaganda machiine.

OS/2 works. It has allowed my firm to scrap hundreds of thousands of dollars
of proprietary mainframe equipment for a couple of 486 systems. We process
over $400 million worth of banking assets with OS/2 and have been doing so
for over twwo years.

Our new system has cut the amount of time required for nightly processing by
at least 50 percent. The stable, protected-memory architecture of OS/2 lets
us ruun large programs with peace of mind that we would never have achieved
under Winddows.

Even the simple fact that we are not required to rewrite programs to use a
GUII and still are able to access large amounts of memory makes OS/2 a far
more reassonable choice.

Windows does have mass-market appeal. To achieve equal notoriety, perhaps
IBM needs to incorporate some of Windows more arcane features, such as the
"Unrecoveerable Application Error" or "Trash Your Disk with CHDSK." James
Betts Emprise Bank Wichita, Kan. To the Editor:

Upon returning from the most successful trade show in our company's history,
I turned to the April 13 PC Week for a recap of Comdex. I was surprised at
the seecond headline, indicating that IBM is not supporting ISVs. Perhaps
Mr. Sherer leeft the show early and failed to notice the excitement over
OS/2.

The last day of any trade show is traditionally very slow. Most of the press
and customers leave after the first two days. On Thursday, Windows World was
quieet. The presentations in the Microsoft booth had seats open.

In contrast, the IBM booth was packed the entire day with 200 to 300 people
atttending each presentation. Customers remained in the IBM booth hours
after the show closed asking questions and begging for demonstrations.

Customers, ISVs and vendors were excited about OS/2 2.0. It is a real
product,, not a promise. Thousands of customers were able to try OS/2 and
the applicationns available at the Test Drive Center on the show floor. IBM
also made OS/2 2.0 available in the press lounge.

Win NT, on the other hand, was look-don't-touch. One of the vendors crashed
hiis application and NT three times successively by moving the mouse.

IBM made the upgrade process easy for everyone. Members of EEP can download
OSS/2. Others can upgrade by calling a toll-free number printed on bags IBM
gave awway.

Hundreds of Windows users informed our representatives that they plan to
upgraade to OS/2 2.0. Christine White Marketing DeScribe Inc. Sacramento,
Calif. To the Editor:

As a longtime OS/2 user, I appreciated the fine article by Larry J. Seltzer
inn the April 6 issue ("OS/2 2.0 Finally Here and It Works").

It is great to see OS/2 2.0 get a fair appraisal. This information will
permitt the readers of PC Week to make an informed decision when they
consider whether to try the new system.

It would be very beneficial to have PC Week Labs evaluate the relative
performmance and stability of OS/2, Windows and the Macintosh. This could
include evaluaation of networking capabilities, database sorting and
background processing suchh as file downloads and compilation of long
programs.

As 32-bit versions of programs for OS/2 appear, it would be very helpful to
seee a performance evaluation compared to Windows.

Richard E. Hodges

Los Angeles, Calif.

--------------------

QUICK(EN) FIX

To the Editor:

I am writing to inform you about the actions we are taking in response to a
leetter that was sent from one of our Quicken users to PC Week.

The author of the letter was Leo Tornow, who had experienced a problem where
an error message indicated he may have had damage to his Quicken data index
filess.

I have talked with Leo and have learned that at no time was his data at risk,
although he did have a problem with his memorized lists.

The problem Leo encountered is a rare one but one that does happen. We sent
Leeo a utility that rebuilds the affected files, and he is now back up and
running with Quicken.

As the result of my conversations with Leo and our Technical Support
departmennt, we are implementing changes that will reduce user anxiety and
downtime in thee future.

One, we are going to improve the error messages so that users have a clearer
idea of the problem and aren't needlessly worried.

Two, we are going to include the file-rebuild utility with all products (it
cuurrently is included with the Quicken for Windows program). Our next
version of Quicken for DOS will include the utility. This will mean that
users will be able to instantly recover from any problems.

Three, we are investigating our backup procedures to see if a rotating system
will be more secure.

John Monson

Vice President, Marketing

Intuit

Menlo Park, Calif.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #2569 *****

Journal: Computer Reseller News May 4 1992 n472 p2(2).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Next moves to eclipse Sun in financial market: Jobs takes jab at
conference. (Next Computer Inc. Pres Steven Jobs, Sun Microsystems
Inc.)
Author: Markowitz, Elliot.

Abstract: Next Computer Inc's competitive attitude toward its nemesis Sun
Microsystems Inc is highlighted by remarks made by Next Pres
Steven Jobs at the recent 20th Annual Hambrecht & Quist Inc
technology conference. Jobs opened the conference by jokingly
referring to his competitor as 'the mother of all competitors,'
and by dazzling the crowd with a demonstration of the NextStep 3.0
operating system. Jobs also commented that Sun's computers
require a backup PC or Macintosh because of the lack of adequate
productivity software. As a result, Jobs said Next has been
picking up wayward Sun accounts in the financial market, such as
UBS Securities and JP Morgan & Co. Incidentally, Sun is preparing
to ship its state-of-the-art SuperSPARC chip - Viking - which
features three million transistors. The chip is expected to bring
the company's computers up to the price/performance level of HP
and IBM products. The NextStep computer is slated to let
programmers write custom applications up to 10 times faster than
other systems.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Management)
Sun Microsystems Inc. (Management).
Ticker: SUNW; NEXT.
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Conferences and Meetings
Competition
Operating systems.
Feature: illustration
photograph.
Person: Jobs, Steven (Public relations).

Record#: 12 131 690.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #2954 *****

Journal: MacWEEK May 4 1992 v6 n18 p20(2)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT, Taligent could be headed on collision course.
Author: Whitmer, Clair.

Abstract: NeXT Inc and Taligent Inc may be targeting the same market with
the development of their respective operating systems. Both
companies are developing systems that allow large companies to
custom-develop software for network workgroups. Taligent is
working on the Code Pink object-oriented operating system, while
NeXt has established itself in the commercial workstation market
with an installed base of 41,300. NeXT's 1991 revenues grew 443
percent to $127.5 million. NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs, a
former Apple executive and analysts are anxious to see if Jobs can
successfully manage a second company. Apple may also threaten
NeXT with the introduction of a reduced-instruction set computing
(RISC)-based Mac.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Marketing)
Taligent Inc. (Marketing).
Topic: Marketing
Strategic Planning
Operating systems
Product Development
Market Analysis
Competition.

Record#: 12 230 465.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

By Clair Whitmer

Redwood City, Calif. -- When Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and went off
to create his NeXT venture, the question was: Can he do it again?

NeXT Computer Inc.'s long-term viability is still questioned in many
high-tech circles, but the company is beginning to find its niche.

That has led some to ask: If he does do it again, will he go up against
Apple?

Apple and NeXT officials discount any overlap between their current markets.

But Apple is involved in several development projects -- most notably Pink,
Taligent Inc.'s forthcoming object-oriented operating system -- that could
set the companies on a collision course in the marketplace.

Apple executives recently have maintained that the Mac will remain the
company's primary operating system, while Taligent is intended for large
companies to develop custom software for network workgroups -- exactly the
market NeXT has targeted.

Sales success. NeXT is busy establishing a foothold in the commercial
workstation market. According to International Data Corp. in Framingham,
Mass., NeXT had an installed base of 41,300 units at the end of 1991.

Although that figure is minuscule compared with other vendors, the company's
1991 revenues increased 443 percent to $127.5 million.

Even Sun Microsystems Inc. executives, in documents distributed to their
sales force, admitted NeXT has "scored some impressive victories in both
commercial and government markets."

NeXT has started selling itself as the best platform for developing
"mission-critical custom apps" at medium to large corporations with its
NeXTstep operating system.

In that regard, "Taligent is about the best thing that ever happened to us,"
said Mike Slade, NeXT vice president of marketing. He said the start-up
legitimized NeXT's position that the "object is the advantage."

"You read [Taligent's] press releases, and it sounds like we wrote them,"
Slade said.

The specter of Pink. Although Taligent's operating system generally is
believed to be several years away from release, industry experts agree that
NeXT already has reason to be concerned about Pink.

"[Pink] may well overlap where NeXT is trying to position itself. If [NeXT]
loses that competitive advantage technologywise, it could be in trouble,"
said Dan Ruby, editor of NeXTWORLD magazine in San Francisco.

Richard Berzle, Taligent vice president of marketing, claims Pink is an
"object-oriented system from the ground up," in contrast to NeXTstep, an
object-oriented development environment built on top of what he called a
"spaghetti-code" Unix foundation.

Slade counters that NeXT's Fortune 1,000 customers don't care about the Unix
underpinning -- only about how quickly they can create applications.

Analysts, however, say customers do care about hardware investments and about
relationships with established vendors.

Like the Mac's and Microsoft Windows' chronology, many NeXT developers may
get their feet wet in object

Other areas of competition. NeXTstep isn't the only area where Apple could
compete with NeXT and other workstation vendors. The RISC (reduced
instruction set computing)-based Mac, using the PowerPC chip jointly
developed by Apple, IBM Corp. and Motorola Inc., "would land squarely in the
middle of NeXT's market," said Pieter Hartsook, editor of The Hartsook Letter
in Alameda, Calif.

While Taligent percolates, analysts say NeXT has at least an 18-month window
to exploit its object-oriented development advantage and to prove that Jobs
can do it again.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #3164 *****

Journal: PC Week May 4 1992 v9 n18 p150(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NextStep versions in the works. (NeXT Computer's NextStep
3.0)(Late News) (Brief Article)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product development).
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product development).
Topic: Product Development
Operating systems
Beta Testing.

Record#: 12 220 161.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NextStep Versions In the Works

NeXT Computer has begun beta testing NextStep 3.0, a version of its operating
system due by the end of June, officials said.

The company then plans to begin beta testing NextStep 486, a version for
Intel 486 computers, Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs said at a conference last
week. NextStep 486 will be shipped in the third quarter, but initially will
be available only preinstalled on 486 PCs.

--------------------


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #4729 *****

Journal: PC Magazine April 28 1992 v11 n8 p192(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: 32-bit GUI alternatives: no contest. (Unix-based graphical user
interfaces)
Author: Zachmann, William F.

Abstract: Interactive Systems Inc and The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) both
offer 80386-specific versions of the Unix operating system that
offer graphical user interfaces built into the Unix X Window
system. SCO's Open Desktop includes a complete GUI along with
networking services, the ability to run many DOS applications and
compatibility with some shrink-wrapped Unix programs. Not all DOS
programs will work under Open Desktop, and hardware requirements
are heavy: each user will need at least a 200Mbyte hard disk, half
of which is required for the operating system itself. Sun
Microsystems recently acquired Interactive's Unix business for the
Intel architecture, and its SunSoft division plans to ship the
Solaris 2.0 version of Unix in 3rd qtr 1992. Solaris 2.0 will run
on both Sun's SPARC reduced-instruction-set-computing architecture
and on 386 and 486 processors. NeXTstep 486 is NeXT Inc's new
80486-compatible version of the operating system used on Next
workstations. It will require a 486 with eight to 16 megabytes of
RAM and will occupy 120Mbytes of hard disk space in its user
version and a whopping 400Mbytes in its developer version.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Product: Motif (Graphical user interface) (Design and construction)
Open Desktop (Operating system) (Design and construction).
Topic: 32-Bit
Software Selection
Operating Systems
Graphical User Interface
UNIX.

Record#: 12 011 640.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

32-BIT GUI ALTERNATIVES: No Contest

by William F. Zachmann

IBM's OS/2 2.0 and Microsoft's Windows NT get the lion's share of attention
when the topic is 32-bit GUI (graphical user interface) operating systems for
Intel architecture. But Unix was well ahead of both of these in the race to
bring 32-bit GUI capabilities to Intel-based systems.

Both Interactive Systems and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) began shipping
386-specific versions of Unix in 1987: the 386/ix and the Xenix 386,
respectively. Before long, both companies moved to more standard offerings
based on Unix International's Unix System V specification (previously AT&T's
SVID specification). Other vendors have subsequently entered the fray.

Prior to 1990, however, the total number of 32-bit Unix installations on
Intel-architecture systems was small. Most of these were used strictly in
character mode. Despite the inclusion of basic GUI capabilities conforming
to the X Window protocol, these early 32-bit Unix versions for IBM PC
compatible systems did not offer a practical GUI environment for more than a
handful of users.

In 1989, that began to change with the introduction of SCO's Unix System
V/386 and its Open Desktop graphical operating system environment. Open
Desktop was the first 32-bit Unix GUI for Intel architecture that was
packaged in a form accessible to ordinary users and that carried a realistic
promise of available shrink-wrap software.

Based on Unix System V, Version 3.2, Open Desktop includes a complete GUI,
networking services, and the ability to run many though not all DOS
applications. Since Open Desktop will run Windows only in Real mode, it is
not a practical environment for Windows.

Open Desktop's system requirements are heavy. It requires an ISA, EISA, or
MCA system with at least an 80386 and 8MB of memory. The operating system
itself requires 100MB of disk space; in practice, each user will need at
least a 200MB hard disk.

The GUI is built on the X Window system and uses the OSF/Motif Window Manager
and Desktop Manager. OSF/Motif is very similar to Windows in behavior, but
has the three-dimensional look of the OS/2 2.0 Workplace Shell. OSF/Motif is
priced at $1,295 for one to two users, and currently there are not many
popular PC apps on the platform.

The primary rival to SCO's Open Desktop is likely to be SunSoft's Solaris
2.0, which is scheduled to ship in the third quarter of 1992. SunSoft, a
subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, recently acquired Interactive Systems' Unix
business for Intel architecture systems. SunSoft also brings Sun's
workstation version of Unix for the RISC-based SPARC (Scalable Processor
Architecture) processor to the Intel desktop as well. Updated to Unix System
V, Version 4, Solaris 2.0 will have the advantages of both the broad base of
applications already developed for Sun workstations and the implementation of
Unix System V, Version 4, at its foundation. Resource requirements for the
Solaris will probably be similar to or slightly greater than those for SCO's
Open Desktop.

Another Unix-related contender is the NeXTstep 486, from NeXT. Built on the
Macintosh operating system kernel, the object-oriented NeXTstep is an Intel
architecture version of the much praised (if little bought) operating system
developed for Steve Job's NeXT computers. NeXTstep will require an 80486
with 8MB to 16MB of RAM. The user version will occupy 120MB of disk space;
the developer version will need a whopping 400MB.

What are the prospects for these and other Unix-related 32-bit GUI operating
systems on the Intel desktop? Probably no more than modest success. All
require system resources well beyond what OS/2 2.0 does. They even make
Windows NT look like a comparative lightweight in that regard. None offers
more than limited backward compatibility for DOS and Windows software. All
cost more than OS/2 2.0, and Windows NT is likely to be priced well below
them, as well. NeXTstep, for example, costs $995; OS/2 costs $195.

SCO's Open Desktop, SunSoft's Solaris 2.0, and NeXT's NeXTstep 486 will have
some success, particularly in shops where Unix is already used in one form or
another. They will probably enjoy success in vertical markets with custom
applications; in fact, OS/2 2.0 will have to compete strongly with them for
this market. But between the system resource demands and the lack of
mainstream applications, these 32-bit contenders have a way to go before they
provide any serious competition.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #6180 *****

Journal: EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report April 20 1992 v3 n100 p36(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EDGE Publishing 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT: Informix-SE available on NeXT; release 4.1 ported to
multimedia workstations of NeXT computer. (Informix Software Inc.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Informix Software Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: Informix-SE 4.1 (Data base management system) (Product
introduction)
NeXT (Workstation) (Computer programs).
Topic: Data base management systems
Software Migration
Relational Data Base Management Systems
Applications Programming
Software Packages
Product Introduction.

Record#: 12 182 197.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

In a joint announcement, Informix Software Inc., and NeXT Computer Inc.,
introduced the implementation of the relational database management system
INFORMIX-SE release 4.1 on NeXT workstations.

Additionally, several Informix application development tools are now
available for NeXT systems.

INFORMIX-SE is a powerful, yet easy-to-use relational database management
system suited for small- to mid-range multiuser application environments.
The ANSI SQL-based system is mainly used in front-end applications within
both single-vendor and multivendor client/server environments.

INFORMIX-SE provides high performance and sophisticated features that assure
data consistency in multiuser configurations, along with a reputation for
reliability that has been proven through tens of thousands of installations
worldwide. Only a minimum of database administrator expertise is required in
making this product an ideal solution for small corporations and
self-contained

departments. In addition to the database management system

port, Informix' front-end tools, such as INFORMIX-NET, C-ISAM, INFORMIX-4GL
and INFORMIX-SQL, are also now available for NeXT systems. These tools
provide an efficient environment for software development with Informix'
databases.

"NeXT computers are an ideal front-end for today's innovative database access
applications," said Tim Shetler, vice president of database servers and
connectivity products at Informix. "This new port is part of our strategy to
support platforms which are in high demand by the market today, and which are
leading the industry toward new frontiers in information processing. The
NeXT platform is an ideal example of both."

"As NeXT makes greater inroads in corporate computing, the availability of
high-performance database management systems becomes essential," said Steven
P. Jobs, chief executive officer and chairman of NeXT Computer. "With
INFORMIX-SE we can now supply our customers with one of the world's leading
and most powerful systems for small- and medium-sized organizations."

INFORMIX-SE is the second Informix product to be available on NeXT. It
follows Wingz, a front-end tool used for accessing data stored in corporate
databases within client/server environments.

INFORMIX-SE release 4.1 for NeXT is available immediately on a worldwide
basis through Informix distributors, VARs and OEMs.

Informix Software Inc. is a leading supplier of information management
software providing solutions from the database through the desktop. Informix
products include powerful distributed database management systems, robust
application development tools and both graphical and character-based
productivity software.

Headquartered in Menlo Park, Informix also has European headquarters in
London, and Asia/Pacific headquarters in Singapore.

NeXT Computer Inc. designs, manufactures and markets professional
workstations based on the pioneering NeXTSTEP object-oriented system
software.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #8185 *****

Journal: PC User April 8 1992 n182 p18(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EMAP Business & Computer Publications (UK)
1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXTstep 3.0 to reach 486 PCs by July. (NeXT Inc.) (Brief Article)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products)
Dell Computer Corp. (Products)
Compaq Computer Corp. (Products).
Ticker: CPQ; DELL.
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Usage).
Topic: Operating systems
Software Migration
Public Offerings
Revenue.

Record#: 12 058 704.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NeXT Computer has confirmed that NeXTstep 3.0, the new version of its highly
regarded, object-oriented systems software, will be available on 486 PCs from
Dell and Compaq in July.

The launch of NeXTstep 3.0 for the 486 will be preceded in June by its
availability on NeXT's Motorola-based workstations, according to Gregor
Bailer, the company's recently appointd UK general manager. NeXTstep 3.0
will include Novell and AppleTalk connectivity, making it easier to integrate
into PC networks.

Bailar also revealed that the company will seek a public share offering
within the next two years, providing that its fast revenue growth continues.
In 1991, NeXT saw gross income shoot up 443 per cent over the previous year
to reach $127 million. The appointment of Peter Van Cuylenburg as president
and CEO is a key element of the share offer. Van Cuylenburg is leaving a
senior director's post with UK telecommunications group Calbe & Wireless to
join the company.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #9881 *****

Journal: Computer Shopper April 1992 v12 n4 p695(2)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Solaris: a new Sun in the OS sky. (SunSoft Inc.'s operating
system) (Tech Section) (Product Announcement)
Author: Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J.

Abstract: SunSoft Inc introduces its $1,395 Solaris operating system for Sun
workstations, which comes bundled with OpenWindows 3.0, DeskSet
3.0, ONC ToolTalk and the Open Look graphical user interface.
This an operating system of tomorrow that is here today. Version
2.0 of Solaris, currently testing on Intel architectures, is
planned for a late 1992 release. Interoperability and
object-oriented programming are built into Solaris. Sun
Microsystems Inc's acquisition of Interactive Systems Corp has
aided in the development of this operating system. Sun OS has
pioneered graphical user interface development, and Solaris builds
on this approach with OpenWindows, a completely transparent tool.
Solaris 2.0 will build on its Unix support by adopting SVR4.
SunPro, Sun's language development company, is working on
compilers for Solaris 2.0. At least 15 desktop applications for
Solaris will be available, adding to the product's viability.
Solaris may provide the key to unlocking Unix's potential.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: SunSoft Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: Solaris (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Operating Systems
Product Introduction
Interoperability
Bundled Software.

Record#: 11 987 730.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

SunSoft

(subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc.) 2550 Garcia Ave. Mountain View, CA
94043 1-800-688-9704; 1-800-346-7111; 1-800-227-9227; (415) 960-1300; FAX:
(415) 366-0362; BBS: 1-800-477-4768 (holds patches) Online: Usenet news
groups: comp.sys.sun.admin, comp.sys.sun.hardware, comp.sys.sun.misc, and
comp.sys.sun.apps Sugg. ListPrice: Solaris 1.0 (typical SUN workstation,
includes OpenWindows 3.0, DeskSet 3.0, ONC ToolTalk, Open Look GUI)--$1,395;
prices vary depending upon configuration, call for details.

What operating system do you think you'll be running in 1994? MS-DOS 6.1?
System 8.0? If some of the movers and shakers of the computer industry have
anything to do with it, you'll be running one variation or another of Unix.


Microsoft, DEC, Santa Cruz Operations (SCO), and their compatriots in the
Advanced Computer Environment are working on a Unix backbone to their
multi-pronged operating system plans. The question here is, will the
alliance last long enough to see these plans come to fruition? If it does,
you may see an operating system with a Windows face and a Unix heart.

At the same time, PowerOpen, the joint Apple and IBM operating system is
starting to take shape. PowerOpen, based on IBM's home-grown Unix, AIX, and
Apple's A/UX, will taken off from the launch pad of Open Software Foundation
(OSF) Unix standards.

There are other possibilities. The IBM/Apple Pink operating system is an
intriguing enigma that may prove influential in the 1990s. As details become
clearer though, it appears that Pink's object-oriented environment might be
running on top of PowerOpen. It's too early to tell. OS/2, battered and
seemingly always late to the party, may eventually catch the public's fancy.
Time will tell.

The only problem with all these operating systems is that, except for OS/2,
all exist only on paper or are, at most, working models. As for OS/2, after
yeras of waiting for its promise to be fulfilled, almost everyone is too
tired to care if it lives up to its hype. There is, however, one operating
system for tomorrow that's already here. It's SunSof's Solaris.

SUNRISE

I know. You're thinking, "Not another new operating system!" Relax, Solaris
is a different breed. Solaris is here today. The catch is that, at the
moment, it only runs on SPARCstations. If all goes well, version 2.0, which
will run on Intel artchitectures, should appear later this year.

Solaris is different from the other operating systems that promise system
interoperability and objects in that most of the operating system is already
built and, more importantly, the in-house expertise needed to bring SunSoft's
brand of Unix to Intel architectures is on hand.

When SunSoft, a wholly owned spinoff of Sun Microsystems, first announced
Solaris, the news was greeted with some skepticism and raised eyebrows.
Although a workstation giant, Sun has never had an important role in the PC
world. While few doubted that Solaris 1.0, the next generation of Sun's
successful SunOS, would be a big boost for SPARCstations, many wondered what
it could do on Intel platforms that ACE and the IBM/Apple consortium weren't
better equipped to do. The answer, at the time, was nothing.

Since then, though, SunSoft has acquired Interactive Systems Corp.
Interactive has been a leader in bringing Unix to PCs, being the first
company to run Unix on the i386 platform. Although often overshadowed by
SCO, Interactive's hard work has made them a leader in PC uNix. As an
example of this, Unix System Laboratories (USL) made Interactive the
principal publisher of System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix for the i386/i486 chip
family.

For Solaris, this means that SunSoft now not only has an operating system,
but also perhaps the best developers in the business for bringing Unix
systems to PCs. SunSoft and Interactive are a powerful combination that
won't take a back seat to anyone in the operating system race.

SOLARIS 1.0: OPEN WINDOWS

Solaris 1.0 is the newest member of the SunOS group. SunOS first came into
existence in 1982 and, in the Unix family tree, owes more to Berkeley
Standard Distribution (BSD) Unix, especially 4.1 and 4.2, than it does to the
System III/V side of the family. Despite this, in its latest incarnations,
SunOS has incorporated more and more of the ideas seen in System V.

SunOS was always a leader in graphical user interfaces, with its SunView GUI
holding the distinction of being one of the first successful GUIs. Since
then, Sun has moved on to OpenWindows, which has been built around no fewer
than three windowing systems: SunWindows, the X Window System, and Network
Extensible Window System (NeWS). The idea behind this potpourri of windows
is to give developers freedom to create new works without outdating older
software.

While OpenWindows may sound confusing ("What GUI am I using now?"), it's
completely user transparent. Users access the tools from all three GUI
toolkits, XView, Open Look, and NeWS, in exactly the same way. From the user
perspective, OpenWindows is what defines the Sun operating system approach to
computing.

Point and click and drag and drop are the basic techniques of OpenWindows.
It can be set up so that certain tools appear automatically. You can, for
example, set your OpenWindows DeskSet environment to start with a file
manager, clock, calender, and C-shell already active. The environment
provides great flexibility in both screen appearance and behavior. For
instance, you can arrange to activate a window by clicking on one or by
merely moving the cursor into it.

DeskSet is the unifying desktop manager for Solaris. It comes complete with
a variety of applications to enhance productivity. Some of the most useful
are the Calendar Manager, File Manager, and Print Tool.

In essence, DeskSet's surface puts a user-friendly face on a powerful and
complicated infrastructure. Unlike most GUIs, OpenWindows and DeskSet are
designed not to exploit the power of a single system, but the resources of a
network. Users may never know that the DeskSet applications they're working
with may actually be running on systems scattered across a building.

As an evolutionary step forward, Solaris 1.0 refines SunOS rather than adding
any starting new developments. Solaris 2.0 is the system that may spell
revolutionary change for personal computer users.

SOLARIS 2.0: TOMORROW'S

OPERATING SYSTEM?

Solaris 2.0 will will hold many high cards in its hand when it sits at the PC
table this year. Beyond bringing a 32-bit operating system that runs both on
SPARCstations and 80x86 systems, Solaris's core--designated SunOS 5.0--will
enclose 1991's hottest PC Unix, SVR4, and add multiprocessing and
multithreading support to it in the process.

SVR4 support is vital. SVR4 was the firt Unix to try to unify the warring
factions of Unix, offering the best features of System 5 release 3.2, BSD
4.3, Xenix, and SunOS. Its success has made it easier for developers to
write applications that can quickly port from one platform to another and, in
turn, made Unix more attractive to software companies. This translate into
more shrink-wrapped Unix products.

Solaris 2.0 will return the favor by adopting all of SVR4. In essence,
Solaris 2.0 will build on SVR4 with its OpenWindows GUI and
system-interoperability tools, Distributed Object Everywhere.

OPENWINDOWS 3.0:

THE NEW SUN'S SURFACE

Like its predecessor, OpenWindows Version 3 (OMV3) is a graphical,
network-extensible window system. OMV3 is built around Sun's X11/NeWS, which
is the merging of the X Window network-based windowing system and the NeWS
programmable user interface. In essense, X Window takes care of network
windowing while NeWS, based on PostScript, takes care of the display. The
style of appearance and behavior is based on Open Look.

OMV3 is more than just a pretty GUI. OMV3 includes object-oriented toolkits
to create applications designed to support Open Look. If you're looking for
any weakening of Sun's support for Open Look in favor of Motif, you won't
find it here.

The first of OMV3' three toolkits is the Open Look Intrinsics Toolkit (OLIT).
Based on X Window's Xt intrinsics, OLIT may be the most familiar development
tool in OMV3's workshop. OLIT also includes Open Look-compatible widget sets
so that developers can quickly add menus, command buttons, and the like to
their applications.

The NeWS Toolkit (TNT) enables developers to add precise control over
onscreen images and fonts using PostScript. Again, though, programmers won't
have to work from scratch--pre-built PostScript objects are available that
can be used to construct larger applications. Lastly, the included XView
Toolkit helps developers port SunView applications to the Open Look
interface.

While OMV3's alphabet soup of toolkits sounds imposing, its graphical object
orientation makes it relatively easy to make or port applications to Solaris.
Solaris 2.0 will go a step further and include other graphics application
programming interface (APIs). If your cup of tea is SunPHIGS, SunGKS, XGL,
or Xlib, you'll be able to build programs with these.

Traditional programmers won't be abandoned by Solaris 2.0. SunPro, the
language development side of Sun, has already released the first compilers
for Solaris 2.0. These include new versions of SunPro's ANSI C, C++,
Fortran, and Pascal.

DEVELOPER'S GUIDE 3.0

Most programmers will be lured towards using OMV3's toolkits by the
point-and-click simplicity of the Developer's Guide 3.0. The Developer's
Guide enables programmers to easily and transparently build applications for
all three OMV3 toolkits. More than just a front-end painter, although that's
no small matter in GUI programming, the Developer's Guide not only enables
developers to get the right look and feel, it also empowers them to build
applications that can operate with existing DeskSet applications.

The core of Developer's Guide is Devguide. Devguide breaks down into its
point-and-shoot front-end and three-code generators. The first, GXV, creates
both Kerningham & Ritchie C and ANSI compliant C for XView. Next, GXV++ also
works for XView by generating, surprise, C++ code. OLIT is supported by
GOLIT, which produces both C code and data structures. Finally, GNT supports
TNT by creating C, C++, or PostScript. It all sounds more complicated than
it really is.

Once you've got an interface that you like, you won't have to reinvent it to
use it in another application. Devguide's project organizer allows you to
save an interface, or only part of it, to a ".G" file which encapsulates the
application's look, feel, and behavior. These objections can then be reused
in other applications by adding the ".G" file to the project organizer.

DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS EVERYWHERE

Solaris 2.0's strong points will be its networking capacities. SunSoft
already has networking down cold. After all, Sun invented the Network File
System (NFS).

Networking by itself only solves part of the riddle of interoperability.
Everyone wants to be able to trade data across systems and applications
without beating themselves to death in the process. SunSoft is well aware of
this, and in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, they've been pounding the key
creating a Distributed Object Management Facility (DOMF). In conjunction
with an Object Request Broker (ORB), DOMF will bring data transparancy to
networks.

What does all that mean for end-users? In short, it means that a user will
be able to take data from anywhere on the network, regardless of its
originating application. In practice, it would mean that you could do things
like use Lotus 1-2-3 on your PC to read data from an Oracle database sitting
on a SPARCstation down the hall.

Solaris 2.0 won't be able to do that right out of the box, but the intent is
there. The first step in this direction is Sun's Distributed Objects
Everywhere (DOE).

DOE is built around SunSoft's ToolTalk. ToolTalk, in turn, is erected upon
DOMF. ToolTalk enables ToolTalk-compliant applications to send interprocess
messages to each other over a network. While ToolTalk itself is not
object-based, it does enable transparent data exchange, including objects.
As a result, in its first iteration, DOE will be a step towards true
application interoperability where programs and data can work together across
the network. The final steps will come in later versions of Solaris. With
DOE in Solaris 2.0, developers will be able to create applications that truly
can work with each other.

APPLICATIONS

Applications are an operating system's life blood. Without them, no one
cares how wonderful an operating system may be. For that matter, no one
cares how great its development tools may be. New operating systems have a
real catch-22 problem with this. No one will buy an operating system without
applications, but no one will develop applications for an oerating system
that doesn't have buyers.

Solaris 2.0 will bypass this lack of application worries, starting out with
no fewer than 15 bundled DeskSet applications. Most Solaris 1.0 or SunOS 4.x
applications will also be able to run on Solaris 2.0. While some porting may
be needed to run older programs that run on Intel chips, the SunSoft-bundled
applications will run on both SPARC and Intel systems.

The two most important improvements to Solaris' built-in applications are to
electronic mail and network file management. Borrowing a leaf from NeXTStep,
Solaris's new mail system, Multimedia Mail, will enable users to attach
graphics, sound, and video to their E-mail missives.

Likewise, the Network File Manager (NFM) has been given a face lift and
presents users with a consistent, easy-to-use graphical front end. Walking
across the network will not be accomplished with a flick of the wrist and a
click of the mouse.

The real vitality of Solaris can be judged from its support by major vendors
in the PC world. AST, CompuAdd, and Dell, to name only three direct-market
favorites, have climbed on board the Solaris bandwagon and will distribute
Solaris 2.0. Novell, Lotus, and Oracle are all planning to release
Solaris-compatible versions of their programs.

SUNRISE OR SUNSET?

If SunSoft can deliver on their promises, there may finally be a high-end
operating system that can supersede MS-DOS on fast 386s and 486s. Solaris'
powerful and proven window metaphor coupled with its unparalleled networking
strength make it a natural for corporate computing.

But though Solaris 2.0 is more real than the theoretical offerings from ACE,
there remain two lingering questions. First, can SunSoft pull it off? I
think the answer here is yes. The union of Interactive and SunSoft is an
enormous critical mass with great potential. If anyone in 1992 can make an
operating system that straddles such wildly differing architectures, they'll
be the ones to do it.

The second question is far more critical. Is there really any demand for a
highend operating system to match our highend Intel driven systems? Unix has
been around for years on PCs, but its market share is small. SunSoft adds an
outstanding GUI, interoperability, and networking to the mix, but that may
not prove to be enough. Still, there is something more than a little silly
about wasting the speed of 50MHz 486s on MS-DOS when it can't come close to
unleashing the possibilities hidden in the 386 and 486. Solaris 2.0 may
prove to be the key that finally unlocks these chip's hidden potential.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is a freelance writer. He can be reached on MCI
Mail as sjvn. A tip of the hat to Virginia Vaughan-Nichols, the
Vaughan-Nichols office's resident SunOS expert.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #13011 *****

Journal: PC Week March 23 1992 v9 n12 p20(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT TurboColor sets standard for workstations. (NeXT Inc.'s
NeXTstation Turbo Color workstation) (Hardware Review) (First
Look) (Evaluation)
Author: Stetson, Christopher.

Abstract: NeXT Inc's $8,995 NeXTstation Turbo Color workstation is a system
that is easier to use than a traditional Unix-based workstation
and is more powerful than a high-end microcomputer. The NeXTstep
operating system combines the Unix operating system and
object-oriented programming technology to provide a system that
lets users easily install and launch programs. The NeXTstation's
graphical interface lets users click on applications to be
installed; this is a much easier process than on other Unix
workstations. Also, the NeXTstation Turbo Color workstation can
load programs in the background, an ability lacking in Apple
Macintosh and IBM and compatible systems. The NeXTstation Turbo
Color's 12-bit color processing provides good shading and
highlighting performance. The interface is easy to use, but the
system suffers from cluttering caused by multiple palettes.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products).
Product: NeXT NeXTstation Turbo Color (Workstation) (evaluation).
Topic: Evaluation
Workstations
Color.
Feature: illustration
graph.

Record#: 11 982 804.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NeXT Computer Inc.'s NeXTstation TurboColor raises the bar for high-powered
workstations.

The TurboColor, which was released in quantity late last month, has a
powerful operating system called NeXTstep that combines Unix and
object-oriented system elements. The environment makes the TurboColor easier
to use than other workstations and more powerful than competing PCs. To test
the TurboColor's operating environment, PC Week Labs created a loan-analysis
presentation using Lotus Development Corp.'s Improv spreadsheet, Adobe
Systems Inc.'s Illustrator drawing package and LightHouse Design Ltd.'s Co
ncurrence presentation application.

In marked contrast to the esoteric installation procedures of other Unix
workstations, loading the third-party programs on the TurboColor was a snap
-- PC Week Labs simply double-clicked on the appropriate icon in the file
browser. And unlike installation on Macintoshes and PCs, the TurboColor can
load programs in the background.

PC Week Labs created a robust presentation with transitions and sound in less
than an hour. The Labs used applications interactively, passing data through
NeXTstep's Clipboard and Speaker/Listener data-exchange function, which is
similar to Windows' Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). The TurboColor's
12-bit color provided subtle shading and splashy highlights, but because the
NeXT system dithers color, Concurrence showed unexpected color shifts during
transitions. Creating applications with TurboColor is similar to the
development process in Windows-based Visual Basic or Macintosh-based
HyperCard. Using the Interface Builder development environment bundled with
the system, PC Week Labs programmed a "Hello World" application by simply
drawing connection lines between interface elements and the Objective C
procedures listed in command boxes. The process took only about 10 minutes.

The TurboColor is not flawless, however. Its interface is easy to use, but
applications get cluttered with myriad floating palettes. And, while the
workstation's peer-to-peer networking capabilities are powerful, the
network-management program, NetInfo Manager, is confusing and caused the Labs
to inadvertently restrict network access to the machine. Applications for
the NeXT workstation are also limited, although it comes with the full
development environment and a slew of applications.

Powered by Motorola Inc.'s new 33MHz 68040, the TurboColor surpasses the
fastest PCs, but trails RISC workstations (see chart). The tested system,
which came with a 400M-byte hard disk, 32M bytes of RAM, a 17-inch color
monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, costs $11,995. The $8,995 base
configuration comes with a 250M-byte hard disk and 16M bytes of RAM. Pricing
is competitive with similarly configured workstations such as Sun
Microsystems Inc.'s SPARCstation IPX and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s 9000 710, and
with 50 MHz 486 PCs from Compaq Computer Corp. and Dell Computer Corp.

NeXT, of Redwood City, Calif., is at (800) 848-6398.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #13099 *****

Journal: PC Week March 23 1992 v9 n12 p136(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: New NeXT executive to take some weight off Jobs' shoulders. (NeXT
Inc. appoints Peter Van Cuylenburg as president and chief
operating officer) (Product Announcement)
Author: Burke, Steven.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Officials and employees).
Topic: New Appointment
Promotion of Employee
Chief Executive Officers.

Record#: 11 987 948.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

New NeXT Executive To Take Some Weight Off Jobs' Shoulders

Six years after launching NeXT Computer Inc., PC industry legend Steven Jobs
is giving up some of the day-to-day responsibility for running the
workstation company.

NeXT announced last week that Jobs has hired Peter Van Cuylenburg for the
newly created position of president and chief operating officer.

Jobs and Van Cuylenburg, a former top executive for British
telecommunicationss company Cable and Wireless plc., will share management
tasks. Jobs said the British native pioneered object-oriented technology and
mission-critical applications at Texas Instruments Inc.

The changes will let Jobs spend considerably more time doing new product
development and promoting NeXT's NextStep operating system.

NextStep 486, a version of the NeXT operating system for Intel Corp.'s 486
CPU, is due in the fall.

Privately held NeXT posted a fourfold increase in sales to $127 million for
1991. The Redwood City, Calif., company laid off about 30 employees late
last year.

-- Steven Burke


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #13751 *****

Journal: Computergram International March 16 1992 n1879
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Apt Data Services (UK) 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: IBM "invites Sun to join Taligent joint venture." (Sun
Microsystems Inc. may contribute to IBM's and Apple's
object-oriented technology plans)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: International Business Machines Corp. (Management)
Taligent Inc. (Management)
Sun Microsystems Inc. (Management).
Ticker: IBM; AAPL; SUNW.
Topic: Business Planning
Object-oriented programming
Competition
Operating systems
Product Development.

Record#: 11 952 356.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

IBM "INVITES SUN TO JOIN TALIGENT JOINT VENTURE"

IBM Corp has quietly invited Sun Microsystems Inc to join Taligent Inc, its
joint venture with Apple Computer Inc to develop an object oriented operating
system, according to the New York Times, which quotes "industry executives
who did not want their names publicly attached to such preliminary
discussions". Officially, both sides are declining comment or denying
knowledge of any talks. Sun is already working on its own object-oriented
operating system under the code-name Spring, and the importance it attaches
to object-oriented technology is underlined by the fact that it paid $10m for
a licence to NeXT Inc's object-oriented NeXTStep environment, only later
deciding against using it. The call to Sun is seen as a further effort to
bolster the opposition lining up against Microsoft Corp's Windows New
Technology operating system. The Times also reports people close to Taligent
saying that several companies have applied to join, and that Taligent had
approached others requesting key technologies.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #14287 *****

Journal: MacWEEK March 16 1992 v6 n11 p43(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Emulation, Pink and the successor to the Mac. (Commentary)
(Column)
Author: Gassee, Jean-Louis.

Abstract: The proposed Macintosh emulation for reduced-instruction set
computers (RISC) is likely to work, despite the fact that the
Macintosh is more difficult to reproduce than an Apple II or DOS.
The emulation, however, will not guarantee hardware migration and
solving of software concerns. Price is likely to be a major
factor since processors that are faster and more expensive than
the emulated central processing unit (CPU) are always required.
Faster memory is also needed to execute the faster processor's
number of instructions. If Taligent's Pink operating system is
not ready in time for the RISC machines it is possible that A/UX
could be the operating system of choice. Custom programming of
large networked corporate applications could be the main function
of Pink and not the future of desktop operating systems as it has
been touted.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Apple Computer Inc. (Product development).
Ticker: AAPL.
Topic: Emulators
Reduced-Instruction-Set Computers
Operating Systems
Interoperability.
Feature: illustration
photograph.

Record#: 11 961 838.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Emulation, Pink and the successor to the Mac

Jean-Louis Gassee

Now that Apple intends to move toward RISC-based computers, emulation could
become a very interesting component of the future Macs.

In theory, running software written for one computer on a different, normally
incompatible one lets you keep your old software and jump on the
new-generation train. It is a simple yet elegant way to ease the transition
to a new platform and preserve investments in application software.

At best, however, the record shows emulations achieve only modest success.
They never become money makers or market makers. At worst, they become the
butt of jokes or the object of customer ire.

Yours truly in 1985 thought that building a NuBus card capable of running PC
software inside a Mac was a great idea. We know how the market treated that
one.

Puzzling over emulation. Perhaps, in view of my past errors and suffering,
my puzzlement over the stated plan to offer Macintosh emulation on upcoming
RISC computers from Apple is understandable. Granted, having control over
both hardware and software makes Apple engineers better suited for taming
difficult animals such as floppies and serial ports and improving execution
times. And there is little doubt that the RS/6000 RISC microprocessor at the
heart of the PowerPC architecture underlying Apple's future computers will
provide good performance.

Cost factors. In other words, I'm willing to concede that the real
emulation, not a demo, will really work, despite the Mac being a lot more
complicated to reproduce than DOS or an Apple II.

But I'm not willing to concede that emulation will readily, for many
constituencies, bridge the software gap and bolster hardware migration. A
few issues, such as price, need to be resolved. Cost factors inherent in
building a faster machine result in a more expensive computer doing the same
work as a less expensive one.

Even with the best of implementations, one instruction of the emulated
program is resolved into a number, often large, of instructions on the
emulating machine. That's why faster processors than the emulated CPU are
always required. And more expensive too: The first PowerPC chips will cost
much more than the 680x0 chips they'll emulate.

Pink factor. Faster memory also is required, either large caches or plain
speedier dynamic RAM to execute the number of instructions of the faster
processor required by the emulation.

Another reason for promoting Mac emulation could be tied to which Apple
software these RISC computers will run when they're ready. Let's assume
these RISC computers come out somewhere in late 1993 or early 1994.

In the event that Taligent's Pink ships in that time frame, available
application software will range from non-existent to modest -- not what you'd
count on to take over a multibillion-dollar business.

Bridge to nowhere. If Pink's not there in time for the first RISC machines,
the emulation, instead of offering a bridge between generations, as the PDP
11 mode was for the beginnings of the VAX, becomes the main software
platform. In this case, picture a version of A/UX for the new hardware.
Would A/UX suddenly become a hot seller? It's perhaps a similar conundrum
that may become familiar to those who are entrusted with the
Windows-to-Windows NT transition on Intel Corp. engines.

In fact, the latest system software positioning could lead one to believe
that Pink is no longer the future of desktop operating systems, but now
appears to be targeted at the custom programming of large networked corporate
applications. This sounds, almost word for word, like a clone of Steve Job's
latest positioning strategy for NeXTstep.

Perhaps, just as NeXT Computer Inc. found it impossible to displace the Mac,
Apple is acknowledging that Pink, after all, is not a successor to its
current breadwinner.

If this is true, this would leave Apple with little choice but contending
that Mac emulation on a RISC platform is "the right one," regardless of
history, regardless of how effectively it will utilize a more modern hardware
platform. And it would leave wide open the question of a real successor to
the Mac.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #16694 *****

Journal: PC Week March 2 1992 v9 n9 p5(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Taligent board suits up for Pink OS campaign. (Apple-IBM joint
venture to market new operating system) (Brief Article)

Author: Freedman, Beth.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: Taligent Inc. (Product development)
Apple Computer Inc. (Joint ventures)
International Business Machines Corp. (Joint ventures).
Ticker: IBM; AAPL.
Topic: Operating systems
Product Development
Marketing Strategy
Joint Venture.

Record#: 11 973 159.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

TALIGENT BOARD SUITS UP FOR PINK OS CAMPAIGN

--------------------

By Beth Freedman

The object-oriented design of Taligent's Pink operating system will let
vendors and sophisticated users tailor it for specific needs, sources close
to the company said last week.

IBM and Apple Computer Inc. formally named the board of directors last week
for their Taligent joint venture, which officially will open its doors in
Cupertino, Calif., this week. While IBM and Apple officials did not disclose
any new details on Pink -- which will not debut until mid-decade -- sources
said the next-generation operating system will provide a new level of
flexibility for both hardware and software developers.

Pink, which will comprise hundreds of object subclasses that are
processor-independent, is best compared to NeXT Inc.'s NextStep operating
system, the sources said. Like NextStep, Pink can be easily extended or
adapted by modifying existing object classes or by adding custom objects for
specific requirements such as networking or multimedia, they explained.

IBM and Apple will license Pink, exploiting its object-oriented design to
create an upgrade path from their respective OS/2 and System 7 offerings.
Taligent also plans to license Pink to other vendors.

"[IBM and Apple] will offer Pink adapters, or `personalities,' that will run
Macintosh, Presentation Manager or Windows applications much along the lines
of Insignia Solutions Inc.'s SoftPC [emulator]," one source close to Taligent
said.

Common functions that software developers must now build into their
applications will be built into Pink, allowing developers to create leaner
applications and ensuring that vendors won't have to upgrade their
applications to take advantage of new versions of Pink, sources said.

As expected, IBM and Apple named IBM Vice President Joseph Guglielmi as
Taligent's chairman and CEO and Apple's Edward Birss as chief operating
officer. Of Taligent's top executives, the only other IBM official is
controller Gerard Fassig. Taligent's 170 employees will be based at Apple's
Cupertino facility until a permanent residence is found in Silicon Valley.

--------------------

Additional reporting by Paul M. Sherer


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #17513 *****

Journal: EXE March 1992 v6 n9 p6(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Process Communications Ltd. (UK) 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: PC NeXT. (Next Computer Inc. introduces NeXTstep 486 UNIX-like
object-oriented operating system for Intel 80486-based
microcomputers) (Product Announcement)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NeXTStep 486 (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Product Introduction
UNIX-Like Operating Systems.

Record#: 11 990 086.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NeXT Computer Inc has unvelied NeXTstep 486, a version of the company's
UNIXish object-orientes system software tha runs on Intel 80486-based
machines. NeXT;s own machines are based on the powerful Motorola 68040 chip.
NeXTstep 486 will obe offered in two versions; a user version retailing at
695 pound sterling and a developer version, price to be confirmed. Both wil
requirements are pretty hefty with 8-16 MB RAM and 400 MB disk space needed
for the developer version. Contact NeXT for more info on 081 5650005.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #17764 *****

Journal: LAN Computing March 1992 v3 n3 p3(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Professional Press Inc. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT's future is in objects. (NeXT Computer ships new version of
NeXTstep 486 object-oriented operating system) (Product
Announcement)
Author: Halligan, Tom.

Abstract: NeXT Computer (Redwood City, CA) ships a new version of its
NeXTstep 486 object-oriented operating system. The powerful
operating system runs on computers based on the Intel 80486
microprocessor. NeXTstep 486 provides the same functionality as
the NeXTstep version that runs on the NeXT computers plus the
ability to communicate and interact with Apple Macintoshes,
MS-DOS- and Windows-based IBM PC-compatibles and UNIX-based
computers. The combination of the operating system and the Intel
80486 creates a powerful environment for such demanding data type
as graphics and audio. Minimum host system requirements include
8Mbytes of random-access memory and 120Mbytes (user version) or
400Mbytes (developer version) of hard disk space. The user
version is $995 while the developer version is $2,495.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NeXTStep 486 (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Product Introduction
Object-Oriented Programming
Operating Systems
Compatible Hardware.
Feature: illustration
graph.

Record#: 11 962 430.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Banking on NeXTstep as the key to its future, NeXT Computer (Redwood City,
Calif.) will beging shipping a new version of its object-oriented operating
system that will run on computers powered by Intel Corp's (Santa Clara,
Calif.) 486 chip.

With Sun Micrcosystems (Mountain View, Calif.), Hewlett-Packard and IBM
holding the lion's share of the workstation market, NeXT's best hope for
success apparently lies in licensing NeXTstep.

"I think NeXT will become a software company down the road," projected Nancy
Battey, director of workstation research for International Data Corp.
(Framingham, Mass.). "I think they'll get out of the hardware business.
Users benefit because of NeXTstep -- not the box," she added.

NeXT step 486 is the same complete object-oriented systms software that is
offered on NeXT's computers, and includes advanced software development
applications such as NeXTmail, Digital Webster and Digital Librarian.

In addition, NeXT computers and 486-based computers running NeXTstep 486 can
interoperate and communicate with DOS- and Windows-based PCs, Macintosh and
UNIX-based computers, according to the company.

"This move extends the benefits of the industry-standard NeXTstep to the huge
installed base of 486 users, and instantly explodes the potential market for
the NeXTstep applications," said Steven Jobs, NeXT's president and CEO.

According to Andrew Grove, Intel's president and CEO, "the combination of the
486 microprocessor performance and NeXTstep's advanced object-oriented
technology will provide PC users and developers with a powerful operating
environment that can handle natural data types such as graphics and audio."

NeXTstep 486 will be offered in two versions: a user version with a suggested
retail price of $995, and a developer version with a suggested retail price
of $2,495. Both will be distributed on CD-ROM media.

Requirements call for 8 to 16MB of RAM, and either 120MB (user version) or
about 400MB (developer version) of hard disk space. It will be available in
two ways: as a "shrink-wrapped" product (in user and developer versions) and
through selected OEM, pre-installed on their 486-based computers.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #17922 *****

Journal: Lotus March 1992 v8 n3 p12(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Lotus Publishing Corp. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: What's NeXT? (NeXT Inc. plans to enter 80486-based microcomputer
market) (Issues & Trends)(Brief Article)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Planning).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Market Entry
Revenue
Operating systems.

Record#: 11 934 290.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Despite the massive hype, cute name, and even cuter design, computers from
Next Inc. have not had much effect on the PC landscape. Looking for larger

market share, the company is now moving its well-regarded operating system,
Nextstep, onto 486-based platforms from Intel Corp.

While the move could provide increased revenues for Next, the potential
benefits for developers and users are less clear. Even such advanced
features as support for voice annotation and display PostScript may not be
enough to attract much development attention.

Software vendors, already writing for DOS, Macintosh, OS/2, and Microsoft
Windows, aren't exactly rushing to divert resources to yet another PC
operating system. Says Jeff Anderholm, marketing manager for Lotus Improv:
"It certainly raises the market potential for Nextstep applications, but the
question is, By how much?"


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #19869 *****

Journal: San Jose Mercury News Feb 23 1992 p4F(48).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Taking programming to next level. (NextStep, computer software
from Next Computer Inc.) (Software Review) (Evaluation)
Author: Robinson, Phillip.

Abstract: NextStep, the operating system for Next workstations, is a complex
program that does many different things. It functions as an
object-oriented programming language, and it is an 'interface
builder,' which means it can be used to create menus, windows and
other helpful features. NextStep is built around a multitasking
Unix operating system with networking and multimedia capabilities.
It also incorporates Display PostScript so that what shows an a
display screen is the same as what prints out on paper. NextStep
runs on Next workstations, which are described as next-generation
Macintosh microcomputers crossed with engineering workstations.
The main criticism about NextStep has had to do with the fact that
using it necessarily meant using a Next workstation. This,
however, is about to change: Next is developing a version of
NextStep that will run on IBM microcomputers with 80486
microprocessors.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (evaluation).
Topic: Program Development Software
Object-Oriented Programming
Evaluation
Operating Systems.
Feature: illustration
table.

Record#: 11 964 381.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #21775 *****

Journal: Computergram International Feb 10 1992 n1854
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Apt Data Services (UK) 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Canon heads the queue for NeXT's NeXTStep 486. (object-oriented
operating system to become available in Japanese)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products)
Canon Inc. (Purchasing).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Purchasing)
Intel 80486 (Microprocessor) (Usage).
Topic: Japanese Language
Strategic Planning
Object-oriented programming
Microcomputers
Operating systems.

Record#: 11 920 183.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

CANON HEADS THE QUEUE FOR NEXT's NEXTSTEP 486

The first announced customer for NeXT Computer Inc's NeXTstep 486 personal
computer implementation of its object-oriented operating environment is
expected to be Canon Inc. The Comline news service reports from Japan that
Canon plans to implement a Japanese language version of the NeXTstep system
on its 80486-based personal computers and to supply it to other vendors.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #23296 *****

Journal: InfoWorld Feb 3 1992 v14 n5 p26(1).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NextStep 486 needs a niche: uncertain market opportunity exists
for Intel-based OS. (operating system)
Author: Corcoran, Cate.

Abstract: Analysts say that Next Inc's NextStep 486 operating system for
Intel-based microcomputers has not yet found a market niche and
has so far failed to attract support from systems developers. One
observer notes that the audience for NextStep on Intel is just as
limited as that for the NextStation workstation and will consist
primarily of those developing custom software. Such developers
could find NextStep 486 attractive as a means of filling
second-sourcing requirements. Other analysts doubt that NextStep
will ever work well on Intel-based machines because it is not
tailored for the Intel environment. The existing installed base
of 80486 machines lacks key features of the Next workstation
design, such as digital signal processors. An Intel machine
capable of running NextStep is likely to cost as much as a
NextStation, if not more.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Products).
Product: NextStep 486 (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Operating systems
Market Analysis
User Needs.
Feature: illustration
table.

Record#: 11 883 449.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #23377 *****

Journal: MacWEEK Feb 3 1992 v6 n5 p35(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: How much should Apple worry about NeXT? (NeXT Computer Inc.)
(Commentary) (Column)
Author: Gasee, Jean-Louis.

Abstract: NeXT Computer Inc has a new marketing strategy that includes a new
CPU, a new color printer and new software. Revenue statistics
indicate that sales figures for 1991 were approximately $127
million, about four times higher than 1990 revenue. Some industry
analysts are speculating that the seven-year-old company is
finally hitting its stride and has a chance at taking part of the
mainstream market. Founder Steve Jobs is targeting Sun
Microsystems Inc's market share; he will focus specifically on
garnering a piece of the corporate market by stressing
mission-critical customer applications. Projections over the next
three years from 1992 to 1995 indicate that NeXT may very well be
targeting Apple as a competitor too, specifically in the area of
operating systems. Some contend that Apple's Pink operating
system and NeXT's NeXTstep will go head-to-head.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Marketing)
Apple Computer Inc. (Marketing)
Sun Microsystems Inc. (Marketing).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Operating Systems
Strategic Planning
Product Development
Competition.

Record#: 11 886 127.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

How much should Apple worry about NeXT?

Jean-Louis Gassee

Well into its seventh year, NeXT Computer Inc. recently announced new CPUs,
new software, a color printer, the now de rigueur Intel port and a new
strategy. Sales figures, according to the company, were about $127 million
for 1991, roughly four times the previous year's revenue.

While these numbers would be more informative if they came with a complete
audited income statement, they raise the question of NeXT's much awaited
breakthrough. Is the labor started in 1985 finally paying off, and is NeXT
finally about to become a mainstream player? And from whose worthy hide is
NeXT's future market share going to come?

If you believe Steve Jobs, the designated adversary is Sun Microsystems Inc.
-- for now.

Jobs is relying on better programming and communications tools, more mips for
the buck, and NeXTstep on 486 boxes months before Sun's Solaris operating
system makes the Intel leap. We can count on Sun's equally frank CEO Scott
McNealy to provide equally objective comparisons.

Missionary objects. NeXT's new strategy is to gain a Trojan niche in the
corporate world via mission-critical custom applications built with
NeXTstep's object-oriented programming tools. Once NeXT is entrenched and
worshipped for its object-based development environment and applications, it
could invade the rest of the desktops with the blessing of the IS
organizations.

With this in mind, and the fact that, of all the workstation vendors, Sun
appears to have had the most success in winning non-engineering "seats," it
is no wonder that NeXT chose to do battle with Sun. Furthermore, size and
focus figure into NeXT's choice of targets. Sun is about 30 times bigger
than NeXT and, unlike Hewlett-Packard Co. or IBM Corp., it is only in the
business of workstations. Good for clean polarization. Jobs this time must
be following Nietzsche's advice about the enlightened choice of one's
enemies.

One of Jobs' recent remarks contrasted the past goal of putting a computer on
every desk with today's hope of having only one per desk. Which returns us
to the intersection between the personal computer and workstation markets so
many companies seem to be trying to grasp.

In two or three years we'll have the following environments: ACE (if it still
exists), SCO Unix (available today), Windows and Windows NT, SunOS/Solaris,
Taligent's Pink (perhaps in two "personalities," one from Apple, one from
IBM), NeXTstep, A/UX, and System 7 or 8 on 680x0 and RISC (reduced
instruction set computing) architectures.

I must be forgetting some Unixes, and I'm not counting the pen-based or other
more specialized operating environments. How customers will deal with this
abundance of choices is another story.

In this time frame, NeXT is on a collision course with three major software
players: Sun, Microsoft Corp. and the Apple-IBM alliance. Now, pray tell,
which one looks like the easiest future target? Sun and Microsoft are both
going about their business unfettered; they are mean and in control of their
work, just like NeXT, which may not be profitable like the others but appears
to be charting a purposeful course.

Pink vs. NeXTstep. Contrast this with the structural problems bundled with
the three-way association of Taligent, Apple and IBM. The adversaries
change.

Pink and NeXTstep inevitably pursue the same goal: improving the three
dimensions of personal computing -- ease of use, expressive power and ease of
programming. What else when hardware power is equally accessible?

Today's Apple business is not at stake. NeXT is not capable of competing in
the current mainstream of the personal computer business. But if NeXT
delivers what it promises, more or less on time, it might be Pink's biggest
competitor.

There are many ifs involved. For example, what if the macho arguments over
kernels disappeared between Sun and NeXT and, instead, today's adversaries
collaborated? Unlikely, but not out of the question. Meanwhile it will be
interesting to watch the various players make their moves over the next few
years.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #23574 *****

Journal: The Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing Feb 3 1992 v6 n6 p27(2)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Seybold Publications Inc. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Next focuses on custom applications; promises faster boxes,
interactive Renderman, Nextstep on '486 PC. (Intel 80486
microprocessor)(The Latest Word)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Planning).
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product enhancement)
NeXT NeXTstation Turbo (Workstation) (Product enhancement).
Topic: Marketing Strategy
Object-Oriented Programming
Enhancements
Bundled Software
Product Development
Strategic Planning.

Record#: 11 903 325.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Next Computer finally appears to have found its market niche. At the first
NextWorld conference and exposition in San Francisco ad in a 12-page
advertising insert in the Wall Street Journal, it hammered home its new
theme: Next provides the best platform for development of "mission-critical"
custom applications.

Next also announced an important third-generation upgrade to the Next
operating environment and faster computers, and it promised to provide a
version of its operating environment that runs on (very robust) Intel-based
computers.

Fourth try the charm? Next's original market focus was higher education. We
have always thought that this was a stalking horse--a credible starting point
before tackling a larger market.

The larger market soon emerged. Next wanted to provide the next-generation
personal computer--the machine that would eventually supersede the Macintosh
and the PC. It established distribution through Businessland and courted
third-party software developers to write exciting, shrink-wrapped software
applications for its machine.

The problem was that not enough of the key software developers bought into
the dream. It eventually became clear that Next simply was not going to have
the rich library of shrink-wrapped software that is found on both the PC and
the Mac. Publishing was supposed to be a key "camel's nose" application to
get Next into user site just as it had for the Macintosh. But Next could not
successfully attract the key publishing applications. It had FrameMaker, but
no PageMaker, no Quark Xpress.

Next refined its focus: it stressed "interpersonal computing," exploiting its
networking and communications capabilities.

In the meantime, users slowly began to buy the machines. They were buying
them exactly as we had originally predicted they would, for exactly the use
that we had predicted: development of high-value custom software for key
applications that are not well served by off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped
software. In essence, Next has found itself competing not with Apple and
Microsoft but with Sun Microsystems and other Unix workstation suppliers.

We have long contended that there is a market for Unix workstations that is
distinctly different from the traditional scientific/engineering workstation
market. This is, at the moment, a market for workstations used by
nontechnical professionals to support what they do for a living every day.
These people will generally want to make use of shrink-wrapped "productivity"
software, but their lives really revolve around specialized,
application-specific software that has been created specifically to support
their requirements and their working procedures.

Some of this software (for example, display ad composition and/or image
processing) may be developed by specialists in a particular market and sold
to a number of companies in the same business. Other software, such as
support for bond trading, may be developed by a company for its own use and
may be closely guarded as a unique competitive advantage for that company.

Better Sun than Sun? Next's contention is that its object-oriented Nextstep
environment enables programmers to put together clean custom applications
much more quickly and easily than they can on other platforms. Next also
claims that, although it does not have the full library of shrink-wrapped
software available for Windows or the Macintosh, it does have a far larger
library of shrinkwrapped software than Sun. It also argues that its
workstations are easier for nontechnical people to use than Sun's.

Someone is buying the arguments. Although we do not believe that the company
is profitable yet (it helps to have all that cash from IBM, Ross Perot and
Canon), Next reports 1991 revenues of $127.5 million, nearly 4 1/2 times
those of 1990.

Nextstep 3.0

The next release of the Next operating software, due out in the second
quarter of this year, contains significant improvements to the existing 2.0
software.

These include:

* Novell and AppleShare. Next workstations can (finally) be full AppleShare
clients over EtherTalk and/or full Novell clients. This means that users
should really be able to use Next workstations as full citizens in existing
PC and/or Mac environments.

We have been asking for this facility since well before the Next machine was
announced to the world. We continue to think that it is essential. Next
will now support the major PC, Macintosh and workstation (TCP/IP and NFS)
networking protocols over both thin and twisted-pair Ethernet. It can also
read both PC floppy disks (supported in Release 2.0) and Macintosh floppies
(new with 3.0).

* Interactive Renderman. The new 3DKit provides Pixar Renderman facilities
for rendering three-dimensional images on the screen. Simple rendering can
be done interactively so that the user can manipulate the object. Imagine,
for example, a technical manual in which the user can manipulate the
illustration of a part to view it from different angles. Full photorealistic
rendering can be performed as a background function.

* Integrated ISDN. Built-in support for ISDN digital dial-up phone services
will enable users to work on a remote network over high-speed, dial-up phone
lines. All we need now (in the U.S.) is full deployment of ISDN by the
telephone companies.

Hayes will provide a nice little $395 phone network interface that will
connect to both regular phone lines and ISDN lines.

* Color enhancements. Improving upon its current 24-bit color capabilities,
Next is adding full PostScript Level 2 support, built-in Pantone matching,
and better use of color in the user interface. It is also introducing a very
nice $ 3,495 color printer based on the Canon four-color, 360-dpi, ink-jet
printer engine.

* Database kit. A new database kit is intended to make it quick and easy to
develop graphic front ends to both SQL and hierarchical databases. The kit
will ship with interfaces to Oracle and Sybase SQL databases.

We have been eager to get our hands on this kit since we encountered the
original prototype more than a year and a half ago. We will report on it in
greater depth after we have had an opportunity to try it out.

* Utilities. New utilities include an online hypertext Help system and
system-wide facilities for public and private key data encryption and for
data compression.

* Internationalization. International versions of Nextstep will be provided
in two flavors. One supports English and five European languages. The other
supports English and Japanese. Users can have all menus, prompts and so
forth displayed in their language of choice. They could even elect to have
different applications run in different languages.

* Distributed objects. The system will support linking to program and/or
data objects distributed across a network.

Cost. The upgrade from Release 2 to Release 3.0 will cost $295 delivered on
floppy disk. Next is trying to get users to buy CD-ROM drives so that new
software and documentation can be delivered on CD-ROM. It sells a Next drive
for $895. (Because these drives can be networked, you need only one CD-ROM
drive per site.)

Turbo machines

All Next workstations, except the very entry-level machines, are getting a
33-MHZ 68040 processor in place of the 25-MHz one now used. They monochrome
machines also get the hardware assist for screen display previously included
only in the color machines. Next claims that this upgrade boosts performance
from 18 MIPS to 25 MIPS.

Except for the $4,995 entry-level machine, prices have also been reduced
approximately 10% across the board. A monochrome Nextstation with 16 MB of
memory and a 250-MB disk now lists for $6,995 instead of $7,995.

The 33-MHz Hext machines are still slightly slower than, for example, a Sun
Sparc 2 (25 MIPS vs. 28.5 MIPS, according to Next). However, they list for
about 2/3 the price.

Nextstep 486

To satisfy potential customers who have recently invested in '486 PCS, and to
give other customers an alternative to solesourcing hardware from Next, Next
will offer the Nextstep environment as a software-only package to run on
well-equipped 80486 PCs.

You will require a minimum of 8 MB of memory (16 MB would be far preferable),
a mouse, and at least 120 MB of disk space to run Nextstep on your PC.

Given the fact that this is a highly graphic environment, you will also need
to pay attention to your screen display. Because of the limitations of the
PC bus, Next will support Super VGA displays in monochrome gray level only.
(Color would be too slow.) A better solution would be one of the next
generation of 16-bit EISA color graphics boards. Better yet, a graphics
display processor built into the motherboard (as Dell and others are now
starting to do). This means that the screen display data does not have to be
sent over the computer's internal bus.

The software will be available for $995 directly from Next or through
software distribution channels. Most likely, you will also be able to buy it
bundled with an appropriate '486 computer from companies such as Dell and
Compaq. No firm deals have been announced, but we believe serious
discussions are under way.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26232 *****

Journal: EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report Jan 27 1992 v3 n88 p59(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EDGE Publishing 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: 80486-based NeXTstep: NeXTstep object-oriented system software now
available for 80486-based computers. (Product Announcement)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NextStep 486 (Operating system) (Product introduction)
Intel 80486 (Microprocessor) (Computer programs).
Topic: Object-oriented programming
Operating systems
Product Introduction.

Record#: 11 880 231.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

80486-BASED NEXTSTEP: NEXTSTEP OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEM SOFTWARE NOW

AVAILABLE FOR 80486-BASED COMPUTERS

NeXT Computer Inc. Wednesday unveiled NeXTstep 486, a version of NeXT's
highly regarded object-oriented system software that runs on computers
powered by Intel's 80486 microprocessor.

The announcement was made at NeXTWORLD Expo, being held at the San Francisco
Civic Auditorium.

NeXTstep 486 is the same object-oriented system software that is offered on
NeXT's computers. In addition, NeXT computers and 486-based computers
running NeXTstep 486 can interoperate seamlessly, as well as communicate with
DOS- and Windows-based PCs, Macintosh and UNIX-based computers.

Because NeXT supplies the entire development environment, porting current
NeXTstep applications to run on NeXTstep 486 is both simple and reliable.
For example, during the past week several NeXTstep developers, including
Lotus Development Corp., WordPerfect, Adobe Systems Inc. and Wolfram
Research, have created versions of their NeXT applications running in
NeXTstep 486.

PRODUCT & PRICING NeXTstep 486 will be offered in two versions: a user
version with a suggested retail price of $995 and a developer version with a
suggested retail price of $2,495.

Both NeXTstep 486 versions are based on NeXTstep Release 3.0, announced
Wednesday.

NeXTstep 486 features built-in networking software to share information with
other computers, such as NFS (Network File System) for workstations, Novell
NetWare for PCs and AppleShare for Macintosh computers. As a result,
NeXTstep-based computers can communicate with virtually all other desktop
computers with no additional software.

486 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS NeXTstep 486 requires 8-16 MB of RAM, a mouse or
similar pointing device and either 120 MB (user version) or about 400 MB
(developer version) of hard disk space.

NeXTstep's advanced graphics can be displayed as grayscale on selected
Super-VGA cards, and as 16-bit color on EISA color graphics boards that will
soon be announced by major PC manufacturers. This will enable the entire
installed base of 486 computer users to use NeXTstep 486.

In addition, newer 486-based computers expected to ship in the first half of
1992 will incorporate their graphics memory on the processor bus, enabling
even faster disply of NeXTstep's color graphics.

DISTRIBUTION & AVAILABILITY NeXTstep 486 will be available in two ways: as a
"shrink-wrap" product (in user and developer versions) and through selected
OEMs, pre-installed on their 486-based computers. OEM partnerships will be
announced in the coming months.

NeXT Computer designs, manufactures and markets professional workstations
based on the pioneering NeXTstep object-oriented system software. NeXT
computers are used by medium and large organizations to develop
mission-critical custom applications and to run these applications alongside
breakthrough productivity applications.

NeXT has headquarters in Redwood City, CA.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26233 *****

Journal: EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report Jan 27 1992 v3 n88 p60(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EDGE Publishing 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT: new version of NeXTstep software, 25 MIPS "turbo" hardware
machines. (million instructions per second) (Product Announcement)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product introduction)
NeXT NeXTstation Color Turbo (Workstation) (Product introduction)
NeXT NeXTstation Turbo (Workstation) (Product introduction)
NeXT NeXTcube Turbo (Workstation) (Product introduction)
NeXT Color Printer (Computer printer) (Product introduction)
NeXT External CD-ROM Drive (CD-ROM drive) (Product introduction).
Topic: Operating systems
Object-oriented programming
Workstations
Monochrome
Color
Product Introduction
CD-ROM
Disk drives
Printers.

Record#: 11 880 251.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NEXT: NEW VERSION OF NEXTSTEP SOFTWARE, 25 MIPS "TURBO" HARDWARE

MACHINES

At the first NeXTWORLD Expo, NeXT Computer Inc. Wednesday announced an
important new release of its NeXTstep object-oriented system software, plus
faster and less expensive NeXT hardware.

A new version of NeXTstep 3.0, designed to run on computers powered by
Intel's 80486 processor, was also unveiled. NeXTstep 486 will offer the same
features as NeXTstep running on NeXT workstations.

NeXTstep Release 3.0 builds on the unquestioned industry leadership of
NeXTstep, the only object-oriented system software currently shipping.
Release 3.0 features additional connectivity software, tools for developing
applications for databases and 3D graphics, integrated foreign language
suppport and an integrated help system.

NeXT also announced faster, "Turbo" versions of the NeXTstation, NeXTstation
Color and NeXTcube, built around the Motorola 68040 processor running at 33
megahertz (MHz).

These faster machines give NeXT dramatic price/performance advantages.
Previous NeXT workstations were based on the 25 MHz version of the 68040.

The new Turbo machines are rated at 25 MIPS, compared to 18 MIPS for the 25
MHz versions. At the same time, NeXT has reduced the prices on its most
popular configurations by an average of 10 percent.

NeXT also debuted a 360 dpi, four-color printer that sets a new standard for
its combination of color quality and low price point, and an external CD-ROM
drive.

PRICE & AVAILABILITY NeXTstep Release 3.0 will be available from NeXT in Q2
1992.

The NeXTstation Turbo and NeXTstation Color Turbo workstations are available
immediately. The NeXTcube Turbo will ship in Q2.

Prices begin at $4,995 for a monochrome NeXTstation (25 MHz) with 8 MB of RAM
and a 105 MB hard disk. Prices for NeXTstation Turbo (33 MHz) begin at
$5,995 for a monochrome version with 8 MB of RAM and a 250 MB hard disk.

NeXTstation Color prices start at $7,995 for a 25 MHz version with 16 MB of
RAM and a 105 MB hard disk. The NeXTstation Color Turbo, with 16 MB of RAM
and a 250 MB hard disk, starts at $8,995.

The NeXTcube Turbo will start at $10,995 for a monochrome system with 16 MB
of RAM and a 400 MB hard disk.

The NeXT Color Printer is priced at $3,495 and will be available in Q2 of
1992. The NeXT External CD-ROM Drive is available now for $895.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26234 *****

Journal: EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report Jan 27 1992 v3 n88 p61(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EDGE Publishing 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT: Teradata & NeXT in joint marketing agreement; NeXT DBKit
adaptor for DBC/1012 Data Base Computer. (Database Kit)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Contracts)
Teradata Corp. (Contracts).
Ticker: TDAT.
Product: Teradata DBC/1012 (Data base processor) (Computer programs)
NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Usage).
Topic: Marketing Agreements
Data Base Processors
Relational Data Base Management Systems
Program Development Software.

Record#: 11 880 269.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NEXT: TERADATA & NEXT IN JOINT MARKETING AGREEMENT; NEXT DBKIT

ADAPTOR FOR DBC/1012 DATA BASE COMPUTER

Teradata Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., and NeXT Computer Inc., of Redwood
City, Calif., Wednesday announced a joint marketing agreement and a NeXT
Database Kit (DBKit) Adaptor for the Teradata DBC/1012 Data Base Computer.

With the DBKit Adaptor, NeXT users gain access to the DBC/1012 relational
database management system and to the hundreds of gigabytes of data that can
be stored in it.

Both the NeXT workstation, with its NeXTstep object-oriented application
development environment, and the Teradata DBC/1012 are used by many Fortune
500 companies for strategic business applications.

Given the complementary nature of the Teradata and NeXT systems, the two
companies signed a joint marketing agreement providing for the exchange of
technical information, prospect referrals, training and joint sales
cooperation.

Teradata President Jim Castle said: "We are excited about the tremendous
synergy between the NeXT workstation and the DBC/1012. Many of our customers
who saw a recent demonstration of DBKit at the Teradata Partners' Users'
Group Conference gave us an overwhelmingly positive response, encouraging us
to proceed with the integration of the DBC/1012 with the NeXT platform.

"The development of the DBKit Adaptor for the DBC/1012 provides the framework
to deliver exceptionally more powerful client/server business solutions to
our respective customers."

"Teradata support for the NeXT DBKit enables users to get the best of both
worlds -- the power of the DBC/1012 with NeXT's object-oriented application
development environment and rich graphical user interface," said Jobs.

"Our customers in finance, government and health care will be especially
thrilled with this new partnership. Now they can develop mission-critical
database applications five to ten times faster, without needing to know the
DBC/1012's syntax requirements."

The NeXT Database Kit extends the power of NeXTstep's object-oriented system
software to database application development. DBKit, which is an integral
component of NeXTstep Release 3.0, significantly speeds the development and
implementation of database applications that have graphical user interfaces
(GUIs).

Its layered architecture provides for the development of database adaptors to
translate data source-independent queries into function calls for specific
vendors' databases.

By developing an adaptor for the DBC/1012 Data Base Computer, Teradata is
enabling NeXTstep users with no knowledge of the DBC/1012 or its syntax
requirements to develop object-oriented database applications that have GUIs.

The NeXT DBKit Adaptor for the DBC/1012 Data Base Computer will be generally
available to beta customers of NeXTstep Release 3.0 at the end of the first
quarter of 1992.

Teradata manufactures and markets high-performance systems and related
products for relational database management. The company has experienced
rapid growth since it shipped its first DBC/1012 Data Base Computer in 1984
and was named the fastest growing company in America by Inc. magazine in 1989
and by Electronic Business in 1991.

Teradata's DBC/1012 is used by many Fortune 500 companies for decision
support, database management and transaction processing in large-scale
banking, transportation, telecommunications, retail and other industries.
The company provides support through its worldwide network of sales and
service offices.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26252 *****

Journal: EDGE: Work-Group Computing Report Jan 27 1992 v3 n88 p79(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT EDGE Publishing 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Financial: NeXT revenues grow 440-plus percent in 1991; expands
commercial base, geographic scope.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Finance).
Topic: Revenue
Financial Report
Growth
Profit
Expansion
International Trade
Market Penetration.

Record#: 11 880 529.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

FINANCIAL: NEXT REVENUES GROW 440-PLUS PERCENT IN 1991; EXPANDS

COMMERCIAL BASE, GEOGRAPHIC SCOPE

NeXT Computer Inc. Wednesday announced that its revenues for 1991 increased
443 percent over those for 1990, exceeding $127 million for the year ended
Dec. 31, 1991.

"Our 1991 results are a solid accomplishment, especially given the worst
recessionary environment in memory," said Steven P. Jobs, president and chief
executive officer of NeXT.

NeXTstep lets organizations create industrial-strength mission-critical
custom applications up to 10 times faster than ever before, then run these
applications alongside the NeXT platform's full suite of breakthrough
productivity applications.

"For a market challenger such as NeXT to have a compelling advantage over the
entrenched systems of the day it must be much better. NeXTstep has been
heralded as being significantly better than Sun's and everyone else's system
software, in part because it allows customers to create custom applications
up to 10 times faster.

"Our 1991 financial results show that significant numbers of customers are
realizing our compelling advantage and are voting for NeXTstep with their
wallets," Jobs said.

Along with increasing its total revenues, NeXT has also changed the types of
customers to which it sells. In 1990, NeXT sold nearly half its workstations
to higher education customers. By the end of 1991, more than 80 percent of
the company's revenues were generated by business and government customers.

NeXT has also expanded the geographic range of its operations. During 1991,
NeXT derived 43 percent of its revenues from its Europe and Pacific
operations. The company expects that about half its revenues will come from
outside North America in 1992.

Significantly, the number of third-party applications shipping for the
NeXTstep platform grew from 63 to 247 during 1991. In addition, the number
of NeXT user groups worldwide grew last year from 65 to 260 groups in 28
countries, which reflects the growing number of users interested in the NeXT
platform.

NeXT designs, manufactures and markets professional workstations based on the
pioneering NeXTstep object-oriented system software. NeXT has headquarters
in Redwood City, CA.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26379 *****

Journal: InfoWorld Jan 27 1992 v14 n4 p3(1).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Next debuts 486 version of NextStep. (Intel 80486, NextStep
operating system) (Product Announcement)
Author: Corcoran, Cate.

Abstract: Next Inc introduces NextStep, a recompiled version of its NextStep
operating system designed to support the Intel 80486 architecture,
as well as NextStep 3.0 for Next workstation users. NextStep 486
will ship during the 3rd qtr of 1992 and will list for $999 for
users and $2,000 for developers. Company officials will not
disclose whether any hardware vendors have agreed to bundle the
new environment with their systems. The company has signed
contracts with some OEMs but says that these agreements will be
revealed later in 1992. Industry analysts say that the new
software is powerful, but add that the company's position would
have been stronger had OEMs been announced. NextStep 3.0 is the
basis of NextStep 486. It includes tools for developing
three-dimensional graphics applications that can be connected to
databases and will offer PostScript Level 2 and support
three-dimensional graphics via 3-D Renderman. Pantone color has
also been added. Intel 80486-based systems running NextStep 486
and Next computers running NextStep 3.0 will be able to
interoperate seamlessly.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NextStep 486 (Operating system) (Product introduction)
Intel 80486 (Microprocessor) (Usage)
NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Product Introduction
Operating systems.
Feature: illustration
photograph.

Record#: 11 760 828.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26481 *****

Journal: MacWEEK Jan 27 1992 v6 n4 p92(1)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Coastal Associates Publishing L.P. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Jobs makes NeXT move to 486 CPUs. (Steve Jobs; NeXT Inc.; central
processing units)
Author: Farber, Daniel.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product development).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Product enhancement).
Topic: Product Development
Enhancements
Operating Systems
Microcomputers
Sales.
Person: Jobs, Steven (Management).

Record#: 11 773 842.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

While Apple showed its latest Unix operating system, A/UX 3.0, at UniForum
'92 in San Francisco, NeXT Inc. CEO Steve Jobs held court across town and
announced another change in his company's direction.

With sales of only about 40,000 machines to date, NeXT has decided to unleash
its proprietary, object-oriented system software for Intel 486 processors.

Speaking at NeXTWORLD Expo, Jobs said NeXTstep 486 for end users is expected
in the third quarter of this year for $995. A developer version will be
available for $2,495. Several manufacturers of IBM PC compatibles, including
Dell Computer Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp., are expected to offer NeXTstep
486.

Jobs also introduced NeXTstep 3.0, which is due this spring. He claimed the
new NeXTstep is three to five years ahead of its competitors, which include
the Macintosh OS, Microsoft's Windows NT, IBM Corp. and Apple's PowerOpen
Unix environment, and the fledgling Taligent project.

"Taligent is the best thing that ever happened to us. They endorsed the
direction we have already taken," Jobs said. He also said the company would
focus its efforts on taking market share from Sun Microsystems Inc.

In addition, Jobs announced a family of NeXT computers to be built around
Motorola Inc.'s 33-MHz 68040 chip, plus a 360-dpi color printer. Due in the
second quarter at $3,495, the NeXT Color Printer will have a Canon Bubble
Jet-based engine and support PostScript Level 2.

Jobs said that sales for last year climbed from around $28 million in 1990 to
$127.5 million last year. He declined to discuss the company's
profitability. -- By Daniel Farber


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26680 *****

Journal: PC Week Jan 27 1992 v9 n4 p137(2)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT makes play for corporate market.
Author: McCarthy, Vance.

Abstract: NeXT Inc will introduce a microcomputer-based version of its
NextStep operating system at the 1991 NextWorld Expo trade show,
targeting a more mainstream audience than the technical market to
which the NeXT workstation has traditionally appealed. NeXT will
aim the new version of NextStep at corporate and government users,
but the product's heavy hardware requirements may limit its
appeal. It requires an 80486 microprocessor and a 100Mbyte hard
disk drive; some analysts are skeptical that NeXT will achieve its
goal of becoming a major microcomputer systems-software player.
Only 247 applications for NextStep are currently available. The
vendor hopes to persuade vendors of high-end microcomputers to
bundle NextStep with their products; Dell Computer Corp and Compaq
are reportedly considering such an arrangement.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Planning).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Product enhancement).
Topic: Strategic Planning
Market Entry
Product Development
Workstations
Operating systems
Software Migration.
Feature: illustration
photograph.

Record#: 11 762 716.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NEXT MAKES PLAY FOR CORPORATE MARKET

--------------------

By Vance McCarthy

SAN FRANCISCO -- NeXT Computer Inc. last week made its first major bid to
break into the mainstream corporate market by unveiling a version of its
NextStep object-based operating system for 486 PCs at the NeXTWorld Expo.

NextStep 486, slated for delivery in the spring, is part of a wide-ranging
product rollout aimed at what NeXT CEO Steven Jobs has called a "refocusing"
of the company to target mainstream corporate and government users. One
factor that may limit NextStep's appeal in corporations is that in order to
run the object-oriented environment, a 486 PC must be equipped with a minimum
100M-byte hard-disk drive. Some analysts are skeptical that NextStep will
make NeXT a big player in the PC market."NeXT has a very go od development
environment, but I doubt that will be enough to make them a real player in
the PC arena," said Andrew Allison, editor of RISC Management, an industry
newsletter in Carmel, Calif. So far, only 247 applications run on NextStep,
far fewer than the thousands available on PCs. NeXT's ability to attract
traditional PC users in large numbers may depend in large part on its ability
to convince PC makers to bundle NextStep on PCs. The Redwood City, Calif.,
company has not yet announced any agreements with PC makers. And last week,
William Filip, president of IBM's Advanced Workstation Division, said IBM has
no plans to put NextStep on its RS/6000 workstations. IBM signed a widely
publicized deal to license NextStep more than two years ago, but since then,
IBM has not released NextStep.

One source close to NeXT said Compaq Computer Corp. and Dell Computer Corp.
are considering offering NextStep with their 486 PCs. NeXT demonstrated
NextStep running on Compaq and Dell 486s at NeXTWorld.

NextStep 486 also enables NeXT computers and 486 PCs to interoperate
seamlessly, as well as communicate with DOS and Windows-based PCs,
Macintoshes and Unix-based workstations, Jobs said, announcing networking
support -- including Network File System, NetWare for PCs and AppleShare.
The developer version will sell for $2,495, the user version for $995.

Jobs last week also showed off a new family of desktops based on the new
33MHz 68040 CPU from Motorola Inc., the company's first "photo-realistic"
color printer, and a variety of database and graphics application packages
for linking files from different platforms -- including PCs, workstations and
Macs.

Armed with this suite of products, slated for shipping between now and the
third quarter, NeXT hopes to attract more business from corporate
information-systems managers looking to quickly build and deploy
mission-critical custom applications, said NeXT officials.

NeXT's new focus only crystallized within the company over the past six
months. "We did a lousy job of marketing up until about September of last
year," Jobs said. "The largest limiting factor [to our success] was our own
ignorance of what we wanted to do and who our customer was."

Jobs has specifically targeted three markets -- financial services, health
care, and state and various federal and local government -- this year.
NextStep 486 is designed to allow application developers to build
mission-critical custom applications as much as 10 times faster than with
conventional software development tools, Jobs said.

NextStep provides developers using 486 PCs the same integrated user interface
and object-oriented development tools offered for the Motorola-based NeXT
machine. NextStep 486 also includes built-in E-mail and graphics
applications.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26784 *****

Journal: Computergram International Jan 24 1992 n1843
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Apt Data Services (UK) 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXTWorld news. (1992)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product development).
Topic: NextWorld Expo
Trade Shows
Computer industry
Product Development
Workstations.

Record#: 11 744 680.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

NeXTWORLD NEWS

NeXT unveils NeXTstep 486 as NeXTWorld opens

- but is not able to announce any takers

There was no word of any of the companies that had been said to be lining up
to adopt it - OEM partnerships will be announced in the coming months, it
says, but NeXT Computer Inc duly unveiled its NeXTStep 486 version of its
object-oriented system software for machines using the 80486 microprocessor
late Wednesday at NeXTWorld Expo, being held at the San Francisco Civic
Auditorium. With the environment, 80486-based computers running NeXTstep 486
can interoperate seamlessly with NeXT computers and communicate with MS-DOS-
and Windows-based machines, Macintosh and other Unix computers - it has
built-in Network File System for workstations, Novell Inc NetWare for MS-DOS
machines and AppleShare for Macintosh computers. NeXT claims that because it
supplies the entire development environment, converting current NeXTstep
applications to run under NeXTstep 486 is "both simple and reliable" - Lotus
Development Corp, WordPerfect Corp, Adobe Systems Inc and Wolfram Research,
have created versions of their NeXT applications for NeXTstep 486. The
environment requires 8Mb to 16Mb of main memory, a mouse or similar pointing
device and either 120Mb for the user version or about 400Mb for the developer
version on hard disk. NeXTstep graphics can be displayed as grey scale on
some Super-VGA cards, and as 16-bit colour on EISA colour graphics boards
that it expects will soon be announced by major manufacturers and these will
enable the entire installed base of 80486 users to run NeXTstep 486. And the
newer 80486-based computers expected by NeXT to ship in the first half of
this year will incorporate their graphics memory on the processor bus,
enabling faster display of NeXTstep's colour graphics. NeXTstep 486 will be
available as a shrink-wrapped product in user and developer versions and
through some OEM customers, pre-installed on their 80486-based computers.
The user version will cost $1,000, and the developer version will be $2,500.

NeXTstep 3.0 accompanied by souped

up hardware, colour printer

NeXT also formally announced the new Release 3.0 of its NeXTstep environment
- without elaborating on the improvements beyond saying that it had
additional communications features, tools for developing applications for
databases and three-dimensional graphics, integrated foreign language support
and integrated help. On the hardware front, it has moved to 33MHz 68040s
from the 25MHz version previously used in its computers, dubbing the new
machines Turbo models.The new Turbo machines are rated at 25 MIPS, compared
with 18 MIPS for the 25 MHz versions. It also cut prices an average 10% and
launched a 360 dots per inch four-colour printer and external CD-ROM drive.
NeXTstep Release 3.0 will be available from NeXT in the second quarter. The
NeXTstation Turbo and NeXTstation Colour Turbo workstations are available now
with the NeXTcube Turbo following next quarter. Prices start at $5,000 for a
monochrome 25MHz NeXTstation with 8Mb memory and a 105Mb hard disk. Prices
for NeXTstation Turbo begin at $6,000 for a monochrome version with 8Mb and
250Mb disk. NeXTstation Colour prices start at $8,000 for the 25MHz version
with 16Mb and 105Mb disk. The NeXTstation Colour Turbo, with 16Mb and 250Mb
hard disk is from $9,000. The NeXTcube Turbo will start at $11,000 for a
monochrome system with 16Mb and 400Mb hard disk. The NeXT Colour Printer is
priced at $3,500, next quarter; the External CD-ROM Drive is out now at $900.

NeXT achieves 443% increase in 1991

sales - but only to $127m

The jury is still out - and it is going to be a long wait for a verdict - on
whether NeXT Computer Inc can become anything more than a minor player in the
computer market of the 1990s, but the fact that the company is still around
and growing fast is a promising portent. Nevertheless, although fourth
quarter revenues were around the $34m mark, and the company says that
December was strong, it had been looking for $50m. For 1991, it achieved a
443% increase in turnover over 1990 to $127m, but gives no indication of
whether it has yet turned a profit. And it seems that the name of Steve Jobs
may strike more positive chords abroad than it does at home these days,
because a remarkable 43% of business came from Europe and the Pacific - where
the mighty Canon Inc is in charge fo sales: 43% foreign business is a much
higher proportion than is typical for a company in NeXT's stage of
development. Third party applications are starting to reach significant
numbers, hitting 247 from just 63 at the end of 1990; and there are now 260
NeXT user groups in 28 countries, up from 65 groups a year ago.

NeXT computers will be able to run as

front-ends to Teradata's DBC/1012

The one big deal so far announced at NeXTWorld is that El Segundo,
California-based Teradata Corp, in process of being acquired by AT&T Co's NCR
Corp, has signed a joint marketing agreement and a NeXT Database Kit Adaptor
for the Teradata DBC/1012 Data Base Computer. With the DBKit Adaptor, NeXT
users gain access to the DBC/1012 relational database management system which
uses an array of Intel Corp iAPX-86 microprocessors to sort through hundreds
of Gigabytes of data stored on disk. The two companies signed a joint
marketing agreement providing for exchange of technical information, prospect
referrals, training and joint sales co-operation. The NeXT Database Kit
extends the power of NeXTstep's object-oriented system software to database
application development. DBKit is an integral component of NeXTstep Release
3.0, and is claimed significantly to speed the development and implementation
of database applications with graphical user interfaces. It has a layered
architecture that provides for the development of database adaptors to
translate data source-independent queries into function calls for specific
vendors' databases. The promise of an adaptor for the DBC/1012 from Teradata
means that NeXTstep users with no knowledge of the DBC/1012 or its syntax
requirements will be able to develop object-oriented database applications
with graphic front ends. The DBKit Adaptor for the DBC/1012 will go into
NeXTstep 3.0 beta test sites at the end of the quarter.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26800 *****

Journal: Newsbytes Jan 24 1992
* Full Text COPYRIGHT Newsbytes Inc. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Next heralds 400+ percent growth, new products. (Nextstep 486
object-oriented operating system) (Product Announcement)
Author: Rohrbough, Linda.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Finance).
Product: NextStep 486 (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Financial Report
Revenue
Profit
Growth
Fourth Quarter
Product Introduction
Operating systems
Software Packages
Object-oriented languages.

Record#: 11 888 437.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

****Next Heralds 400+ Percent Growth, New Products 01/24/92 SAN FRANCISCO,
CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1992 JAN 24 (NB) -- Next announced it is experiencing an
unheard-of growth spurt, reporting a 443 percent increase compared to its
revenue last year. The company reported $127 million in revenues for its
fiscal year ending December 31, 1991.

Steve Jobs, inventor of the Apple Computer and current president and chief
executive officer of Next Computer, said: "Our 1991 results are a solid
accomplishment, especially given the worst recessionary environment in
memory." Jobs gave the keynote speech, appropriately, at the NextWorld show
in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Jobs said Next has to be significantly better to get the advantage over
entrenched systems like Sun. "Nextstep has been heralded as being
significantly better than Sun's and everyone else's system software, in part
because it allows customers to create custom applications up to 10 times
faster," Jobs said.

Next said the increase in revenues is due in part to the company's change in
marketing focus from higher education in 1990 to business and government
customers in 1991. Next also said 43 percent of its revenue was from its
European and Pacific operations. The company is projecting half its revenues
will come from outside the US in 1992.


Third party applications for the Next are increasing in numbers as well from
63 to 247 during 1991. Next user groups went from 65 in number to over 260
groups in 28 countries, the company added.

Next also announced several new products, including an operating system that
is designed for Intel 486-based computers.

Called Nextstep 486, the operating system is object-oriented and is the same
operating system offered on the Next, the computer designed and built by Next
Computer. The Nextstep 486 allows Next and 486-based computers to
interoperate seamlessly with each other, as well as with Apple Macintosh,
Unix and IBM or compatible computers.

Rumors were flying prior to the announcement that Compaq would be among those
licensing the new Intel processor version of the NextStep software, but a
definitive agreement from the two firms failed to materialize on schedule.

Current Nextstep applications can be ported to the Nextstep 486 easily, Next
said. Lotus, Wordperfect, Adobe and Wolfram Research, have created versions
of their Next applications running in Nextstep 486.

The Nextstep 486 requires 4 to 16 megabytes (MB) of random access memory
(RAM) and a mouse or pointing device. The user version of Nextstep requires
120 MB of free hard disk space for use and is offered at a retail price of
$995. The developer version, which requires a 400 MB of hard disk space, is
being offered for $2,495.

Next has also announced faster, color versions of the Nextstation which the
company says are also less expensive. These "turbo" versions of the
Nextstation, Nextstation Color and Nextcube are built around the Motorola
68040 processor running at 33 megahertz (MHz).

Previous versions of these new "turbo" Next computers were based on the
Motorola 68040 chip, but only at 25 MHz, Next said. The turbo computers have
been rated at 25 million instructions per second (MIPS), compared to 18 MIPS
for the 25 MHz versions.

Next said it has also reduced prices on its other computer configurations by
an average of 10 percent.

Other announcements by the company included the debut of a 360 dots-per-inch
(dpi), four-color printer; an external compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM)
drive; a Next Database Kit (DBKit) Adaptor for the Teradata DBC/1012 Data
Base Computer; and a joint marketing deal with Teradata Corporation. The
joint marketing agreement provides for the exchange of technical information,
prospect referrals, training, and joint sales cooperation, Next said.

More information about Next products is available toll-free at 800-879-6398
(800-TRY-NEXT).

(Linda Rohrbough/19920124/Press Contact: Allison Thomas, Allison Thomas
Associates for Next Computer, tel 818-981-1520)


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #26928 *****

Journal: San Jose Mercury News Jan 23 1992 p1F(2).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NeXT dives into rich software market. (NeXT Inc.'s NeXTstep
operating system)
Author: Gomes, Lee.

Abstract: Steven Jobs announces that his computer company, NeXT Inc, intends
to sell a version of the NeXTstep operating system on Intel-based
microcomputers. Jobs wants companies such as Compaq and Dell
Computer Corp to sell the operating system on their computers, but
no actual deal is yet concluded. Industry observers judge
NeXTstep to be a very good operating system. It needs an 80486
microprocessor and considerable memory to run on an Intel system.
Various companies are expected to compete, trying to establish
their operating systems as the standard for the next generation of
computers. Such companies include Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft
Corp, Novell Corp and the Apple-IBM alliance.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Marketing).
Product: NeXTstep (Operating system) (Marketing).
Topic: Market Entry
Operating Systems
Competition
Marketing Strategy.
Feature: illustration
photograph.
Person: Jobs, Steven (Management).

Record#: 11 746 850.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #29035 *****

Journal: P.C. Letter Jan 13 1992 v8 n1 p1(4)
* Full Text COPYRIGHT PCW Communications Inc. 1992.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Why portable operating systems are a joke. (Systems Trends)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Topic: Operating systems
Software Migration
Open Systems
Product Development
Interoperability
Microcomputers
User Needs
System Design
Applications Programming.

Record#: 11 722 818.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Full Text:

Sunsoft is porting Solaris 2.0 to the Intel platform from the Sparc. Next,
according to press reports, is porting Nextstep to the Intel platform and a
future RISC platform from the Motorola. Windows NT is being designed to run
on both the Intel and Mips platforms. Apple is designing Pink to run on the
Motorola, Intel, and PowerPC platforms. The Santa Cruz Operation's Open
Desktop, which is based on OSF/Motif from the Open Software Foundation (and
also Unix System, Release 4.0), will run on any platform supported by OSF,
which includes Intel and most RISC platforms as well as a host of proprietary
ones.

Does that sound pretty much like what you think is going on? It is one of the
main trends in OS design recently, and it should be called The 1991
Lemmings-LovePortability Phenomenon. It could also be the biggest practical
joke played on customers by the computer industry so far. Don't get me
wrong, since I think all of the vendors cited above (which includes every
major vendor in the industry except Hewlett Packard, which will probably join
the fray soon enough with HP/UX) are totally sincere in their desire to sell
customers what they want. But it is a joke, and the reason it is a joke is
that microprocessors are not platforms, and porting operating systems from
one to another not only doesn't solve the customers problem, it makes the
problem worse.

Let me say that again to make it perfectly clear. Microprocessors are not
platforms. And again: microprocessor's are not platforms.

We could easily get into semantics here, since my statement depends in part
on how you define the word "platform." So I'll start with that definition: To
me and to most customers, the implication of the word "platform" is that it
is something that supports the entire infrastructure of a computing system.
In other words, a platform is not a microprocessor but the entire computing
system that is supported by applications software, peripheral hardware,
distribution, and the rest of the infrastructure of the computer industry.
And that means that a platform is a combination of elements: the
microprocessor as well as the operating system, the BIOS, the rest of the
hardware system (including bus connectors, disk formats, network interfaces,
display interfaces, graphics standards, and so on) and the standard
configuration (which is really the minimum amount of hardware that software
developers believe they can count on). Platforms are things like the Apple
II (II+, IIe, IIc); the Apple IIgs (a different platform from the older Apple
II, because it had a different processor, operating system, graphics display,
disk format, and so forth); the classic Macintosh (68000, black-and-white,
small screen); the color Macintosh (68030, color, sound processor,
expansion); the IBM PC (8088/86/286, MS-DOS, monochrome screen, character
graphics, 5.25.-inch floppy); Windows (80386+, Windows 3.0, DOS 3.3+, 60MB+
hard disk, 3.5 inch floppy, 2MB memory, VGA+ graphics, mouse); Sparcstation
(Sparcstation IPC or greater, SunOS, NFS, 8MB memory, network services,
high-resolution, 16-inch, gray-scale screen); Nextstep (68040,8MB memory,
Nextstep 2.0, etc.). These are platforms, all of which include
microprocessors but include much more as well - a complete computing system,
in other words; something the customer can buy and expect to get applications
to work on and be able to build on over time.

Say you accept the basic premise here, which is that customers buy systems
(or solutions, in the worn-out lingo of the sales & marketing staff). So
what? The so-what is that you can begin to see lots of vendors, distracted by
the superficial elements of Microsoft's success as a system-software vendor,
believing that they should adopt the same model. So they are beginning to
design their operating systems to work on a generic notion of hardware and
systems, rather than focusing on solving their customers problems. And that
will ultimately lead those vendors into ruin, because they will lose whatever
competitive advantage they once had.

The current fashion, expressed so well by a recent article in the Harvard
Business Review (see "'Computerless Computer Company' Equals
ThoughtlessThinking," Issue 7.16, September 16, 1991) is that the smart way
to be successful is to sell software and let all the stupid companies fight
it out for the commodity-oriented, profitless hardware business. The two
most recent converts to this fashion are Sun Microsystems and Next Computer.
Sun has already announced its delivery schedule for the Intel-based version
of what it now calls Solaris 2.0, and has taken the rather drastic step of
splitting itself into different companies in order to implement this
strategy. Next has not announced its schedule, but is widely expected to do
so at its Nextworld Expo in San Francisco in two weeks (and it is not
expected to divide the company up to do so). The theory behind both
conversions is that, if everybody thinks these companys' system software is
so great, why force customers to buy a particular kind of hardware to get it?
Why not let customers run the same system software on the hardware they
already have and prefer, namely machines built to run DOS.

Ill tell you why that thinking is a joke. Me reason is that customers don't
buy operating systems and then install them on whatever hardware happens to
be lying around. Customers buy systems that seem likely to be helpful in
solving their problems. Read that sentence carefully, because it's very easy
to skip over as just another marketing statement. The absolute, repeatedly
proven truth is that customers do not buy technology; they buy what they
believe will make their situation better, they buy solutions to their
problems. Their problems may be defined in many different ways, including
the problem of making the guy who signs off on a purchase more successful in
his career, but that is the objective the customer has. And when they
perceive that there is a solution to their problem, they buy both hardware
and software to solve that problem even if they buy them from different
vendors or if they are made by different vendors. an other words, what looks
like discrete purchases to the industry is actually being bought as
integrated systems by the customer.)

So the question to ask these vendors who seem to believe in porting their
system software to whatever microprocessor seems to be handy is: Why does the
customer want that particular operating system to run on that particular
microprocessor? Do they believe that the software developers will make their
programs run on that combination? Do they believe that the resellers (even
they are the vendors own salespeople) will learn how to support and service
that particular combination? Do they believe that their own administrators
and developers will have an easier time making new applications and managing
their systems? What's remarkable is that none of the vendors actually point
to benefits like this in defining their portability strategies. Instead they
talk continually about how they will be able to sell their operating systems
more easily, or how their software developers will love it because getting an
application to a new platform will require a simple recompile instead of
re-coding; or how their distribution channels will love it because they can
stock just one set of hardware. But no vendor ever successfully defines why
the customer will love it.

They won't love it. And the reason they won't love it is because they won't
believe in it. Customers are smart people, generally speaking. And they
know that, if a vendor does something to make the vendor's life easier,
usually the vendor is not really committed to that strategy. Instead, what
is really meaningful to customers is what happens when a vendor tackles a
hard problem, particularly one that has vexed a large number of customers.
Porting an operating system from one instruction set to another and from one
system definition to another is not a very hard or challenging problem.
Sure, it takes a lot of effort, but the result is that the same set of
functionality that ran on one system now runs on another. What customers
love is when a vendor tackles a problem like: making an operating system use
the new linear, protected memory design of a chip like the 80386 without
losing compatibility with existing software (Windows 3.0); making an
operating system use more than one application in memory without losing the
user (Macintosh System 7.0); integrating the network into a working system
(Solaris 1.0).

So here's the bottom line: Solaris 2.0 on Intel computers will be a failure
and may even distract Sun from its main chance (of the Sparcstation platform)
to the degree that Sun cannot continue to be a growth company; Nextstep 3.0
on Intel computers win be a failure and may distract Next Computer from its
main chance of finding a longterm, high-value microprocessor for its platform
to replace the now-aged 68040; Windows NT's only hope is on Mips-based
computers, if a system configuration ever stablizes for that set of hardware
and Microsoft successfully defines NT as the preferred development
environment for that configuration; Pink win only be successful on the
PowerPC, if Motorola implements their single-ship design and Apple integrates
that single chip into a useful computer system (meaning better than whatever
is available from anyone else in 1994); and Open Desktop will never be a
successful environment until Santa Cruz Operation or another vendor can
define a unique system configuration for it that is itself useful (see above;
the one possibility for that system being some derivation of Silicon
Graphics' Iris Indigo). In other words, porting operating systems around is
not only not a good strategy, it may well kill or maim several of the vendors
that have adopted this as a strategy.

DEMO 92 NOTE: Demo 92 conference registrants will have a special opportunity
that will not be available anywhere else. That is that we have arranged for
the side-by-side demonstrations of the next release of each of seven
different operating environments: Windows NT 3.1, OS/2 2.0, Solaris 2.0,
Macintosh System 7.1, Open Desktop 2.0, and Penpoint 386, as well as one
other that will be announced in the next two weeks. For those who have the
opportunity to see these demonstrations, take special notice of which
hardware the vendors choose to demonstrate their systems on, That will give a
strong signal of what the vendor considers strategic and therefore important
enough for customers to consider.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #33090 *****

Journal: InfoWorld Dec 23 1991 v13 n51 p8(1).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NextStep to integrate Mac, PC LANs. (local area networks) (NexStep
3.0 Unix-like operating system under development by Next Inc.)
Author: Coale, Kristi.

Abstract: The NextStep 3.0 interface will feature support for Apple
Macintosh EtherTalk, Novell NetWare and Microsoft SQL Server when
it reaches the market in March or April 1992. The addition of the
NetWare IPX transport protocol will enable NextStep to gain access
to files on NetWare servers. Next CEO Steve Jobs says the primary
goal is to allow brand-new Next computers to work in multivendor
environments. MIS managers say the current version of NextStep
makes it hard to link the Next computer with other vendors'
systems. John Rymer, editor-in-chief of the Boston-based 'Network
Monitor,' says version 3.0's enhancements will not necessarily
boost sales for the Next computer. Novell Inc's licensing
agreement with Next represents one more step into the arena of
Unix and enterprise-wide networks.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product development).
Product: NeXTstep 3.0 (Operating system) (Product development).
Topic: Connectivity
Compatible software
Unix-like operating systems
Multivendor systems.

Record#: 11 676 742.


***** Computer Select, June 1992 : Doc #34253 *****

Journal: InfoWorld Dec 16 1991 v13 n50 p1(2).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: NextStep for 486s to debut at NextWorld. (Next Inc. plans new
version of NextStep operating system) (Product Announcement)
Author: Quinlan, Tom; Corcoran, Cate.

Abstract: Next Inc plans to introduce NextPC, a version of its NextStep
operating system for Intel-based microcomputers, at the NextWorld
trade show in Jan 1992. The new product will run on the 80486
microprocessor and will be functionally identical to the upcoming
NextStep 3.0 for the company's workstation line. Next hopes to
provide incentives for software developers to create applications
for the operating system. Next faces fierce competition from the
Apple/IBM alliance and Advanced Computing Environment initiative,
but most analysts believe NextStep has a good chance for success.
NextPC will reportedly require 4Mbytes of RAM and a
high-resolution graphics board as well as a 486 microprocessor.
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Descriptors..
Company: NeXT Inc. (Product introduction).
Product: NextPC (Operating system) (Product introduction).
Topic: Operating systems
Product Introduction
Software Migration.

Record#: 11 634 546.