The revolution is HERE!
Ed Gould
> This idea has been brought up and shot down so many times it makes
> me tired to think about it. But it's usually been shot down because
> it's been hypothetical. You couldn't do it yet, so there were lots
> of reason why it should never be done. But now it's been done,
> and the world will never be the same.
The revolution has been here for years. It's on the X11R4 tape.
Or, at least an implementation (the Andrew Message System), that
does everything you're so excited about, plus more. Does this
thing, in addition to graphics and multi-font text, do animations,
sound, or spreadsheets, in a way that preserves those items as
separate objects in the message? AMS does. Does it run on any
number of platforms (anything running X11R4)? AMS does.
Yes, there are reasons why the "revolution" didn't catch on before.
But lack of implementation isn't it.
I wish people would get out of their own closets and look around
at what else is available (even just the stuff that's publicly
known - AMS was described in part of a half-day session at the
USENIX in Dallas a few years back, before X11R4 was released) before
jumping up and down that they'd just invented the wheel. It may not
be anything all that wonderful (or it may be), but it did everything
described here years ago.
--
Ed Gould No longer formally affiliated with,
e...@mtxinu.COM and certainly not speaking for, mt Xinu.
"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady. I'll fight them as an engineer."
Robert Smart
on the new multi-media mail format. Here is an extract from comp.archives
[no copyright on it yet :-)].
Archive-name: mail/formats/richmail/1991-06-18
Archive-directory: thumper.bellcore.com:/pub/nsb/ [128.96.41.1]
Original-posting-by: n...@thumper.bellcore.com (Nathaniel Borenstein)
Original-subject: Internet Draft on Multimedia, Multipart Mail
Reposted-by: e...@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
I am pleased to announce the publication of an Internet Draft document
entitled "Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of
Internet Message Bodies" by Ned Freed and myself. This document is the
result of several months worth of work on the part of dozens of people
who have participated in the Internet Extensions Task Force Working
Group on SMTP Extensions, and in the ietf-822 mailing list. As an
Internet Draft, the document has no status as a standard, but specifies
a protocol that many of us hope to see evolve, with modifications, into
an Internet standard eventually. In particular, after a few months for
experimentation and comment, we will submit a revised version as an RFC
(Request for Comments), which is the next step on that path.
The document is about 40 pages long, and specifies several
backward-compatible extensions to the Internet Message Format standard
(RFC 822). In particular, it specifies standardized and robust ways to
do the following:
-- Describe the contents and type of a message body, e.g. as audio or
image or formatted text data in a certain format.
-- Encode arbitrary binary or 8-bit data for transmission via 7-bit SMTP.
-- Use certain non-ASCII character sets to transmit text in virtually
any natural language
-- Combine multiple parts, each of potentially differing types, in a
single email message.
At least four, and probably more, independent implementations of this
protocol are currently in progress. Already, for example, it has been
used to interchange multipart audio/video/text mail between two users of
independent software using two different windowing systems. After a few
months of such experimentation and comments from a wider community, a
new version of the document will be drafted and submitted as an RFC.
If you are interested in reading this document, which is approximately
40 pages long, it will be available soon as an Internet Draft.
Alternately, it is available now via anonymous ftp from the host
thumper.bellcore.com, in the directory /pub/nsb. The PostScript version
is called "BodyFormats.ps" and the plain text version is called
"BodyFormats.txt".
Also available in that directory is a much shorter document that
describes a configuration mechanism for compatibly extending existing
mail-reading agents to handle arbitrary mail types of the kind described
by the first document. (This document is my own work, and does not
reflect the work of the IETF working group or any other semi-official
body.) Copies of that document are availble in the same place, under
the names "Configuration.ps" and "Configuration.txt".
Although I encourage you to read and comment on these documents, I also
encourage you to relax and do so carefully and at your leisure. As you
will read in the document, we do not expect to begin working hard on the
next draft until late September, so there's no reason to rush hasty
comments to us in the next few weeks. Of course, your comments are
welcome at any time before that, as well.
If you do not have ftp access to either the Internet Drafts or to
thumper.bellcore.com, you may send mail to me (Nathaniel Borenstein
<n...@thumper.bellcore.com>) and I will send them to you. Please specify
whether you want the text or PostScript versions.
-- Nathaniel Borenstein, Bellcore
-- MSEN Archive Service file verification
thumper.bellcore.com
total 461
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 115424 Jun 20 15:27 BodyFormats.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 195185 Jun 18 20:03 BodyFormats.ps
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 87190 Jun 18 20:03 BodyFormats.ez
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 13952 Jun 18 14:27 Configuration.ez
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 18178 Jun 18 02:55 Configuration.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 4099 39301 Jun 18 02:55 Configuration.ps
found richmail ok
thumper.bellcore.com:/pub/nsb/
Ralph Zazula
I also think that there are great possiblilites for those of us using
NewsGrazer (your message did have some problems on my end, though. See the
bottom of this message for what I ended up doing). I don't think anyone
outside of comp.sys.next could flame this group for wasting bandwidth by
posting multi-media messages. Just use alt.sex.pictures as an example of the
very same thing for a seemingly less fruitful purpose.
I do see how it could be frustrating for readers of C.S.N that do not have
NeXT's running NewsGrazer. But, I don't think mirroring the C.S.N news group(s)
with RTF versions is a good idea either.
PROPOSAL: I propose we experiment with RTF postings. To enable us to
distinguish them from regular postings, I propose we append (or prepend)
something to the "Subject" line. How about:
Subject: (RTF) Info on new NeXT software...
I think putting the "(RTF)", or whatever, as the FIRST thing in the "Subject"
will prevent it from being clipped off of the screen. Also, I think we have to
agree on a standard notation so that people using sophisticated News readers
can either filter out the RTF messages or select them eaisily.
We should also try to post ASCII versions of the messages to keep others from
missing out on what is going on. Even if they just say: "Cool graphic inserted
here...". I'd like to see:
1029883 Subject: (RTF) Info on new NeXT software...
1029884 Subject: Info on new NeXT software
Etc...
Comments???
Ralph Zazula
University of Arizona
NeXT Campus Consultant
Graduate Student
Physics Dept
5'11"
drive's a 1970 Old's
---- If you couldn't read Glenn's posting, read on... -----
Well, something didn't work on my end... I was able to get to
look at the RTF version after following the following steps...
1) double-click on the RTF icon at the bottom of the message
2) delete everything execpt the lines that start with M
3) put a line at the top saying : begin 666 test.rtf
4) save it as test.uue
5) chant: uudecode test.uue
6) double-click on the test.rtf icon in a browser to start Edit on it
Guido van Rossum
[in response to]
>> The Revolution is HERE!
>Does it run on any number of platforms (anything running X11R4)? AMS does.
Uhmm, AMS (Andrew) does not run on anything running X11R4. Andrew
requires hacks in assembly and various other undocumented interfaces
to have a chance to work. The last time I tried to bring up AMS on a
Sparc running SunOS4.1 I had to give up, and later the Andrew people
acknowledged in their mailing list that SunOS4.1 required patches to
the system. I haven't seen such a patch announced yet. A port to
SGI machines is even less likely to appear...
(I don't disagree with you that the aforementioned "Revolution" was
here before (and getting the NeXT software running on a Sparc or SGI
machine would be at least as hard as getting Andrew), but saying that
AMS runs on all X1R4 platform is stretching it a bit...)
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <gu...@cwi.nl>
"Floccinaucinihilipilification"
wal...@capd.jhuapl.edu
If this sort of thing catches on, I wonder if people will become more interested in
writing (including, but not limited to, spelling and grammar) as the availability of
these sorts of tools increases (hopefully through the sale of more NeXTs)?
If my memory serves me (and that's increasingly doubtful), Knuth developed TeX at
least partly because how things looked on a page were important to him. For many
(most? vast majority?) people, reading is an aesthetic experience. So is using a
NeXT. Keith Ohlfs has contributed immeasuribly to my enjoyment of the NeXT; and
many of the people who contribute software have made their software and
documentation aesthetically pleasing (true on the Mac as well; in fact, in my
experience, it seems much of the best software--free or otherwise--is frequently
beautifully documented no matter where it appears; Macs and NeXTs make this easier
than most).
So I share Glenn's enthusiasm for the new NewsGrazer. Even if it means we may some
day have to put up with a successor to the spelling flame and the grammar flame:
the aesthetics flame.
c.f.waltrip
Internet: <wal...@capsrv.jhuapl.edu>
Opinions expressed are my own.
Eric Thayer
> The revolution has been here for years. It's on the X11R4 tape.
> Or, at least an implementation (the Andrew Message System), that
> does everything you're so excited about, plus more. Does this
> thing, in addition to graphics and multi-font text, do animations,
> sound, or spreadsheets, in a way that preserves those items as
> separate objects in the message? AMS does. Does it run on any
> number of platforms (anything running X11R4)? AMS does.
Yes, but it is still exciting to see the rest of the world catch up with CMU
:-) :-)
..eric
Charles Herrick
Multi-media news is certainly coming, but it will also certainly be based
on the new multi-media mail format. Here is an extract from comp.archives
[no copyright on it yet :-)].
I am pleased to announce the publication of an Internet Draft document
entitled "Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of
Internet Message Bodies" by Ned Freed and myself.
While people elsewhere are working on the wording of their preliminary
requests for definitions for mechanisms for consideration of
implementation of protocols and standards,
people at NeXT seem to be writing and shipping applications. (;-}
--
"I am walking on the wire
and the wire is what the whole thing is about."
-- John Stewart
Timo Lehtinen
>there's an internet draft standard for this stuff.
There is also an RFC (from August 1980) on this stuff - #767.
So, what?
>please read it and mutate your existing stuff to either be able to
>import text from it, or use this as your native format.
>
>not hard to do at all, really -- all that this message would have
>needed was a header of
> Content-type: multipart; 1-P; the-revolution-is-here
>and a separator
> --the-revolution-is-here--
>after the text, and a header
> Content-type: application/x-newsgrazer
>
>right after the separator. Et voila, conformant.
Conformant, but useless. By labeling types of a lot of things (i.e.
typing different applications' file formats) we are not going to
achieve much of interoperability. There would be much better ways to
utilize the RFC-XXXX ideas here, but...
The NeXT attachement format is probably not the best possible way to
do multimedia mail but please if you're going to change it to something
else don't blindly adopt RFC-XXXX. It's far from a so called 'standard'
and even if it was a standard it's far from a proper design for a useful
one.
In many respects the NeXT multimedia document format is actually better.
Timo
--
____/ ___ ___/ / Kivihaantie 8 C 25
/ / / SF-00310 HELSINKI, Finland
____ / / / Phone: +358 0 1399 0151, +358 49 424 012
Stream Technologies Inc. Fax: +358 0 1399 0154
Charles Herrick
1029883 Subject: (RTF) Info on new NeXT software...
1029884 Subject: Info on new NeXT software
I'd prefer:
1029883 Subject: (RTF) Info on new NeXT software...
1029884 Subject: (ASCII) Info on new NeXT software
then writes:
3) put a line at the top saying : begin 666 test.rtf
your files, etc will be safer if you use 644 instead. For those who
might find this line a bit mystifying, this number sets the
protections of the uudecoded resultant file.
Eliot
letters, and such should take a long hard stare at the draft documents
meant to update RFCs 821 and 822. A richmail format is included for
one of the content types.
--
Eliot Lear
[le...@turbo.bio.net]
Doug DeJulio
> Yes, but it is still exciting to see the rest of the world catch up with CMU
Agreed, but it's rather horrible that it's being done in a totally
incompatible and IMHO inferior manner. It's great that NeXTs have
multimedia, I use it every day, but it's just not as good as the
multimedia support in ATK and AMS.
--
--
Doug DeJulio
d...@zardoz.club.cc.cmu.edu (NeXT mail)
dd...@andrew.cmu.edu (AMS/ATK mail)
Sean Eric Fagan
>Uhmm, AMS (Andrew) does not run on anything running X11R4.
It runs on SCO UNIX 3.2v2 running X11R3; it can run on anything.
--
Sean Eric Fagan | "What *does* that 33 do? I have no idea."
s...@kithrup.COM | -- Chris Torek
-----------------+ (to...@ee.lbl.gov)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.
Sean Eric Fagan
>Basically, it's a new version of the NeXT newsreader that supports
>multi-media
>postings containing Microsoft's Rich Text (you can change fonts, basically)
>and
>imbedded TIFF or EPS files.
Where's the source? Why is your posting so annoyingly longer than 80
characters per line? Why are you so excited about something that isn't
terribly exciting? (It was when it was first done, several years ago, but
now...)
Craig_E...@transarc.com
is HERE! Guido van Ros...@cwi.nl (962)
> The last time I tried to bring up AMS on a
> Sparc running SunOS4.1 I had to give up, and later the Andrew people
> acknowledged in their mailing list that SunOS4.1 required patches to
> the system. I haven't seen such a patch announced yet. A port to
> SGI machines is even less likely to appear...
You need the Andrew Toolkit (ATK) as well as the Andrew Message System
(AMS) to use its multi-media mail. Yes, ATK does dynamic loading, and
needs support for that either from assembly code or from the OS. The
patch (patch 10, to ATK, not to SunOS) that supports SunOS4.1 was
announced a few days ago. (I believe that this ATK patch upgrades it to
being able to use the SunOS4.1 built-in dynamic loading facility, which
clearly wasn't available in the fall of 1989 when the original X.V11R4
distribution was being gathered.) Yes, this isn't ``any platform that
runs X.V11R4'', but it's a lot of platforms.
Send mail to info-andr...@andrew.cmu.edu to be added to the
info-...@andrew.cmu.edu discussion/announcement list.
An SGI port might well be in the works; Andy Palay, former ATK manager,
now works for SGI.
Craig
Barry Friedman
[ Enthusiasm about including bandwidth intensive wysiwyg image deleted ]
>And best of all, there's a plain ol' ASCII version.
>
>Suddenly you can see (that was in italics, but you probably can't see that).
If your articles use conventions such as:
_Suddenly you can see_ (underscore for italics)
*this* (asterisks for bold).
see below#1 (footnotes)
Then they can easily be typeset from the plain text if one wishes.
I have written a number of filters which can take an article right off the
net and translate to troff typesetting markup. To my mind this is far more
desirable than including a proprietary image format with the article.
blf/
--
Barry Friedman
Phone: (613) 782-2389 UUCP: ...!uunet!chekov!friedman
Emax Computer Systems Inc. 440 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa, Ont. Canada K1R 5C4
Kurt Baumann
the RFC on this? We have a commercial newsreader for the Mac, and would be
just happy to support mixed documents, multimedia, whatever you want to call
it, but what happens to all of those normal users out there who don't have a
Mac, NeXT, or whatever it takes to deal with these messages? Do we create two
seperate classes of users on the network? One for the privalaged (sp?) and one
for the underclassed? It's fine to have all of these cool features but not so
cool if only a few can get them. There are many more Macs than NeXT's, and
many many more VT100 style terminals out there than Macs. It's fine to be
revolutionary (and I don't think that this is all that revolutionary), but if
you are the only one to enjoy it, then it is rather useless.
Kurt Baumann 703.709.9890
InterCon Systems Corp. Creators of fine TCP/IP products for
the Macintosh
John Coppinger
>I have written a number of filters which can take an article right off the
>net and translate to troff typesetting markup. To my mind this is far more
>desirable than including a proprietary image format with the article.
>Barry Friedman
>Phone: (613) 782-2389 UUCP: ...!uunet!chekov!friedman
>Emax Computer Systems Inc. 440 Laurier Ave. W., Ottawa, Ont. Canada K1R 5C4
The format is neither an image, nor is it proprietary. Rich Text Format
(RTF) is specified publicly. So are compress and uuencode, which are used
to keep the RTF data small. Finally, RTF is considerably more flexible
than troff typesetting.
There's been a lot of talk about "specifications in the works", or
"we have that on _____, but we just don't use it", or "that COULD be
done EASILY, just ...". I suggest following Jayson Adams' example:
Don't speculate. Deliver. While everyone else argues over the
--
-- John Coppinger "You'll find that your left cuff link --
-- University of Kentucky will be communicating with your right --
-- jo...@s.ms.uky.edu cuff link via satellite" --
-- jo...@graphlab.cc.uky.edu [NeXT] -- Nicholas Negroponte --
Bill Janssen
True, though I've been running Andrew on X11R4 since R4 came out, on Sun-3,
Sun-4, and SPARCStation hardware.
From the latest Andrew README:
"The Andrew Distribution is portable to a number of system types. Andrew is able to run on RT AOS 3.4, RT AIX 2.2.1, RS/6000 AIX3.1, PS/2 AIX1.2, Sun3 3.5, Sun3 4.1, Sun4 4.1, Vax Ultrix 3.1, Vax BSD, DEC MIPS, Apollo, HP, and Macintosh II MacMach."
Full sources are provided for those who wish to try other machines.
Bill
--
Bill Janssen jan...@parc.xerox.com (415) 494-4763
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304
Bill Janssen
have a chance of presenting.
Garance A. Drosehn
jan...@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) writes:
> Better still would be a content-type that non-newsgrazer UA's would
> have a chance of presenting.
Which would (most likely) make it less exciting for those on NeXT machines.
Those who *do* have next machines want something that fits in with that, while
people with other platforms want something that fits in well with that
platform.
I haven't tried whatever the new NewsGrazer is yet, but one example is that it
would be nice for NeXT users if a "reply thru mail" quoted the original article
in NextMail format. And comp.binaries.next (if such a thing existed) would be
pretty trivial to deal with, just drag the icon out of the usenet article.
- - - - - - - -
Garance Alistair Drosehn = g...@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA
Glenn Reid
> Where's the source? Why is your posting so annoyingly longer than 80
> characters per line? Why are you so excited about something that isn't
> terribly exciting?
I thought I asked you to flame me in EMAIL.... Please, folks, flame
me through mail, and I promise to summarize :-)
--
Glenn Reid NeXTMail: gl...@heaven.woodside.ca.us
RightBrain Software ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn
NeXT/PostScript developers 415-326-2974 (NeXTfax 326-2977)
Jerry Franklin
>Sean Eric Fagan writes
>> Where's the source? Why is your posting so annoyingly longer than 80
>> characters per line? Why are you so excited about something that isn't
>> terribly exciting?
>
>I thought I asked you to flame me in EMAIL.... Please, folks, flame
>me through mail, and I promise to summarize :-)
>
But he can't show everyone how witty and smart he is if he replied
via email, as long time readers of comp.unix.sysv386 already know.
Let's see how long it takes him to annoy the hell out of everyone
here as he has done in c.u.sysv386.
I guess he feels that he has flamed enough people there so now it's
our turn. Ignore him and maybe he'll go back under the rock he crawled
out of.
Simon Leinen
The last time I tried to bring up AMS on a Sparc running SunOS4.1 I
had to give up, and later the Andrew people acknowledged in their
mailing list that SunOS4.1 required patches to the system. I
haven't seen such a patch announced yet.
As of patchlevel 10, I had no problems whatsoever to get all of the
Andrew Toolkit running on Sparcs under SunOS 4.1.1 with a resolver
libc. After changing a few definitions in config/allsys.h and adding
one to config/site.mcr, I started `make World' and went home---next
morning I had a working Andrew system installed.
A port to SGI machines is even less likely to appear...
The distribution contains configuration files for the Pmax and for SCO
Unix on 386 boxes, so it should not be too difficult to interpolate a
version for SGIs (assuming they run a S5R3-ish OS with the MIPS
compilers).
Have fun,
--
Simon.
Charles Herrick
subject line. If you can read RTF, your read the post. If you want to
read the post, you deal with the RTF. If you can't deal with the RTF,
you don't read the post.
What to do if a USENET post has some RFC/Andrew/other-wierdness in it?
Specify this on the subject line. If you want to read the post, you
write-buy-download software to deal with it. If you don't want to do
this, you don't read the post.
People do this all the time in alt.binaries.pictures and the other
image USENET groups. Folks post .GIF images, I read 'em. Folks post
.GL or .ZIP images, I don't. Somehow, one survives. Wouldn't it be far
easier to write the software to translate RTF into ASCII than to fret
about how your computer doesn't handle RTF?
Doug DeJulio
> Wouldn't it be far easier to write the software to translate RTF into
> ASCII than to fret about how your computer doesn't handle RTF?
There exists code to translate RTF into an ATK datastream.
Considering that pbm exists, it might not be hard to convert NeXT
tiffs into ATK bitmaps. Combining these two might just let any ATK
site receive a large subset of NeXT mail without a problem.
Anthony A. Datri
It should certainly *display*, at least. No DPS requirement. The sources
are free, too.
>to have a chance to work. The last time I tried to bring up AMS on a
>Sparc running SunOS4.1 I had to give up, and later the Andrew people
>acknowledged in their mailing list that SunOS4.1 required patches to
>the system.
*Building* under 4.1x had problems. Building under 4.0.3 and running under
4.1x works just fine.
>I haven't seen such a patch announced yet.
You haven't been looking very hard -- patch 10 is out.
>machine would be at least as hard as getting Andrew), but saying that
>AMS runs on all X1R4 platform is stretching it a bit...)
Someone here got an old version to run on Convex machines long ago, and when
I get a few hours I'll make the latest stuff build too.
--
Use your wheels: that is what they are for.
da...@convex.com
Sean Eric Fagan
>feel you have a right to the source code?
No, it's meant to imply that I will not grab a binary off the net without
sources. Period. Are you really that trusting? I am, to be honest,
shocked beyond words that you (or anyone else) would be.
Actually, I did try newsgrazer. It didn't work for me. I couldn't debug
it, because I didn't have sources. I asked the author, and he said "no,
they're too ugly for anyone to see," which seemed like a subtle way of
saying "nope, you can't get them."
So I grabbed News instead, and am playing with that, as well as my own news
reader.
>NewsGrazer was written within the year. Is it possible that what you
>do not find exciting, others might properly find exciting? Get a life.
Yes, it was. However, PARC had a *wonderful* newsreader for their Smalltalk
systems as much as 4 or 5 years ago; it was *beautiful*. Brought tears to
my eyes and all that. Nothing new at all about NewsGrazer, except that it
runs only on a particular machine, and sources are not available. (Go see
the Andrew Messages System, which does the same thing, but on a lot more
computers, and the sources are available to anyone.)
Kurt Baumann
> There's been a lot of talk about "specifications in the works", or
> "we have that on _____, but we just don't use it", or "that COULD be
> done EASILY, just ...". I suggest following Jayson Adams' example:
> Don't speculate. Deliver. While everyone else argues over the
I don't disagree. But how about publishing the how afterwards?
Twould be cooler and more useful if everyone could do the samething.
Kee Hinckley
>The revolution has been here for years. It's on the X11R4 tape.
Furthermore there are existing standards for sending multi-part,
typed enclosures (and newer and better ones under way). NeXT however
keeps creating their own. Which is fine if you don't want to talk
to the rest of the world.
--
Alfalfa Software, Inc. | Poste: The EMail for Unix
naz...@alfalfa.com | Send Anything... Anywhere
617/646-7703 (voice/fax) | in...@alfalfa.com
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
John Coppinger
>In article <1991Jul1.2...@ms.uky.edu>, jo...@ms.uky.edu (John
>Coppinger) writes:
>> There's been a lot of talk about "specifications in the works", or
>> "we have that on _____, but we just don't use it", or "that COULD be
>> done EASILY, just ...". I suggest following Jayson Adams' example:
>> Don't speculate. Deliver. While everyone else argues over the
>I don't disagree. But how about publishing the how afterwards?
>Twould be cooler and more useful if everyone could do the samething.
>Kurt Baumann 703.709.9890
This is a good point. When the program is released, it may include
a description of the format. All of the formats he's using (RTF,
TIFF, uuencode, compress) are well-documented, so a brief description
should make building compatible news readers fairly straight-forward.
Woochang Jin
>In article <1991Jul1.0...@mtxinu.COM> e...@mtxinu.com (Ed Gould) writes:
>>The revolution has been here for years. It's on the X11R4 tape.
>
>Furthermore there are existing standards for sending multi-part,
>typed enclosures (and newer and better ones under way). NeXT however
>keeps creating their own. Which is fine if you don't want to talk
>to the rest of the world.
In fact, NeXT can. X11R4 can run as a program in NeXT. I saw only demo
version so I cannot say in detail, but you can switch from NeXTStep to X
and vice versa.
------
W. Jin
Bill Janssen
useless, he does make a good point:
Conformant, but useless. By labeling types of a lot of things (i.e.
typing different applications' file formats) we are not going to
achieve much of interoperability. There would be much better ways to
utilize the RFC-XXXX ideas here, but...
If Next uses a content-type of "application/x-newsgrazer" and Sun uses
"application/x-sun-mailtool", and so on, it's not going to help a lot.
Every mail tool will only understand that it *can't* understand the
message.
It would be nice to have a default document format for internet mail
as well. RFC-XXXX specifies a simple format called "richtext", but it
isn't really sufficient. Something like the Next format, but also
extensible like the Andrew format, should really be defined in a
separate RFC, and pushed as a mail formatted-document standard. I'd
suggest that a minimum set of functionality is to have styled text
(logical mark-up as well as physical mark-up), images/drawings (color
PS?), and sound.
Bill Janssen
over 3 years now), there is another very nice multi-media mail system
available for UNIX and X -- BBN's Slate. It runs on several different
hardware platforms. It costs money to obtain, and you don't get the
source code unless you pay more money (if at all).
The contact name I have is Scott Richardson (sc...@bbn.com).
Charles Herrick
In article <CNH5730.91...@calvin.tamu.edu> cnh...@calvin.tamu.edu (Charles Herrick) writes:
> Wouldn't it be far easier to write the software to translate RTF into
> ASCII than to fret about how your computer doesn't handle RTF?
There exists code to translate RTF into an ATK datastream.
Considering that pbm exists, it might not be hard to convert NeXT
tiffs into ATK bitmaps. Combining these two might just let any ATK
site receive a large subset of NeXT mail without a problem.
Very true. The pbm tools package (available at ftp sites, compilable
source code, handles and incredible number of graphics image formats)
handles transfer of TIFF images to other formats. And there is at an
ftp site somewhere out there a utility which translates RTF to TROFF,
if I remember correctly.
So there is no excuse for folks not reading NewsGrazer USENET
newsposts that have attached .TIFF images or RTF text on their
VT100 terminals.
Charles Herrick
Baumann) writes regarding following Jayson Adams' example:
I don't disagree. But how about publishing the how afterwards?
Twould be cooler and more useful if everyone could do the samething.
Folks, this is Object-oriented programming. The how-to is in the OOP
toolkit, which is published by, extensivly documented by, and
distributed by NeXT. All this is part of the SoftwareBundle, which you
get when you buy a NeXT.
This is a different paradigm, and it requires a mind shift. You have
to break yourself of the habit of needing to read either someone else's
source code or a bunch of RFCs in order to be able to "do the same
thing." You read the *.h files and the OOP toolkit specs instead.
If you really need to read source code (I know I still do), I suggest
that you roll up your sleeves and cruise through
/NextDeveloper/Examples/*. I like to drag an example into my
~/home/temp subdirectory, and double click on the IB.proj file, which
launches InterfaceBuilder. You can choose "connections" in the
inspector and check out how all the Control-Drags were done.
P.S. I recommend /NextDeveloper/Examples/Lines. Check out how Jayson
Adams gets NXApp to load the infoPanel.nib file.
IMO, Jayson Adams is a CodePoet, truly in the C compu-linguistic sense.
Charles Herrick
typed enclosures (and newer and better ones under way). NeXT however
keeps creating their own. Which is fine if you don't want to talk
to the rest of the world.
NeXT is the only vendor I know of which is currently shipping
multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
1988. They didn't sit around waiting for the "compuCommunity" to agree
on an initial standard, they just did it.
In addition, there is ample precedent for using an existing product as
a standard. Examples range from C to encryption techniques.
NeXT clearly honors speaking to the rest of the world, as is evidenced
by the fact that they have a company policy regarding open standards,
they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP. It's just that the rest of the
world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
Louis A. Mamakos
This isn't exactly easy to read (or use). One of the advantages of
the richtext format described in the draft RFC is that its entirely
possible for someone to read the text of the message even if he
doesn't have a fancy mail (or news) reader that understands the
Content-Type: header.
Having to uudecode, uncompress, tar -x, rtf->troff,
ptroff->PostScript, and then Preview is not exactly easy to do or
"user friendly". I'd rather see a less host specific (and perhaps
lower capability) approach to solving the multi-media/rich text
problem, than one which is only easy to use (and thus will ONLY be
used) on a single platform.
If you haven't read draft RFC on Body Formats, you really should.
There are some good ideas presented that could be readily adapted to
the NeXT environment. A really nifty newsreader or mail agent that
supported multiple formats using this specification could make the NeXT
the platform of choice for folks looking for that capability.
The existing Mail.app is pretty nice to look at, but hard to take
seriously when your user community uses a wide variety of platforms,
and where NeXT platforms are in the minority. Is the format of a NeXT
mail message documented? If not, you probably shouldn't depend on it
not changing in the future.
What good does a "NeXT Mail" message do to a user running X on a
DECstation 3100? Is he more likely to build a mail agent to handle
"NeXT mail" format or one that conforms to a standard? Which wouild
you bet money on, give that both offer the same basic capability?
You can get a copy of a draft of the Body Formats RFC from
thumper.bellcore.com via anonymous FTP as /pub/nsb/BodyFormats.ps.
Check it out.
"The nice thing about standards are that there are so many to choose
from, even those that aren't published anywhere."
louie
Mark Crispin
>multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
>1988.
Haven't you been listening? There are lots of multi-part multi-media
mail/enclosure mail systems out there, including several commercial
products. There are some even for the lowly Mac and PC. The problem
is, with the exception of a few of the Internet experiments, none of
these products interoperate with any others.
The only people who can do anything reasonable with incoming NeXTmail
are people who have a NeXT and use NeXTmail. NeXTmail is not the only
mail program in use on the NeXT; several others have carved niches,
and mainly because NeXTmail does not have all the answers for everybody.
> They didn't sit around waiting for the "compuCommunity" to agree
>on an initial standard, they just did it.
Neither did the vendors of any of the other programs referred to
above, which is why there's a problem.
>In addition, there is ample precedent for using an existing product as
>a standard.
I will wager you $1000 that the NeXT multi-media format is NOT adopted
as a standard by the rest of the industry. Let's pick a date, say,
July 1993. That gives you two years to get together $1000 to pay me.
>NeXT clearly honors speaking to the rest of the world, as is evidenced
>by the fact that they have a company policy regarding open standards,
>they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP.
Is this why it wasn't until a couple of months ago that I *finally*
got a specification of the NeXT multimedia mail format out of NeXT?
Is this why sources are not available from NeXT?
Is this why NeXT to this day does *NOT* specify the NeXTstep inter-
machine windowing protocol?
Is this why most of NeXT's applications use an undocumented binary
structures for their data (the dictionary in Webster is a good idea)
for no apparently reason other than to make it difficult for people to
write implementations to access it themselves?
NeXT is about as closed a vendor as they come.
Wake up and smell the coffee. IBM isn't doing much of anything with
their NeXTstep license, and no vendors are interested in getting
NeXTstep licenses either. NeXT is a bit player in the industry --
they didn't even make this year's Datamation's top 100 (Commodore and
Atari did). NeXT makes a pleasant Unix workstation with some
interesting proprietary software. I have one in my office and one at
home; most of my use is at the Unix workstation end. I spend much
more time in X than I do in NeXTstep.
> It's just that the rest of the
>world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
You seem to have a very cynical view of the community in general and
the IETF in particular. Let me point out that the IETF and its
prececessor the NWG are responsible for creating most of the open
standards you loudly praise. What keeps these standards open is the
fact that no vendor has control over them.
I have tried NeXTmail, and other than the multi-media capabilities it
is a very weak mail UA. People who go for chrome rather than what's
under the hood may be impressed by NeXTmail; but these tend to be a
small (albeit vocal) minority. I doubt you've seen the Andrew Message
System, or you wouldn't be singing the praises of NeXTmail so loudly.
AMS is a humbling experience for those who think they know the answers
of Internet mail.
The people working in the IETF Mail Extensions group are some of the
leaders in the industry. One of the authors of the Andrew Message
System is the primary author of the new draft standard for Internet
mail. Many of us are implementing that standard now. I am not a
multi-media implementor; my field is in distributed electronic mail
(something NeXTmail does not support at all even). But my next
release will support the draft standard, and make it possible to layer
multi-media mail on top of my distributed mail environment (there is a
proposal to do this with AMS -- something I am very excited about).
David Williams
writes:
>Fine, dandy, but does it interoperate with anything else? And just where is
>the RFC on this?
It is RTF Rich Text Format...it already IS a file format standard.
MicroSoft Word imports/exports it as does MacWrite II, among other word
processing programss on the Mac.
The graphics could be TIFF and Macs and PeeCees know how to handle those.
The big guy to solve is sound.
>We have a commercial newsreader for the Mac, and would be
>just happy to support mixed documents, multimedia, whatever you want to call
>it, but what happens to all of those normal users out there who don't have a
>Mac, NeXT, or whatever it takes to deal with these messages?
Allow your GUI based customers to have a richer environment and strip it
out for the vt100 users. Eventually they'll make the investment in getting
a more productive platform or having the richer environment is not
important to them and they probably won't be buying/using your companies
product anyway.
>Do we create two
>seperate classes of users on the network? One for the privalaged (sp?)
and one
>for the underclassed?
Well thats one approach. But then I could just as soon say you get to have
NO Macs,NeXTs or Workstations or PeeCee's until EVERYONE has one. Do you
build applications so that the lowest common denominator is VT100 look n
feel? Probably not...the challenge would be to allow the richer platform to
present the information as effectively as the platform can deliver it and
if vt100 users are important than insure you have a way to strip it down to
just ascii text.
>It's fine to have all of these cool features but not so
>cool if only a few can get them. There are many more Macs than NeXT's, and
>many many more VT100 style terminals out there than Macs. It's fine to be
Sure, but a VT100 is not a Mac or a NeXT or a PeeCee...there are just
certain things you are going to not be able to do as well on one.
In any case Macs and PeeCee's can handle RTF and TIFF which gets you
WYSIWYG text and graphics...then the only thing to be worked on is
sound--Sun's and Next's can already exchange these...and Macs may be able
to do so as well.
In fact with System 7.0 you could just pass these messages to the users RTF
capable word processor for viewing.
>revolutionary (and I don't think that this is all that revolutionary), but if
>you are the only one to enjoy it, then it is rather useless.
It may not be revolutionary, more than glenn can use it, and it is a step in
the right direction. I mean the goal here is to raise the lowest common
denominator and provide us with productive, intuitive, fun to use products!
As an alternative InterCon Systems could port AMS to the Mac and to NeXT
with the respective Look n feel.
>Kurt Baumann 703.709.9890
>InterCon Systems Corp. Creators of fine TCP/IP products for
> the Macintosh
David Williams d...@atherton.com
Atherton Technology Creators of the Software BackPlane, a CASE repository
for SunOS,AIX,ULTRIX,VMS
Ernest Prabhakar
> In article <CNH5730.91...@calvin.tamu.edu> cnh...@calvin.tamu.edu
(Charles Herrick) writes:
> >NeXT is the only vendor I know of which is currently shipping
> >multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
> >1988.
>
> Haven't you been listening? There are lots of multi-part multi-media
> mail/enclosure mail systems out there, including several commercial
> products. There are some even for the lowly Mac and PC. The problem
> is, with the exception of a few of the Internet experiments, none of
> these products interoperate with any others.
>
Maybe the problem is saying, "does it conform to RFCxxxx" instead of "product-X
which does that too - let's make them talk to each other." NeXT people often
feel the world wants them to conform to a lowest-common-denominator standard.
If there is a communications protocol (and perhaps the Andrew Messaging System
is one) that does all this:
- display of RTF
- embedded TIFF & EPS, which can be previewed live
- sound
- inclusion of arbitrary documents
(which is all part of *bundled* NeXTMail)
AND there are already people using it..
Then by all means, I agree. NeXT should be able to talk to such systems. Let
us know of which systems exist, and I (for one) will bug NeXT to reach some
common ground with them. To date, all I have heard are people spouting RFC
numbers, not whether any of these systems (until AMS came up) actually run, or
are any less proprietary than NextMail (and derived News services).
Conversely, you can't blame NeXT (much less a hacker that threw something
together with NeXT tools) for not conforming to a standard that doesn't exist
or isn't used. If the standard is as wonderful as Mark claims it is, I think
NeXT will adopt it, and will be greatly wroth if they don't. Perhaps this is
one reason why they keep the internal format so secret, so they can change it
when they find a better one.
However, NeXTs primary goal is to be the most useful desktop computer, of which
connectivity is just one part. When all those drafts become reality, and when
other computers start being delivered with NeXT's level of functionality,
I'll be very surprised if NeXT isn't sitting there waiting to talk to them.
-- Ernie P.
(Caltech doesn't care what I think.)
--
Ernest N. Prabhakar Caltech High Energy Physics
CaJUN President NeXTMail:ern...@pundit.cithep.caltech.edu
"...and ourselves, your servants for Jesus sake." - II Cor 5:13a
dr...@drake.almaden.ibm.com
>multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures.
>
>by the fact that they have a company policy regarding open standards,
>they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP. It's just that the rest of the
>world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
Where can I get a spec on the NeXT multimedia mail format?
Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center
Internet: dr...@ibm.com BITNET: DRAKE at ALMADEN
Usenet: ...!uunet!ibmarc!drake Phone: (408) 927-1861
Dick Silbar
# [deleted]
Not really a response to Louie's remarks but a piece of this thread that
seems not to have been brought up by anyone.
I received Glenn's original message on this thread on this machine, a VAX/
VMS that serves as my mail machine. I then sent it, along with its uuen-
coded block, to my NeXT (which is 1800 miles east of there). I expected it
to arrive with the block showing up as an icon on my mail message. Not true;
it came as a block which I then had to extract and massage a' la Ralph
Zazulas' prescription given later (except that Ralph -- I think it was he --
mentioned getting the _icon_, which he then had to massage).
Question: I thought the Mail App was supposed to reconstruct encoded mail
as NeXTmail. Wrong?
Mildly related question: the WriteNow App seems to be able to accept RTF
text from the pasteboard, but it comes in as straight ASCII. I.e., all the
font information is lost; it is strictly one-font, no formatting. Is this
proper behavior? Can it be improved upon?
Dick Silbar (NeXTmail: sil...@whistler.er.doe.gov)
Garance A. Drosehn
> If you haven't read draft RFC on Body Formats, you really should.
> There are some good ideas presented that could be readily adapted to
> the NeXT environment. A really nifty newsreader or mail agent that
> supported multiple formats using this specification could make the NeXT
> the platform of choice for folks looking for that capability.
If such a program would make the NeXT the platform of choice, then the people
in question will own a NeXT. If they then own a NeXT, then it doesn't much
matter whether the format used is the "good ideas presented" in some paper, or
just some working application that gets the job done.
I haven't yet decided if this NewsGrazer idea is great and wonderful or just a
good idea that should have been done differently. I would, however, argue that
the sentance:
A really nifty newsreader or mail agent that supported multiple
formats using this specification could make the NeXT the platform
of choice for folks looking for that capability.
would be just as true if the phrase "using this specification" was removed from
it. People just want a really nifty newsreader/mail-agent combination. They
don't care if the net-gods have officially blessed the specification behind the
product, they just want something that gets the job done.
Kevin Sven Berg
Rumor has it that NeXT is working on an updated Mail package for
the OS 3.0 release that will allow cool integrated things like
calendaring.
In general it shouldn't be a surprize that all sorts of mail "standards"
have developed. Each vendor has an agenda to support their own goods,
and mail is becoming more than just mail these days. Even with X.400,
vendors continue to move in proprietary directions and use gateways
to link with the rest of the world.
I believe it will help widespread use to stick with standard tools
like tar, compress, and uuencode; and to support accepted standards
like tiff and rtf. NeXT has done fairly well in this regard.
- ksBerg;
--
+---------------------------------------+
Sven Berg
ty...@milton.u.washington.edu
+---------------------------------------+
Garance A. Drosehn
>
> >If such a program would make the NeXT the platform of choice, then the
> >people in question will own a NeXT. If they then own a NeXT, then it
> >doesn't much matter whether the format used is the "good ideas presented"
> >in some paper, or just some working application that gets the job done.
>
Hmm, I still think it's correct. One of two things is true:
1) An application makes a platform "the platform to buy", such that
people say "I want a NeXT because of this application". Consider
Improv, for example.
or
2) An application is a standard application, which means that people
can run it on many platforms. And if it's available on many
platforms, then no one will buy any one platform simply because
of the standard application. (they may *refuse* to buy the
platform which *doesn't* have that application, but that's a
different matter)
If the application is a standard application, then that application will not
make any platform "the platform of choice", as was suggested by the person who
I was replying to. That's what I meant in the comments you quoted.
> If we were to have to support a multimedia mail standard on our
> campus, we simply cannot endorse one vendor's (proprietary,
> non-standard) idea of a solution to the problem.
Lest I get flamed too much for my previous statement, note that it is my
understanding that the NewsGrazer idea uses RTF. RTF already exists on
multiple platforms. If the author does a good job with the NewsGrazer
newsreader, I'm confident that it won't be too long before someone implements a
similar news reader on the Mac (assuming NewsG *is* using RTF). And would not
surprise me if someone comes up with a version for people reading via
VT100-like connections. It should be possible to pull the text out, at least.
I am not arguing for proprietary (forever hidden) solutions, but I am against
the claim that an idea must appear in an RFC or it isn't any good.
> We must have a
> solution that will work across the existing platforms in our
> environment. That means DOS, Mac and other UNIX/X11 based platforms.
> We must have one based on standards so that we don't get protests from
> other vendors when we do sole-source procurements. A standards based
> solution even give me the luxury of choosing between two or more
> vendors rather than being at the mercy of just one.
This is an argument for the format being public information. It is not an
argument that the format has to follow a particular proposal made up by any
particular group of people. RFC's included.
Note that I'm not pretending there are any problems with the RFC in question,
I'm just saying that NewsGrazer may end up doing a wonderful job (for everyone
reading news, on any platform) even if it doesn't happen to follow this RFC.
> Remember, all the world on the network isn't UNIX, much less Display
> PostScript, X11R4 or any of the other stuff that we routinely argue
> about. A standards based approach means that we only need to solve a
> particular problem once (in theory, at least).
Yes, in theory. And in theory all our problems would be over if we all were
running Unix, because Unix is "standard". And since Unix is "standard", there
are (in theory) no differences between the Unix available on different
platforms. Thus no one is (in theory) at the mercy of a single vendor, because
it is trivial (in theory) to transfer all their applications and work to any
other Unix platform.
- - - - - - - - - -
disclaimer: As far as NewsGrazer itself, I like the version I have but I don't
have the version with "the revolution" in it. I have not decided whether "the
revolution" is great and wonderful as-done or if it should have been done some
other way. I plan to wait to see it in action before making any such decision.
disclaimer #2: I'm not trying to pour fuel on a flame war here, I'm just
chatting away with my initial reaction to the notion of "It isn't following an
RFC, therefore it must be bad and no one should even think of looking at it".
I don't know if it's good or bad, and I don't see how people can be so positive
that it's bad without seeing it in action.
disclaimer #3: I wish the original poster had kept his mouth shut until we
could all see it and have some idea of exactly what we are talking about.
disclaimer #4: The world has too many disclaimers.
Louis A. Mamakos
>If such a program would make the NeXT the platform of choice, then the people
>in question will own a NeXT. If they then own a NeXT, then it doesn't much
>matter whether the format used is the "good ideas presented" in some paper, or
>just some working application that gets the job done.
This conclusion is simply incorrect.
If we were to have to support a multimedia mail standard on our
campus, we simply cannot endorse one vendor's (proprietary,
non-standard) idea of a solution to the problem. We must have a
solution that will work across the existing platforms in our
environment. That means DOS, Mac and other UNIX/X11 based platforms.
We must have one based on standards so that we don't get protests from
other vendors when we do sole-source procurements. A standards based
solution even give me the luxury of choosing between two or more
vendors rather than being at the mercy of just one.
Sure, it will be a major pain in the a*s to have to accomodate all
these platforms, but that's the reality of the situation. Now, a
really nifty implementation of a multi-media mail/news environment
could make a NeXT the platform of choice for new machines, we cannot
ignore the very large installed base of non-NeXT platforms.
And that's why standards are useful.
That's why we standardize on TCP/IP and not DECNET or SNA on our
campus. DECNET is really nifty on VMS and other DEC platforms I'm
told, but doesn't do diddly squat for me trying to talk to "open
systems" and the rest of the world.
Getting back to the original issue, the Body Formats draft RFC has the
desirable property that rich text can be read by someone with a dumb
RFC-821/RFC-822 compatible mail system. It sure won't look pretty,
but it will be readable. This is important to me because I have users
that receive mail on large, crusty mainframes (IBM 3081, Unisys
1100/90). These systems just don't have uudecode, tar or compress.
They're not likely to, either. Heck, I'd be happy if they supported
plain ASCII text in a resonable fashion! These mainframe bound are
not going to get TIFF images or the sound of my voice coming out of
their emulated IBM 3270 terminals, but at least they can get text they
can read.
Remember, all the world on the network isn't UNIX, much less Display
PostScript, X11R4 or any of the other stuff that we routinely argue
about. A standards based approach means that we only need to solve a
particular problem once (in theory, at least).
louie
Mark Crispin
>NeXT should be able to talk to such systems. Let
>us know of which systems exist, and I (for one) will bug NeXT to reach some
>common ground with them.
Andrew has been around for years, and runs on many platforms. It has
more capabilities, including multimedia, than NeXTmail. NeXTmail does
not interoperate with Andrew. Why?
BBN's Slate has been around for years, and runs on many platforms. It
has more capabilities, including multimedia, than NeXTmail. NeXTmail
does not interoperate with Slate. Why?
Just because you didn't know about other multi-media systems doesn't
mean that they don't exist.
>To date, all I have heard are people spouting RFC
>numbers, not whether any of these systems (until AMS came up) actually run
With a very few exceptions, RFC's specify something that is *already*
operational. The new Internet Message Bodies Draft Standard -- which
covers much more than multimedia -- was worked on by implementors, who
are baking-off different implementations as we speak. These
implementors include most of the major vendors, as well as those
academic sites which develop software tools.
NeXT made at most minimal participation in the working group. The
most we heard from them was from a NeXT employee who thought we should
go with Unicode instead of ISO character sets. There was no
presentation by NeXT of their format, nor did anyone seriously suggest
that NeXT's format was worth looking into. Until recently, you
couldn't get a specification of NeXT's format out of NeXT.
>However, NeXTs primary goal is to be the most useful desktop computer
If NeXT's primary goal was making money instead of advancing religion,
it's possible NeXT would be a lot more successful. NeXT computers are
cheap single-user workstations, seem to be reasonably reliable, and so
far their religious dictates haven't gotten too much in the way. But
without the use of industry standards NeXT is doomed to become another
also-ran.
>When all those drafts become reality, and when
>other computers start being delivered with NeXT's level of functionality,
>I'll be very surprised if NeXT isn't sitting there waiting to talk to them.
There is only one `Draft' in question.
Don't be mislead by semantic misinterpretations of the terms "RFC" or
"Draft" as used inside the IETF. An RFC has long ago (15 years)
ceased to be merely a "Request For Comments". Something does not
become an Internet Draft until it has already gone through several
reality checks over a period of a few months. An Internet Draft is a
document at the final stages before being cast into stone as an
Internet Standard.
Glenn Reid
> Wake up and smell the coffee. IBM isn't doing much of anything with
> their NeXTstep license, and no vendors are interested in getting
> NeXTstep licenses either. NeXT is a bit player in the industry --
> they didn't even make this year's Datamation's top 100 (Commodore and
> Atari did). NeXT makes a pleasant Unix workstation with some
> interesting proprietary software. I have one in my office and one at
> home; most of my use is at the Unix workstation end.
I believe that NeXT will sell lots of machines and not become a bit
player, mostly because of your last sentence. You don't have to
like the machine for NeXT to be successful. You only have to BUY one.
And you've obviously bought two. Thank you.
Open systems aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. You certainly
can't call the Macintosh or the IBM PC an open system, and they've sold
more of those than any other kind of computer on planet Earth. People
want solutions to their problems, they don't want bullshit. If an open
system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
system solves their problem, people will buy that instead. And, of
course, there's the old bang-for-your-buck quotient which isn't lost
on most consumers.
Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the NeXT doesn't support
Macintosh disks and doesn't support AppleTalk, it's still the MOST
compatible computer with the Macintosh in terms of file formats, fonts,
use of PostScript, etc, etc. And there's some compatibility with the
PC, too, given Lotus software, support for DOS floppies, etc. That's
not the same as "open", but it's helpful.
Anyway, I agree that NeXT isn't a particularly open system, but they
are compatible in lots of ways, and they've got more and more great
ways for people to get work done.
--
Glenn Reid NeXTMail: gl...@heaven.woodside.ca.us
RightBrain Software ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn
NeXT/PostScript developers 415-326-2974 (NeXTfax 326-2977)
Glenn Reid
It's my fault that this thread came up at all (although it's been
a great thread). I feel the need to point out a few things:
1. The "revolutionary" part, to me, is not the software, per se, but
the possibility that Usenet postings could become rich text. That
will change the face of Usenet forever. And having NewsGrazer
available will greatly facilitate that transition, I believe.
2. There is a lot of flamage about "NeXT isn't supporting the standard."
First of all, it's not NeXT, it's one guy who wrote NewsGrazer on
his own time and put it out in the public archives for people to
use. You don't have to use it. NeXT didn't ship it with any of
their systems. It's just really cool software.
Second of all, I have to agree with the people who say "there is no
standard, to speak of." I've been reading USENET for 14 years and
I've NEVER seen a posting that was obviously multi-part or designed
to be read by a particular smart user agent like NewsGrazer. Maybe
they exist, but I don't think so. Everybody uses rn, rrn, trn, xrn,
and mumble-rn. Talk about the stone age.
3. Thanks for all your replies. It's been fun. Even the flamage.
Mark Crispin
> You don't have to
>like the machine for NeXT to be successful. You only have to BUY one.
>And you've obviously bought two. Thank you.
I hate to break your bubble, but I did not buy two machines. My
employer bought my office machine. I bought a home machine when the
price became cheap enough ($3300). My employer has not bought many
additional NeXTs in the past two years. We have bought a lot of DEC
RISC gear. You can count the personal purchases of NeXTs this year
on one hand. It just so happened I had enough cash to spend on a NeXT
but not enough for a DECstation.
This should be read as a symptom of trouble and a source of concern
for NeXT. We're not the only university where this is happening.
18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
sliced bread are not (fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your
viewpoint) the ones who make departmental purchasing decisions; and
those are the decisions which count since at NeXT's current pricing
not all that many students are going to buy NeXTs.
>Open systems aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. You certainly
>can't call the Macintosh or the IBM PC an open system, and they've sold
>more of those than any other kind of computer on planet Earth.
Macintosh filled a pent-up demand for GUIs in the under $5000 range.
Note that the Lisa which was technically superior to the first
Macintosh was a failure, simply because it was too expensive for what
it delivered.
PC's are far more open than NeXT or Mac -- at least in terms of
hardware. You do not have to buy a PC from IBM. You can buy a PC for
$500 or less. Part of what helped IBM seize the market share from
Apple in the early days of the PC was the open hardware architecture;
while Apple was busy suing Franklin, IBM was encouraging clones.
In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
>If an open
>system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
>system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
Ahem, why are so many RFP's requiring open systems these days?
Why isn't every vendor in the world lining up to license NeXTstep, and
instead announcing X and OSF/Motif products? Why has IBM abandoned
NeXTstep?
Question: do you really want NeXT to survive, or do you want to follow
the One True Religion until NeXT goes out of business? The NeXT
computer and NeXT the company have some good features, but there are
some serious flaws that need to be rectified. Some already have, such
as the abandonment of the unlamented optical disc. The lack of
attention to industry standards and the open lack of concern for
continued UNIX compatibility is a continuing flaw that may prove
fatal.
Eric P. Scott
Is that in "dog years?"
-=EPS=-
Izumi Ohzawa
m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
>
>18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
>sliced bread are not (fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your
>viewpoint) the ones who make departmental purchasing decisions; and
>those are the decisions which count since at NeXT's current pricing
>not all that many students are going to buy NeXTs.
Hmm, I don't know about that, Mark.
That would be true if you are counting only departments for
computer professionals and computer centers.
However, I am sure there are plenty of other
departments where people who think NeXTmail is the greatest
and who have never heard of RFC's, make purchasing decisions.
One of our Campus Consultants reported that NeXT has sold about
200 machines to departments and individuals combined at Berkeley.
None of these machines are in public NeXT labs at Berkeley,
as far as I know.
I bet quite a lot of these machines are in the hands of
students. I am not surprised.
Most machines are bought by individuals or for small labs.
Departments have nothing to do with these purchases.
I understand why NeXT isn't making an inroad into public labs yet.
Like you and your boss must, the computer center folks have to worry
about a lot of things, which are of peripheral importance to
these small scale users at best. I understand that, but
you shouldn't be underestimating purchases made in lots of 1 or 2
by individuals and by professors for their labs. And in these
decisions, mere students' opinions are very often decisive.
After all, they are the ones who use the machines.
I guess I am talking about grad students, not 18 year olds, but
you see, MOST grad students don't read RFCs.
Here at the home of BSD, a lot of students get training with
Unix, even a lot of humanities types. When they look around
for a home machine with Unix, there aren't any competitions.
How many students have you seen with a SparcStation at home/dome
room? I have seen plenty with a NeXT.
Izumi Ohzawa [ $@Bg_78^=;(J ]
USMail: University of California, 360 Minor Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: (415) 642-6440 Fax: (415) 642-3323
Internet: iz...@violet.berkeley.edu NeXTmail: iz...@pinoko.berkeley.edu
Andrew Stone
Sender:
Followup-To: and...@stone.com
Distribution:
Organization: Stone Design
Keywords:
The connection between time, rn, and "virtuality" [We have decided virtual
reality, besides being an oxymoron, and overused, is just too many
syllables] is a tenuous one at best.
Reading news somehow compressses time, Glenn is going on 80 and aging
exponenially! --> ;-) <-- just in case.
andrew
||<<++>>||<<-->>||<<==>>||<<++>>||<<??>>||<<++>>||<<-->>||<<==>>||<<++>>||
!! Andrew Stone !! the fictive milieu of !!
!! and...@stone.com <> contemporary society! !!
||<<++>>||<<-->>||<<==>>||<<++>>||<<??>>||<<++>>||<<-->>||<<==>>||<<++>>||
Glenn Reid
Certainly some of them were dog years :-) Actually, when I
go back and do the subtraction again, it's more like 12
years, pushing 13. So I exaggerated. But it was back when
there was only net.* and PostScript didn't exist yet and
things like that....
I know, you met me once at the BaNG meeting and don't think
I'm old enough to date back that far, but it's true :-)
I was one of those idiots who posted stuff, from his university
account and flamed people and generally acted
irresponsibly, but thanks to /usr/lib/news/expire, no
one remembers. Well, only some people remember :-)
Brian Corrie
[Stuff deleted]
>In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
>the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
>Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
>competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
Reality check here..... If you ask me (Yeah, I know, no one did 8-) you
are comparing apples to oranges here. Or at least Granny Smiths to Red
Delicious 8-)
I have been shopping around for a new machine. Two of my final choices were
the Mac and the NeXT. When looking at these machines, you can not compare the
cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope to get anything meaningful out of
it. What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac is twice
as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
Numbers can be made to look how you want them to. You want to see that the Mac
is a better price, look at Mark's numbers. You want to see that the NeXT is
better look at mine. I think my numbers are a better comparison, since they
are comparing similar machines wrt to performance, but thats my opinion.
I just don't think its fair to say that you can not compare a NeXT with a Mac
or a PC, when the high end systems in the Mac and PC areas are similar in
capabilities to the NeXT. Even more so, when the NeXT price for what I consider
a superior system is lower than the Macs.
Yeah, I have decided to go with the NeXT. Anyone got some extra cash laying
around that they don't need 8-)
Just my two cents.....
B
--
Brian Corrie (bco...@csr.uvic.ca)
Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature,
volume, humidity and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well
pleases. Sounds like some of the code I have written...... 8-)
Mark Crispin
>However, I am sure there are plenty of other
>departments where people who think NeXTmail is the greatest
>and who have never heard of RFC's, make purchasing decisions.
We have that problem at times. The 11th Century Basque Literature
Department gets talked into buying a Banana 5000 without asking or
telling anyone in advance and then asks us poor trolls to get it on
the net and support it (actually, it was the East Asia Library and a
3B2...). You end up seeing lots of great deals for hardly-used
oddball computers at Surplus Property Sales.
After a while, the word gets around that that is a bad idea.
NeXT is still on the `recommended platform' list, but not near the
top. At least NeXT was smart enough to include 10BASE-T connectors on
the 68040 machines.
>One of our Campus Consultants reported that NeXT has sold about
>200 machines to departments and individuals combined at Berkeley.
I think you've proved my point. NeXT has sold *only* 200 machines to
departments and individuals combined at Berkeley. That's pretty bad
compared to the potential market.
Also, I'm not talking about public labs. I'm talking about what gets
put on people's desks. For most uses, the NeXT is too slow as a
standalone machine, but (at least for now) it's pretty good as a
better-than-average client in a client/server universe. Only problem
is, NeXT seems to be moving in directions that make this sort of
integration more difficult in the future.
I would like to see NeXT become more of an integrated citizen with the
rest of the world, and less of a lonely pioneer, so certain that it
knows the right narrow pass through the mountains that it ignores the
Interstate that everybody else is building.
T-H-E John Wisniewski?!?
> The Revolution is HERE!
> I've been waiting for this for several years. I can't believe Jayson Adams at
> NeXT has pulled it off. I am probably jumping the gun a bit, but I can't help
> it.
>
Digital's CDA architecture is three years old. Using ODA/ODIFF, Xwindows,
X.400/X.500, postscript and other standards Multi-Media display and data
exchange(via mail) have already been made possible.
The CDA Live-Link ablity and the new audio and (follow-on) video puts
standards (yes standards) at the state of the art for this type of
document control.
When you use private innovation like the NEXT, you enhance only one
company. When using public innovation like standards the entire
industry moves forward -- to the betterment of the user community.
We live in a much larger world than any single vendor in the 1990s.
Be seeing you,
+-----------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
| John Wisniewski | Consultant/DFW DECUS LUG Counterpart |
| +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Voice: 214-404-6412 |
| |d|i|g|i|t|a|l| | UUCP: ...utacfd!montagar!fallout!wisniewski |
| +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | At Work: wisni...@dpdmai.enet.dec.com |
| Dallas, TX USA | |
+-----------------+--------------------------------------------------------+
Izumi Ohzawa
>In article <1991Jul4.1...@agate.berkeley.edu>
iz...@mindseye.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa) writes:
>>However, I am sure there are plenty of other
>>departments where people who think NeXTmail is the greatest
>>and who have never heard of RFC's, make purchasing decisions.
>
>We have that problem at times. The 11th Century Basque Literature
>Department gets talked into buying a Banana 5000 without asking or
>telling anyone in advance and then asks us poor trolls to get it on
>the net and support it (actually, it was the East Asia Library and a
>3B2...). You end up seeing lots of great deals for hardly-used
>oddball computers at Surplus Property Sales.
I agree that this could be a lot of headaches for support people.
I suspect that you weren't exactly pleased when requests came
in for support of Macs and PC's althought these are pretty
worked out now as best as things could be with crippled OSes.
NeXT is no worse than any other workstations at the basic level.
It has all the things needed for connection to the rest of the
world.
All I am saying is that computer support folks, like you,
and people whose primary jobs are not about computers,
have different criteria to evaluate different computers.
On top of my standards are: Display PostScript, IB/Appkit.
On top of your list, I gather are: X11, Standard Adm tools,
RFC conformance for almost everything.
Of course, we both have prerequisite list of NFS, TCP/IP,
Ethernet, compatible OS, etc. which we know NeXT meets.
Sure, your criteria would be nice for me, if they can be met.
But, to me those are way down the list.
Now matter how conformant a certain workstation is, I wouldn't
touch it if it doesn't support DPS with full strength.
DPS an an option is not good enough(RS/6000, DEC).
Detractions like non-RFC conformance of NeXTmail, NewsGrazer,
non-standard NetInfo may be irritating to you, but these
just are not critical factors for me.
Mark Crispin
>I have been shopping around for a new machine. Two of my final choices were
>the Mac and the NeXT. When looking at these machines, you can not compare the
>cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope to get anything meaningful out of
>it. What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
>since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac is twice
>as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
Let me offer you an alternate reality check.
Suppose you decided to go with the NeXT, but all you have or are
likely to have for the forseeable future is $1200. You know that the
NeXT is better than an FX, but it doesn't matter. You can't afford
either.
You buy the Mac Classic because that's all you can afford.
We now go a few years into the future. You are now well-heeled. It
is time to buy a new machine. You see that the NeXT-4 is better than
the Mac-ZX, and you can afford either.
But in those years you have accumulated an enormous investment in Mac
software, both stuff you purchased and a lot of stuff you wrote to
make the Mac tolerable. In some cases, there is no equivalent on the
NeXT; in others, it'll cost some big bucks or at least a lot of work
before you'll be up to speed on the NeXT the way you were on the Mac.
But, between the job and the house and the wife and kids, you don't
have the time to spend 36-hour days hacking.
With considerable reluctance, you buy the overpriced underpowered
Mac-ZX and think to yourself how evil proprietary architectures are.
At your work, you find yourself quite reluctant to buy the new
whiz-bang Steve Sboj Ultimate because of its proprietary aspects...
This little scenario goes on with various modifications (and different
players at different stages) all the time. NeXT has several Achilles'
Heels, and the lack of a low-price ($1000 price range) entry level
machine is one of them.
Sean Eric Fagan
>is time to buy a new machine. You see that the NeXT-4 is better than
>the Mac-ZX, and you can afford either.
>But in those years you have accumulated an enormous investment in Mac
>software, both stuff you purchased and a lot of stuff you wrote to
>make the Mac tolerable.
Of course, there is at least one person working on a mac emulator for the
NeXT, and I would not be surprised if that company in Silicon Valley (you
know, the one where they reverse-engineered both Finder and the ROMS from
the documentation?) doesn't get into that market, as well (assuming they
survive their first lawsuit 8-(). (That would be nice... running Mac
software on Amigas, Ataris, Sun's, NeXT's, etc... probably'll never happen
*sigh*.)
--
Sean Eric Fagan | "What *does* that 33 do? I have no idea."
s...@kithrup.COM | -- Chris Torek
-----------------+ (to...@ee.lbl.gov)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.
wal...@capd.jhuapl.edu
I believe Jayson Adams' work is more of an individual than
corporate effort. Regardless, it is more analogous to DEC's
work in defining a compound document architecture (which has
not always been so freely available) which proceeded in advance
of standards as defined by one of the official standards bodies.
NeXT certainly participates in public innovation (standards) but
does bring private innovation to bear as well. So does DEC (VMS;
VAXclusters; etc). The whole standards movements is based on
the premise that systems benefiting from private innovation
can still interoperate; or that programs written to standards
can be ported to various platforms supporting those standards.
NeXT supports interoperability but NeXTstep is still basically
private and non-portable (but, like LAT or DECnet, licensable if
you've got lots of money:^)
While DEC is making progress towards multi-media, I would have
to give NeXT the edge at present in multi-media and in the
seamless integration of multi-media into the NeXT environment.
Live links (still a new capability with DEC) is something I
believe is regretably still missing from NeXT; but the concept
of applications offering Services is as important and I am
unaware of any similar concept from DEC.
In short, Jayson Adams seems to be exploring an area where
there are, at best, nascent standards. I do not assume that
this work may not eventually conform to standards once those
standards are established; but it is probably premature to be
worried about that. At this time, I'm just looking forward to
trying it and seeing how much I like it8^) Go for it, Jayson!
Go for it, NeXT! Go for it, DEC!
c.f.waltrip
Internet: <wal...@capsrv.jhuapl.edu>
Opinions expressed are my own.
felix.a.lugo
| > You don't have to
| >like the machine for NeXT to be successful. You only have to BUY one.
| >And you've obviously bought two. Thank you.
|
| I hate to break your bubble, but I did not buy two machines. My
| employer bought my office machine. I bought a home machine when the
| price became cheap enough ($3300).
I still count two machines!!!! 8^)
BTW, who introduced the NeXTs to your employer? You??!!!!!
| My employer has not bought many
| additional NeXTs in the past two years. We have bought a lot of DEC
| RISC gear. You can count the personal purchases of NeXTs this year
| on one hand.
With someone like you in their payroll, I don't see how they could
have bought even one!
How many NeXT does your employer own, anyway???? How many DECs???
| It just so happened I had enough cash to spend on a NeXT
| but not enough for a DECstation.
|
What's this; you bought a NeXT knowing how terrible it is and how
it departs from all these "wonderful" standards??!!!! Go scratch
yourself up some other newsgroup! 8^)
| This should be read as a symptom of trouble and a source of concern
| for NeXT.
Maybe it should, but since it's not true, why should they worry!!!!!
| We're not the only university where this is happening.
| 18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
| sliced bread are not (fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your
| viewpoint) the ones who make departmental purchasing decisions; and
| those are the decisions which count since at NeXT's current pricing
| not all that many students are going to buy NeXTs.
|
... Or Macs, PeeCees, DECs, IBMs, etc.
| >Open systems aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. You certainly
| >can't call the Macintosh or the IBM PC an open system, and they've sold
| >more of those than any other kind of computer on planet Earth.
|
| Macintosh filled a pent-up demand for GUIs in the under $5000 range.
| Note that the Lisa which was technically superior to the first
| Macintosh was a failure, simply because it was too expensive for what
| it delivered.
|
What Mac (or Apple) isn't "too expensive" for what they deliver?!!
| PC's are far more open than NeXT or Mac -- at least in terms of
| hardware. You do not have to buy a PC from IBM. You can buy a PC for
| $500 or less. Part of what helped IBM seize the market share from
| Apple in the early days of the PC was the open hardware architecture;
| while Apple was busy suing Franklin, IBM was encouraging clones.
|
Then why are Macs taking over PeeCee's market?
| In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
| the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
| Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
| competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
|
Then why are you comparing NeXTs to Macs and PeeCees????!!!!!
| >If an open
| >system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
| >system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
|
| Ahem, why are so many RFP's requiring open systems these days?
Name a few?
| Why isn't every vendor in the world lining up to license NeXTstep, and
| instead announcing X and OSF/Motif products? Why has IBM abandoned
| NeXTstep?
|
Vendors can choose whatever products they want (NeXT decided to have
NeXTstep.) If other vendors want to adapt brain-damaged systems
(like X) in their products, they certainly have the right to do so!
NeXTstep certainly caught IBMs eye, but I believe they noticed that
their implementation would never compete against NeXT's!!! BTW, has
IBM "oficially" dropped NeXTstep?
| Question: do you really want NeXT to survive, or do you want to follow
I KNOW they'll survive and I'll back them up all the way!!!!!!
(If I had Newsgrazer, I could have made the above statement
really stand-out). 8^)
| the One True Religion until NeXT goes out of business? The NeXT
| computer and NeXT the company have some good features, but there are
| some serious flaws that need to be rectified. Some already have, such
| as the abandonment of the unlamented optical disc.
The introduction of the ODs was certainly not a "serious flaw"!!!
It was a very innovative idea, years ahead of its time! Some people
just didn't appreciate it's usefulness (just as some don't appreciate
NeXT's usefulness). I love backing up my files to it and moving data
between my home NeXT and my NeXT at work! One more thing, NeXT has
not abandoned the ODs; you can still purchase them for the NeXTcube.
| The lack of
| attention to industry standards and the open lack of concern for
| continued UNIX compatibility is a continuing flaw that may prove
| fatal.
Get a life!
===============================================================================
Felix A. Lugo
E-Mail: (NeXTmail preferred)
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Naperville, IL Felix_...@ATT.COM
co...@ihcoco.att.com
AT&T NeXT User Group n...@ihcoco.att.com
T.Y.C. Software, Lisle, IL co...@ihtyc.att.com
===============================================================================
Nik A Gervae
> In article <1991Jul3.1...@ni.umd.edu>, lo...@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis
A. Mamakos) writes...
> # [deleted]
>
> Not really a response to Louie's remarks but a piece of this thread that
> seems not to have been brought up by anyone.
>
> I received Glenn's original message on this thread on this machine, a VAX/
> VMS that serves as my mail machine. I then sent it, along with its uuen-
> coded block, to my NeXT (which is 1800 miles east of there). I expected it
> to arrive with the block showing up as an icon on my mail message. Not true;
> it came as a block which I then had to extract and massage a' la Ralph
> Zazulas' prescription given later (except that Ralph -- I think it was he --
> mentioned getting the _icon_, which he then had to massage).
>
> Question: I thought the Mail App was supposed to reconstruct encoded mail
> as NeXTmail. Wrong?
>
When you forwarded it from an ASCII-only environment, something may have
gotten munged/moved/hidden that NeXTmail depends upon. If there was a "Begin
forwarded message:" line with the old headers, that may have done it. NeXTmail
is not good about that, from the little I've seen of that. Anybody have any
concrete info?
> Mildly related question: the WriteNow App seems to be able to accept RTF
> text from the pasteboard, but it comes in as straight ASCII. I.e., all the
> font information is lost; it is strictly one-font, no formatting. Is this
> proper behavior? Can it be improved upon?
>
Someone mentioned this earlier; don't remember which article. But it's
there. I think it's a bug in WriteNow. There is a workaround.
Hope that clarifies things a teeny bit.
Nik
> Dick Silbar (NeXTmail: sil...@whistler.er.doe.gov)
Nik A Gervae
> In article <3JUL91...@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov> sil...@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov
(Dick
> Silbar) writes:
> > In article <1991Jul3.1...@ni.umd.edu>, lo...@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis
> A. Mamakos) writes...
> > # [deleted]
> >
[ I wrote this V]
>
> When you forwarded it from an ASCII-only environment, something may have
> gotten munged/moved/hidden that NeXTmail depends upon. If there was a "Begin
> forwarded message:" line with the old headers, that may have done it.
NeXTmail
> is not good about that, from the little I've seen of that. Anybody have any
> concrete info?
OK, I've done a little real poking (I know, should've done it to
begin with. Live 'n learn.)
NeXTmail does use a header line "Next-attachment:". If that's not in
your "real" header (ie, forwarded message header), NeXTmail will miss
out on the fact that the message is in fact NeXTmail. My guess is that
when you forward from another mailer, that header line gets filtered
out or something (displaced so that it's in the "body"?). If you edit the message and add the name of the attachment (which is in the body) and some other info (which is not: probably number of chars, protection mode, etc), NeXTmail should be able to parse the attachment. Here's a sample that I
copied right out of my /usr/spool/mail/nik:
>From agent Thu Jul 4 22:45:12 1991
>Return-Path: <nik>
>Received: by ilion.sf.ca.us (NeXT-1.0 (From Sendmail 5.52)/NeXT-1.0+/Anterior)
> id AA01242; Thu, 4 Jul 91 22:45:10 PDT
>Date: Thu, 4 Jul 91 22:45:10 PDT
>From: nik (Nik A Gervae)
>Message-Id: <910705054...@ilion.sf.ca.us>
>Received: by NeXT Mailer (1.63.RR)
>To: nik
>Subject: 7
>Next-Attachment: .tar.77.7.attach, 435, 1/1, 660, 0
>
>begin 666 .tar.77.7.attach
>M'YV0:=R0*8/'A1PZ9@`H7,BPH<.'$"-*G$BQ(HB+-FC0``'@XD49-3AZO`A#
>MY$B/,FC8N%@#QHR6+FO0B.&QAHV7'2OJW,FSI\^?0(,*'4JTJ-&C2)'NX7+0
>M#`PN8=S,2;/4S!LW=.B(8</%:=<Y=]+,F0,"21DV=LK023,FS(X^"KBT"2/G
>M#)L8,F#$G5M7#EZ]7.#0)<.%#AX<-&H4QA/#1HZGAD&^7#QC!@[(>&C(`+FX
>MY0W,-7+$4&S8Q@T;F$_#L+$8<8T879^*>9KF:1TV3\W,L0R"3A@S4<V040`W
>MJ?'CR),K7\Z\N?/GT*-+GTZ]NO7KV+-KW\Z]N_?OX,.+'T^^O/GSZ-.K7\^^
>5O?OW\./+GT^_OOW[^//KW\^_O__]
>`
>end
>
So it looks like NeXTmail is getting whomped by somebody else not
following the rules...the info is there, but the reference is gone.
Anybody have any "official" info on the matter?
Nik.
felix.a.lugo
[article delete:stuff];
| NeXT is still on the `recommended platform' list, but not near the
| top. At least NeXT was smart enough to include 10BASE-T connectors on
| the 68040 machines.
|
Hooray for NeXT! 8^)
| I think you've proved my point. NeXT has sold *only* 200 machines to
| departments and individuals combined at Berkeley. That's pretty bad
| compared to the potential market.
|
That depends! What is the sample of other systems at Berkeley;
Suns, DEC, well, even Macs and PCs? Let's not jump to conclusions
here!
| Also, I'm not talking about public labs. I'm talking about what gets
| put on people's desks. For most uses, the NeXT is too slow as a
| standalone machine,
Are you sure? You did say you had a NeXT both at home and at work!
Have you used them lately? 8^)
Let's see ... "most uses" ...
* Previewing/debugging PostScript programs: it is faster than
eight pages per minute. 8^)
* Editing source code: how fast can you type?
* etc.
| but (at least for now) it's pretty good as a
| better-than-average client in a client/server universe. Only problem
Compares very favorably to other systems (i.e. Suns, DECs, etc.)
| is, NeXT seems to be moving in directions that make this sort of
| integration more difficult in the future.
|
Would you care to explain what direction this is?
| I would like to see NeXT become more of an integrated citizen with the
| rest of the world, and less of a lonely pioneer,
You ever wonder what would have happened if Christopher Columbus
decided he'd become an "integrated citizen". The world MIGHT still
be flat!!! 8^) 8^) 8^)
| so certain that it
| knows the right narrow pass through the mountains that it ignores the
| Interstate that everybody else is building.
What if the Interstate doesn't take you where you want to go?
Would you jump off a cliff just because everyone else does?
It's obvious you've come to dislike NeXT and you're angry at what
you believe NeXT should be doing. Why don't you take some of this
anger and focus it into something more productive. Write NeXT and
let them know how you feel! Maybe they'll surprise you!
felix.a.lugo
|
| Suppose you decided to go with the NeXT, but all you have or are
| likely to have for the forseeable future is $1200. You know that the
| NeXT is better than an FX, but it doesn't matter. You can't afford
| either.
| You buy the Mac Classic because that's all you can afford.
|
do nothing for you? Just so you can later post in netnews what a
terrible mistake you have made and how pissed you are because of it?
In one of your postings you mentioned that you bought a NeXT because
it was the only thing you could afford (you were comparing NeXTs to
DECs at the time). Now you're blaming NeXT for YOUR decision!! It's
a bit childish, don't you think?
| We now go a few years into the future. You are now well-heeled. It
| is time to buy a new machine. You see that the NeXT-4 is better than
| the Mac-ZX, and you can afford either.
|
| But in those years you have accumulated an enormous investment in Mac
| software, both stuff you purchased and a lot of stuff you wrote to
| make the Mac tolerable. In some cases, there is no equivalent on the
| NeXT; in others, it'll cost some big bucks or at least a lot of work
| before you'll be up to speed on the NeXT the way you were on the Mac.
|
This is the norm in the computer industry. You have to decide what
you want and match that to your needs. I owned an Amiga 2000 before
my NeXT. I have an extensive library of programs, games, utilities,
and hardware which I invested an enormous amount of my "capital".
Then the Amiga 3000 came out. It didn't match my needs.
The NeXT did!
I still own the Amiga. It's gathering dust at my place, along with
all the software and peripherals I bought for it. My loss, but it's
the risk you have to take in this industry!
Don't blame NeXT, Apple, myself, or yourself for this one. It's just
the way it is!
| But, between the job and the house and the wife and kids, you don't
| have the time to spend 36-hour days hacking.
|
I have a wife, a three-year old son, and a little girl in the stove.
I find plenty of time to be with my family, PLAY (I mean work) with
my NeXT, work a forty-hour week, and some resting time!
| With considerable reluctance, you buy the overpriced underpowered
| Mac-ZX and think to yourself how evil proprietary architectures are.
| At your work, you find yourself quite reluctant to buy the new
| whiz-bang Steve Sboj Ultimate because of its proprietary aspects...
|
Yeah, right! 8^)
| This little scenario goes on with various modifications (and different
| players at different stages) all the time. NeXT has several Achilles'
| Heels, and the lack of a low-price ($1000 price range) entry level
| machine is one of them.
It took Apple over five years to produce an entry level, $1000 price
range Mac. All they could come-up with was the 'ol Mac Classic!
Give NeXT some time, they WILL surprise you!
DX524 Steve Hoffman
>In article <1991Jul4.0...@milton.u.washington.edu> m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
[ lots of stuff deleted ]
>| the One True Religion until NeXT goes out of business? The NeXT
>| computer and NeXT the company have some good features, but there are
>| some serious flaws that need to be rectified. Some already have, such
>| as the abandonment of the unlamented optical disc.
>
> The introduction of the ODs was certainly not a "serious flaw"!!!
> It was a very innovative idea, years ahead of its time! Some people
> just didn't appreciate it's usefulness (just as some don't appreciate
> NeXT's usefulness). I love backing up my files to it and moving data
> between my home NeXT and my NeXT at work! One more thing, NeXT has
> not abandoned the ODs; you can still purchase them for the NeXTcube.
I'm buying a NeXTstation hoping that the 2.88MB floppy drive will one
day be replaced with a new drive that takes both floppies and 3.5" MO
disks (128MB). Keeping my fingers crossed.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Hoffman email: ste...@mot.com
Software Engineer, Private Trunked Systems Engineering, Motorola Inc.
All opinions are my own. Big corporations have none.
Brian Corrie
>In article <bcorrie.678644149@csr> bco...@csr.UVic.CA (Brian Corrie) writes:
>>I have been shopping around for a new machine. Two of my final choices were
>>the Mac and the NeXT. When looking at these machines, you can not compare the
>>cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope to get anything meaningful out of
>>it. What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
>>since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac is twice
>>as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
>Let me offer you an alternate reality check.
>Suppose you decided to go with the NeXT, but all you have or are
>likely to have for the forseeable future is $1200. You know that the
>NeXT is better than an FX, but it doesn't matter. You can't afford
>either.
>You buy the Mac Classic because that's all you can afford.
Good point, but I'm in no hurry, I've got NeXTs, SUNs, and Macs at work. I'll
choose to wait a bit until I scrape the money together.
>We now go a few years into the future. You are now well-heeled. It
>is time to buy a new machine. You see that the NeXT-4 is better than
>the Mac-ZX, and you can afford either.
>But in those years you have accumulated an enormous investment in Mac
>software, both stuff you purchased and a lot of stuff you wrote to
>make the Mac tolerable. In some cases, there is no equivalent on the
>NeXT; in others, it'll cost some big bucks or at least a lot of work
>before you'll be up to speed on the NeXT the way you were on the Mac.
>But, between the job and the house and the wife and kids, you don't
>have the time to spend 36-hour days hacking.
>With considerable reluctance, you buy the overpriced underpowered
>Mac-ZX and think to yourself how evil proprietary architectures are.
>At your work, you find yourself quite reluctant to buy the new
>whiz-bang Steve Sboj Ultimate because of its proprietary aspects...
>This little scenario goes on with various modifications (and different
>players at different stages) all the time. NeXT has several Achilles'
>Heels, and the lack of a low-price ($1000 price range) entry level
>machine is one of them.
Your point is well taken. I just wanted to defend the NeXT's price, as I didn't
you were comparing machines that were at the same performance level.
I admit that the NeXT doesn't have an entry level machine, but I don't think
it was targeted at that market, as there are already an abundance of machines
in that area (PCs Macs Amigas Ataris etc...). I think they targeted the high
end Macs/PCs and the low/mid range workstations, and they give pretty good
``bang for the buck'', as well as a nice operating/development environment.
By the way, I almost did go for the $2000 Mac 8-) Patience Grasshopper, when
you have the money, you may buy. 8-)
Garance A. Drosehn
>
> [Stuff deleted]
>
> >In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
> >the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
> >Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
> >competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
>
> Reality check here..... If you ask me (Yeah, I know, no one did 8-) you
> are comparing apples to oranges here. Or at least Granny Smiths to Red
> Delicious 8-)
>
> I have been shopping around for a new machine. Two of my final choices were
> the Mac and the NeXT. When looking at these machines, you can not compare the
> cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope to get anything meaningful out
of
> it. What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
> since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac is
> twice as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
Reality check yourself. You're talking about buying a Mac that has equivalent
horsepower to a NeXT. Most students are only concerned about a machine that
gets the work done that they want to do. A person can get a color Mac IIsi
(which is plenty good enough for what most students need) for around $3700 here
at RPI. Maybe add a printer and some memory and call it $4100.
Do the same kind of figuring with an LC and you could walk away with a color
machine for under $3K. A slower one to be sure, but the price is nice.
The *cheapest* color NeXTstation a student could buy is $5720, and that's for a
machine that has too little disk (105 meg) and too little memory (12 meg) and
no printer. If you're a student with $5K to spend, which machine are you going
to buy? Forget the question of which machine is faster/better/cooler
/slicker/runs-farther/jumps-higher, the fact is you can *get* a pretty nice
color Mac for quite a bit less than any color Nextstation.
In fact, your "reality check" proves the very thing that you claim is false.
You say "you can not compare the cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope
to get anything meaningful out of it". That's exactly the point of the
original poster. You may sneer at the low end Mac (as would I, for that
matter), but Apple is selling them by the bushel. NeXT is *not* competing with
the majority of machines that Apple is selling. Nobody buys a Mac Classic
because they think it's a high-powered machine, they buy it because it's all
they can afford. NeXT is competing at the high-end of the Mac universe, and is
competing with Sun, DEC and the other unix workstation vendors (which is what
the original article said).
disclaimer: I'm speaking as someone who very much wants to buy a color
NeXTstation for my home use, but I haven't been able to justify the $$$ for the
model I want. I could, however, come up with the $$$ for a color Mac IIci.
Don't tell me how much neater/keener/cooler a color nextstation would be (I
already understand that), just send me $3-4K so I can afford to buy one...
Meanwhile I guess I'll just have to suffer with this greyscale nextstation
that's here in my office... :-)
Garance A. Drosehn
>
> The introduction of the ODs was certainly not a "serious flaw"!!!
> It was a very innovative idea, years ahead of its time! Some people
> just didn't appreciate it's usefulness (just as some don't appreciate
> NeXT's usefulness). I love backing up my files to it and moving data
> between my home NeXT and my NeXT at work! One more thing, NeXT has
> not abandoned the ODs; you can still purchase them for the NeXTcube.
It was a serious flaw. The optical drive was too slow, and it contributed to
the complaints that everyone had about the first NeXT cubes being too slow.
Many people *still* tell me that a NeXT is too slow for them, because the only
NeXT they've ever used was one of the earlier cubes with an optical drive.
It was a great idea, to be sure, but the idea of completely dropping the hard
drive for an optical disk (which was their original premise) was a serious
miscalculation. It made the machine seem worse that it was.
Michael D Mellinger
I'm buying a NeXTstation hoping that the 2.88MB floppy drive will one
day be replaced with a new drive that takes both floppies and 3.5" MO
disks (128MB). Keeping my fingers crossed.
I expect that the 2.88MB drives will be around for a couple of years,
at least for software distribution. MO disks cost a lot of money.
Fortunately, IBM has started using 2.88MB drives so the price of the
disks should take a nose dive within the next year.
-Mike
Michael D Mellinger
The *cheapest* color NeXTstation a student could buy is $5720, and that's for a
machine that has too little disk (105 meg) and too little memory (12 meg) and
no printer. If you're a student with $5K to spend, which machine are you going
to buy? Forget the question of which machine is faster/better/cooler
/slicker/runs-farther/jumps-higher, the fact is you can *get* a pretty nice
color Mac for quite a bit less than any color Nextstation.
Why does a student need to buy a color machine? They are buying Mac
Classics are they not? I think having a 17" 92 dpi monochrome screen
provides more functionality than color. Try adding up the total
again.
$3250 NeXT
$1295 Postscript LaserPrinter
$0 Word Processor + Thesaurus and dictionary
$0 Mathematica
-----
$4545 for 15 mips + 2.5MFlops
(an Mac IIsi does 0.2 MFlops? Which machine will be worth more in 3
years. Apple is already planning to retire the Mac.)
And is owning your own LaserWriter a must? Try putting that nice
display to use and use Preview more often. Ask your school to buy a
LaserPrinter.
disclaimer: I'm speaking as someone who very much wants to buy a color
NeXTstation for my home use, but I haven't been able to justify the $$$ for the
model I want. I could, however, come up with the $$$ for a color Mac IIci.
Don't tell me how much neater/keener/cooler a color nextstation would be (I
already understand that), just send me $3-4K so I can afford to buy one...
The monitor for the NeXTstation costs some bucks. How would you
decrease the price?
Meanwhile I guess I'll just have to suffer with this greyscale nextstation
that's here in my office... :-)
The monitors are quite sharp. I definitely prefer them over the ones
on our SparcStations. My hope is that next year NeXT will have a $3K
mono. machine and a $5K color machine. They will need this(IMHO) if
they really want to hit it big.
-Mike
Andreas Windemuth
m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
> | the One True Religion until NeXT goes out of business? The NeXT
> | computer and NeXT the company have some good features, but there are
> | some serious flaws that need to be rectified. Some already have, such
> | as the abandonment of the unlamented optical disc.
>
> The introduction of the ODs was certainly not a "serious flaw"!!!
> It was a very innovative idea, years ahead of its time! Some people
> just didn't appreciate it's usefulness (just as some don't appreciate
> NeXT's usefulness). I love backing up my files to it and moving data
> between my home NeXT and my NeXT at work! One more thing, NeXT has
> not abandoned the ODs; you can still purchase them for the NeXTcube.
>
Also, I hope there will be a reintroduction of a more workable
small and fast optical disk when such become available.
--
Andreas Windemuth
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
|Theoretical Biophysics wind...@lisboa.ks.uiuc.edu
|University of Illinois Tel: (217)-244-1612
|3121 Beckman Institute Fax: (217)-244-8371
|405 N Mathews, Urbana, IL61801 NeXTmail Ok
+--------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean Eric Fagan
> Here you go again! Why would you buy something that you know will
> do nothing for you? Just so you can later post in netnews what a
> terrible mistake you have made and how pissed you are because of it?
Wow. That's incredible. That is the most *knee-jerk* and *brainless*
posting I've seen in a *long* time.
Listen carefully: the person you followed up to specified a scenario in
which he wanted a computer, and both a NeXT and a Mac fit his basic
requirements. Given the monetary advantage, he would want either a NeXT or
a Mac IIFX, but he believed the NeXT was superior for his needs. However,
having only a limited amount of money, a lesser computer (a mac classic)
would suit his needs, at least temporarily.
Where did you get "buy something that you know will do nothing for you"?
Mark Crispin
>In article <1991Jul4....@cbnewsl.cb.att.com>
>> It was a very innovative idea, years ahead of its time! Some people
>> just didn't appreciate it's usefulness (just as some don't appreciate
>> NeXT's usefulness). I love backing up my files to it and moving data
>> between my home NeXT and my NeXT at work! One more thing, NeXT has
>> not abandoned the ODs; you can still purchase them for the NeXTcube.
>
>It was a serious flaw. The optical drive was too slow, and it contributed to
>the complaints that everyone had about the first NeXT cubes being too slow.
Also unreliable and expensive. My office cube (12/89 vintage) is on
its fourth OD drive, and all I use the OD for is software installation
and backup. I once tried keeping data on the OD that I didn't have
space to keep on the hard drive -- about 110MB worth. I learned the
hard way not to do that...
My university reseller pricelist shows the academic price of an OD
drive at $2200 plus $175/each for media. So, for $2375 you can get
256MB of removable media. For $10 more I can buy a 1.2GB hard disk
with enclosure and power supply from a commercial vendor, and since it
has a SCSI interface it can be used on both a slab and a cube.
As for transfer between home and office, I think that most people
rarely need to transfer 256MB on a daily basis. At least that's the
case for me. I agree that 1.44MB floppies (2.88MB floppies are still
too expensive to be worth it) are too small and it's inconvenient to
have to write 4 or 5 floppies.
But, removable media is not the only option.
A 9600 baud SLIP line with V.42bis data compression tranfers text
files at about 20K baud using FTP. That should be faster with V.32bis
(14K baud) instead of V.32 (9600 baud). You can get a suitable modem
for about $500-$600; hopefully your employer will buy at least one of
them. I have a 1.5 hour commute each way; allowing an hour to write
the removable media that makes removable media a loser for anything
less than 28MB. With that much data to transfer, rather than deal
with 10-20 floppies, I'd probably take the slab (or external hard
drive) with me to work.
Charles Herrick
Path: helios!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!iWarp.intel.com!ogicse!milton!mrc
From: m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Date: 4 Jul 91 07:42:08 GMT
References: <1991Jul3.1...@milton.u.washington.edu> <5...@heaven.woodside.ca.us>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 59
In article <5...@heaven.woodside.ca.us> gl...@heaven.woodside.ca.us (Glenn Reid) writes:
> You don't have to
>like the machine for NeXT to be successful. You only have to BUY one.
>And you've obviously bought two. Thank you.
I hate to break your bubble, but I did not buy two machines. My
employer bought my office machine. I bought a home machine when the
price became cheap enough ($3300). My employer has not bought many
additional NeXTs in the past two years. We have bought a lot of DEC
RISC gear. You can count the personal purchases of NeXTs this year
on one hand. It just so happened I had enough cash to spend on a NeXT
but not enough for a DECstation.
This should be read as a symptom of trouble and a source of concern
for NeXT. We're not the only university where this is happening.
18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
sliced bread are not (fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your
viewpoint) the ones who make departmental purchasing decisions; and
those are the decisions which count since at NeXT's current pricing
not all that many students are going to buy NeXTs.
>Open systems aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. You certainly
>can't call the Macintosh or the IBM PC an open system, and they've sold
>more of those than any other kind of computer on planet Earth.
Macintosh filled a pent-up demand for GUIs in the under $5000 range.
Note that the Lisa which was technically superior to the first
Macintosh was a failure, simply because it was too expensive for what
it delivered.
PC's are far more open than NeXT or Mac -- at least in terms of
hardware. You do not have to buy a PC from IBM. You can buy a PC for
$500 or less. Part of what helped IBM seize the market share from
Apple in the early days of the PC was the open hardware architecture;
while Apple was busy suing Franklin, IBM was encouraging clones.
In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
>If an open
>system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
>system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
Ahem, why are so many RFP's requiring open systems these days?
Why isn't every vendor in the world lining up to license NeXTstep, and
instead announcing X and OSF/Motif products? Why has IBM abandoned
NeXTstep?
Question: do you really want NeXT to survive, or do you want to follow
the One True Religion until NeXT goes out of business? The NeXT
computer and NeXT the company have some good features, but there are
some serious flaws that need to be rectified. Some already have, such
as the abandonment of the unlamented optical disc. The lack of
Charles Herrick
18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
sliced bread are not (fortunately or unfortunately depending upon your
viewpoint) the ones who make departmental purchasing decisions;
I would suggest that even in Mr Crispin's subconscious,
18-year-old freshmen serve as the archetype for the flexible,
enthusiastic, and open-minded end of the spectrum. Looking at the
decisions that have been made by the old-timers (those with enough
time invested in the system to acquire the power to make decisions and
the hardened arteries to make those decisions poorly), one can clearly
see the archetype for the command-line-bound, hard-to-use,
fits-the-compuGeek-but-doesn't-make-the-common-user's-life-easy, other
end of the human spectrum.
In the '60's they had a saying: "Don't trust anyone over 30." Mr
Crispin's argument is a reasonable justification for acknowledging
that "30" is a state of mind. I'd be happy to remain one of those
"18-year-old freshmen", personally.
Kee Hinckley
>In article <1991Jul1.1...@alphalpha.com> naz...@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
> there are existing standards for sending multi-part,
> typed enclosures (and newer and better ones under way). NeXT however
> keeps creating their own. Which is fine if you don't want to talk
> to the rest of the world.
>
>multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
Andrew, Star*Nine's QuickMail gateway to Unix, Z-Code's Z-Mail and
Alfalfa's Poste all use multi-media enclosures. I'm sure there are more.
Of those both Poste and and Star*Nine use existing RFCs which predate
NeXT's effort.
>In addition, there is ample precedent for using an existing product as
>a standard. Examples range from C to encryption techniques.
Sure, but why bother inventing a new technique when the old one works
fine?
>they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP. It's just that the rest of the
>world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
Want me to mail you a GIF? How about a Fax, or a compressed tar'd
directory? I'm not blowing smoke, all I have to do is click on
"Import File".
--
Alfalfa Software, Inc. | Poste: The EMail for Unix
naz...@alfalfa.com | Send Anything... Anywhere
617/646-7703 (voice/fax) | in...@alfalfa.com
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
Garance A. Drosehn
> In article <2nql#q...@rpi.edu>
g...@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes:
> Why does a student need to buy a color machine?
That is true, they don't need one. However, the article I was responding to
specifically said that a color Mac is twice as expensive as a color NeXT. I
was answering that comment, and not claiming that every student needs a color
machine.
(the last line I quoted in that article, before starting my own comments, was:
What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac
is twice as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
^^^^^ ^^^^^
)
Btw, did I really answer this under the "revolution" thread? I thought it was
something else... Ick. That thread was already busy enough without tangental
topics like this!
Kurt Baumann
> NeXT is the only vendor I know of which is currently shipping
> multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
> on an initial standard, they just did it.
>
> In addition, there is ample precedent for using an existing product as
> a standard. Examples range from C to encryption techniques.
>
> by the fact that they have a company policy regarding open standards,
> they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP. It's just that the rest of the
> world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
I think that the point here that you are missing is the following:
When one goes off on their lonesome and creates a new "standard" it is often
best to also do some marketing of it as well.
There is a group of companies (note I said group) who are working on mail,
printing, and other issues with the hopes of coming up with some new
"standards". This group is not doing this by themselves (note there is a group
of companies), and is not going to sit on the standard after they have created
the applications.
I appluad those on the leading edge of the electronic frontier. But keep in
mind some frontier towns will not exist in the future, and if you want to
survive these days you need to be supported by more than yourself. Please keep
up the good work, all I am saying is let the rest of us know what you are doing.
To put this a bit in perspective, we offered NeXT back in 88 to move our Mac
TCP/IP applications over to the NeXT machine and enhance both the Mac side and
the NeXT side to take advantage of sound, pictures, etc, in essence multimedia
mail and news, but we were told that there was no interest in something that
only the Mac and NeXT could run... Seems ironic that now they are doing just
what they said they were not interested in doing.
We have a HIGH level of interest in doing multimedia mail and news on the Mac
and other machines. So we want to see things like this succeed, because we
can't do it alone. But we can't help out if we don't have the info to do so
either.
Kurt Baumann 703.709.9890
InterCon Systems Corp. Creators of fine TCP/IP products for
the Macintosh
Bill Janssen
In fact, NeXT can [talk to the rest of the world]. X11R4 can run
as a program in NeXT. I saw only demo version so I cannot say in
detail, but you can switch from NeXTStep to X and vice versa.
Which is of course the problem. They go off and do all their neat
stuff in their own world. They can show you the "real" world, but
they can't live in it. The real challenge is to *live* in the same
world as other people, and still do the neat stuff. That is, don't
use a proprietary/oddball OS, don't use a proprietary/oddball window
system (and here I include things like what fonts are available and
what protocol is used for client-client and client-window-manager
interactions in the def of window system).
Bill
--
Bill Janssen jan...@parc.xerox.com (415) 494-4763
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304
Charles Herrick
>NeXT is the only vendor I know of which is currently shipping
>multi-part multi-media mail/enclosures. They've been shipping it since
Andrew, Star*Nine's QuickMail gateway to Unix, Z-Code's Z-Mail and
Alfalfa's Poste all use multi-media enclosures. I'm sure there are more.
Of those both Poste and and Star*Nine use existing RFCs which predate
NeXT's effort.
Oh. By the way, what machine vendors are shipping these? (as in HP,
DEC, SUN, MIPS, etc..)
>In addition, there is ample precedent for using an existing product as
>a standard. Examples range from C to encryption techniques.
Sure, but why bother inventing a new technique when the old one works
fine?
Ask the folks at Carnegie who wrote Mach. As an example,
perhaps they can help you to understand. To paraphrase someone who
shall remain un-named, while some folks are building the wheel,
someone has to be out re-inventing the wheel.
>they support TCP/IP, NFS and UUCP. It's just that the rest of the
>world needs to do more when they talk other than blow smoke.
Want me to mail you a GIF? How about a Fax, or a compressed tar'd
directory?
Sure. I can receive all that stuff on my NeXT. Right out of the box,
without installing or buying anything extra. It's part of the software
Bundle.
I'm not blowing smoke, all I have to do is click on
"Import File".
Well, OK, if you must... of course on the NeXT, all you have to do is
drag the icon of your GIF over the mail message window, but clicking
on "Import File" sounds neat.
John T. Nelson
>
> as a program in NeXT. I saw only demo version so I cannot say in
> detail, but you can switch from NeXTStep to X and vice versa.
>
>Which is of course the problem. They go off and do all their neat
>stuff in their own world. They can show you the "real" world, but
>they can't live in it. The real challenge is to *live* in the same
>world as other people, and still do the neat stuff. That is, don't
>use a proprietary/oddball OS, don't use a proprietary/oddball window
>system (and here I include things like what fonts are available and
>what protocol is used for client-client and client-window-manager
>interactions in the def of window system).
The problem is that Steve Jobs judged X to be brain-dead and decided
to roll his own. Okay so its not standard, but compared to X, NeXT
Step is a technical triumph. I agree with another poster that Jobs
should have made NeXTStep available to many different platforms and
created a standard, if only De Facto.
The only thing X has going for it is that it is portable and available
on many different machines and provides a consistant programming
interface on all of those machines. Source code is available too.
Ease of programming X, or the elegance of the programs built to run
under X are not factors in X's acceptance as a standard.
---
John T. Nelson Internet: j...@potomac.ads.com
Advanced Decision Systems Uucp: kzin!spe...@mimsy.umd.edu
Arlington, VA (703) 243-1611
Michael Neuman
In article <1991Jul4.0...@milton.u.washington.edu> m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
[Lots of stuff deleted about buying NeXTs for home use]
>
>You can count the personal purchases of NeXTs this year
>on one hand. It just so happened I had enough cash to spend on a NeXT
>but not enough for a DECstation.
I don't think it's that little. Since most every college kid has the
opportunity to buy one for $3300. In any event, that's primarily why I'm
considering the NeXT. I'd much rather have an SGI 4D/20 or a Sun IPC, but
I don't have the money to afford either. That's the only reason I'm buying
the machine. It's Unix, fairly fast, has built in ethernet, and is cheap!
Why do you think people buy Yugos? It's a car, it suits their purposes, and
it's cheap!
>This should be read as a symptom of trouble and a source of concern
>for NeXT. We're not the only university where this is happening.
>18-year-old freshmen who think NeXTmail is the greatest thing since
>sliced bread are not [making purchasing decisions for NeXT].
Excuse me. I happen to be one of those 18 year old college freshmen who
knows NeXTmail isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. My experience
with systems ranges from 30 million $ supercomputers to $100 Commodore 64s
with a mix of everything in between. NeXTmail has some nifty features. Voice
& graphics is kinda nice, but interfacing it with normal mailers is REALLY
bad. Ever notice how you can receive a message from a NeXT and it's always in
128 columns? Stupid considering they clicked the little button that said
"Normal Mail".
This is a major downfall of NeXT. Everyone who owns them thinks that they
own the best there is, and therefore they don't need to comply with the rest of
the world. So it runs NFS (as someone pointed out earlier), big deal! That's
only because people didn't want to spend $2000 for a 300 meg HD. The system
DOESN'T EVEN RUN X. It's the open systems standard for god's sake! EVERYTHING
from Suns to Ardents to SGIs to DECs to Crays run X11r4. Sure there's PD
versions, but they're always beta test, and never work with color.
That's not the problem though. The problem is when developers say, "Oh,
we don't need to run X, we have NeXTstep which is far superior!" How's a
system going to make it in the REAL world if it can't even graphically
interface with REAL systems? The systems is a complete loser in a scientific
type environment when people submit jobs to supercomputers, then expect the
output to come to their local workstation. Well, good luck on the NeXT!
>>Open systems aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. You certainly
>>can't call the Macintosh or the IBM PC an open system, and they've sold
>>more of those than any other kind of computer on planet Earth.
He's looking at Open Systems from an extremely limited point of view.
He's right! Open Systems aren't all they're cracked up to be if you're
not interfacing them with other systems. If you're going to sit there,
just using local resources, then using X, NeWS, etc is completely
worthless. However, one of the key elements to a workstation is it's
networking abilities. Sure the NeXT runs Ethernet, but it CAN'T interface
with anything else! You might as well be running a VT100.
>In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
>the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
>Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
>competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
EXACTLY! And NeXT can't compete against systems that CAN network well.
Especially since Sun, DEC, etc. are all working to IMPROVE networking,
whereas NeXT's view seems to be, "Well, our system is superior, if no one
else can see that then we'll die rather than conform to Open System ideals."
>>If an open
>>system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
>>system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
Heheh... When was the last time you ever saw ANY proprietary system
solve ANYONEs problems? The NeXT has no key features that make it stand
out from every other system. For example, the SGI has graphics. If you want
a REALLY GREAT graphics workstation, you go to SGI. Sun has great networking
compatibility, and overall probably has the best package--if you need a multi-
purpose system, go to Sun! HP makes the fastest cheap system available. If you
need serious bang for the buck, go to HP. What does NeXT offer? A 68040? Well,
most comapanies have gone of to RISC/SPARC architecture because it's faster.
Unix? Mach has so many incompatiblities, that it should be embarassed to say
it's modeled after 4.2 BSD. Graphics? Hehehe.. Right. Sound? Sure it has a
nice signal processor, and can do some nice sound, but a $500 Amiga has the
same sound capability (and frankly, somee of the stuff I've heard on the Amiga
was superior to the NeXT!).
What the NeXT DOES offer is a $3300 system that's perfect for kids heading
off to college because they can afford it, and because it'll suit their
more-than-Mac-can-do problems (ie. Mathematica & Unix is very important).
>Why isn't every vendor in the world lining up to license NeXTstep, and
>instead announcing X and OSF/Motif products? Why has IBM abandoned
>NeXTstep?
>
>The lack of
>attention to industry standards and the open lack of concern for
>continued UNIX compatibility is a continuing flaw that may prove
>fatal.
Very well said.
-Mike Neuman
m...@acl.lanl.gov
Advanced Computing Laboratory
Los Alamos National Labs
#include <std.disclaimer>
Mark R. Thomsen
We (my group at work) bought NeXT computers precisely because they combine
standards where standards exist and make sense with innovation where innovation
makes sense. In hindsight they might have made some choices that we (and they)
would have done different knowing now ... However, they are attempting to push
technology and not just clone it. They get some slack from me. If they were
cloning a PC and had trouble running PC software and being a good PC, I would
flame them to a cinder. They are not a cloner. Hell, that is a different
marketplace altogether (low margin, low innovation, and increasingly low
expectations). Eventually DEC, HP, Sun, IBM (non-PC parts), SGI, and the rest
will recognize that cloning and copying without innovating will put them out of
business. Users would get a short term compatibility period followed by little
new and interesting. Those who push on new and interesting will gain the
attention and eventually the market will drift. (The market for taking things
when they are well worn, well proven, and, well, old, already exists with the
PCs).
I overstate the case. But McNeely got it right when he said "Those who can, do.
Those who can't, consort."
An article called "NeXT and Open Systems Standards" provided by NeXT Corporate
Sales (1991) furthers the idea that NeXT combines standards and innovation by
describing some future plans. To summarize (article is copyrighted) they adopt
intercomputer communications and file format standards (e.g., Unix files, NFS,
TCP/IP, TIFF, EPS, RTF, JPEG, ISO 9660, Gp3 FAX). They seem committed to Posix
(4.4BSD) compliance and speak GOSIP. X.400? X.500? These appear to be in their
plans. Generally they are following the standards efforts and are participating
in areas.
With one interesting variation - NeXTstep vs. X11. IMHO, I feel that there is a
lot of work to do in GUIs before it is standards time; probably four more
years. X11 is reknown for having been prematurely removed from experimentation
and rushed into 'standardome.' It is indecent technology. It makes standalone
computers slow for the rare cases of network use. It forgot a graphics model.
It forgot many of the Xerox lessons. It makes applications device-dependent. It
is huge from a programmers viewpoint. Using it makes me long for CLI. And the
idea of toolkit means that much of the looky-feely comes from others. At last
count there are 11 widely distributed X11 toolkits. Hey, NeXT did a better
technology (as did Sun with NeWS) and those will swamp X11 if the originators
will make the software more widely available. There are so few commercial
applications (or others) that use X11 for more than a terminal and menu package
that this area of design will go on.
NeXTmail and NewsGrazer are not commercial products attempting to be definitive
words in multimedia exchanges. NeXTmail was a one-man experimental project that
was so successful and got so much praise from customers that it has become much
more official. NewsGrazer appears to be the work of one man who tried to help
us attack usenet more effectively. These efforts were needed, could be pushed
by indivuduals, and I think they deserve our high praise. My telecommunications
world is pretty effective (on top of an infrastructure in place) using these
tools. Judging from the volume on comp.sys.next, I would say NewsGrazer is
quite a success.
In summary? NeXT is in the midst of standards and in the midst of honest
innovation. Whatever I will be using in five years, NeXT Inc. and my using a
NeXT computer now will both have positive impacts on the choices available and
my demands.
Mark R. Thomsen
felix.a.lugo
...
| bad. Ever notice how you can receive a message from a NeXT and it's always in
| 128 columns? Stupid considering they clicked the little button that said
| "Normal Mail".
I've personally never seen this happen! I've also never seen the
button that said "Normal Mail". Mail.app users are directly
responsible for determining what type of message will be delivered,
be it NeXT mail or non-NeXT mail (I believe that's the button you were
referring to).
| This is a major downfall of NeXT. Everyone who owns them thinks that they
| own the best there is, and therefore they don't need to comply with the rest of
| the world.
That's why it comes with DPS, TCP/IP, RTF, TIFF, etc. 8^)
| So it runs NFS (as someone pointed out earlier), big deal! That's
| only because people didn't want to spend $2000 for a 300 meg HD.
Excuse me!!!!!!! I believe NFS has other uses than as a replacement
for a HD.
| The system
| DOESN'T EVEN RUN X. It's the open systems standard for god's sake! EVERYTHING
| from Suns to Ardents to SGIs to DECs to Crays run X11r4. Sure there's PD
| versions, but they're always beta test, and never work with color.
I RUN X11R4 on my FOUR-COLOR NeXT cube! 8^)
| That's not the problem though. The problem is when developers say, "Oh,
| we don't need to run X, we have NeXTstep which is far superior!" How's a
NeXTstep IS far superior than X in many ways! Being able to run
X11R4 is also good! But if you can get a good implementation for
*FREE*, why should NeXT worry about producing one!
...
|
| EXACTLY! And NeXT can't compete against systems that CAN network well.
| Especially since Sun, DEC, etc. are all working to IMPROVE networking,
| whereas NeXT's view seems to be, "Well, our system is superior, if no one
| else can see that then we'll die rather than conform to Open System ideals."
|
Are you quoting this from NeXT, or is this a PERSONAL quote?
This all sounds very good, but what if your application doesn't
require internetworking with other systems???
| >>If an open
| >>system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
| >>system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
|
| Heheh... When was the last time you ever saw ANY proprietary system
| solve ANYONEs problems?
I see it everyday at work on my NeXT cube!
| The NeXT has no key features that make it stand
| out from every other system.
No??! I've never seen Sun, DEC, HP, etc. running Display PostScript!
Then there's the DSP, the 400 DPI NeXT laser printer, etc. etc. etc.
| out from every other system. For example, the SGI has graphics. If you want
| a REALLY GREAT graphics workstation, you go to SGI. Sun has great networking
| compatibility, and overall probably has the best package--if you need a multi-
| purpose system, go to Sun! HP makes the fastest cheap system available. If you
| need serious bang for the buck, go to HP. What does NeXT offer? A 68040? Well,
| most comapanies have gone of to RISC/SPARC architecture because it's faster.
| Unix? Mach has so many incompatiblities, that it should be embarassed to say
| it's modeled after 4.2 BSD.
The NeXT has graphics!
The NeXT has great networking!
What's wrong with the 68040?
| Graphics? Hehehe.. Right. Sound? Sure it has a
| nice signal processor, and can do some nice sound, but a $500 Amiga has the
| same sound capability (and frankly, somee of the stuff I've heard on the Amiga
| was superior to the NeXT!).
The Amiga sound capability the same as NeXTs? Ha Ha Ha! Not in your
lifetime. What Amiga can produce 44KHz sound at 16 bits? You
certainly have a lot to learn about NeXTs!!!!!!!!
BTW, I've also seen those great Amiga games with nice sound!!!!! 8^)-
| What the NeXT DOES offer is a $3300 system that's perfect for kids heading
| off to college because they can afford it, and because it'll suit their
| more-than-Mac-can-do problems (ie. Mathematica & Unix is very important).
|
Agreed!
...
Andreas Windemuth
[stuff deleted]
> worthless. However, one of the key elements to a workstation is it's
> networking abilities. Sure the NeXT runs Ethernet, but it CAN'T interface
> with anything else! You might as well be running a VT100.
>
I don't see what you mean. The NeXT's we have here interface with
everything else quite well, including SGI's (VERY hard to manage, those
beasts), a SUN and even a lot of MacIntoshes (we use the Gatorbox).
As file servers, they are virtually trouble free (more so than SGI).
Actually, I have a hard time thinking of something that a
SUN can do on a network that a NeXT can not do at least as well.
[more stuff deleted]
> Unix? Mach has so many incompatiblities, that it should be embarassed to say
> it's modeled after 4.2 BSD. Graphics? Hehehe.. Right. Sound? Sure it has a
> nice signal processor, and can do some nice sound, but a $500 Amiga has the
> same sound capability (and frankly, somee of the stuff I've heard on the
Amiga
> was superior to the NeXT!).
The Unix on the NeXT _is_ BSD (4.3, I think). Mach is only the kernel.
Would you care to point out some of those "many incompatibilities"?
The NeXT's ability to compile standard Unix software is second only
to SUN, if anything. Try compiling something on a SGI that was not
previously adapted to it. It works, but takes much longer than for the
NeXT. Admittedly, the NeXT has some quirks, but not more so than any
other Unix workstation (I think Sun still does not provide ANSI-C).
As to sound, I don't know the Amiga, but I doubt that it can do real-time
manipulation of CD-quality sound, including playback and recording from
and to hard disk. Just because the music you might have heard on the Amiga
was better doesn't mean the system is better.
[still more stuff deleted]
I can only assume that you do not have much experience with a NeXT,
maybe one time you will realize that the NeXT is more like a Mercedes
than a Yugo, price notwithstanding.
Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)
>>..
>>.. [still more stuff deleted]
>>..
>>.. I can only assume that you do not have much experience with a NeXT,
>>.. maybe one time you will realize that the NeXT is more like a Mercedes
>>.. than a Yugo, price notwithstanding.
Neither comparison fits: Yugos are no longer sold and Mercedes
(pricewise) is more in the Stardent or SGI class. The NeXT is more
like a Peugeot: relatively affordable, fun to drive, but with dealers
only in University towns, so if you need parts in the middle of the
desert... And most people are not even aware they exist.
Greetings,
Hardy
-------****-------
Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy); Department of Physics, University of California
Irvine CA 92717; (714) 856 5543; ha...@golem.ps.uci.edu or MMA...@UCI.BITNET
Andrew Zimmerman
>>| That's not the problem though. The problem is when developers say, "Oh,
>>| we don't need to run X, we have NeXTstep which is far superior!" How's a
>>
>> NeXTstep IS far superior than X in many ways! Being able to run
>> X11R4 is also good! But if you can get a good implementation for
>> *FREE*, why should NeXT worry about producing one!
>>
>The primary function of X is to transport graphics in near real time to
>Internet sites perhaps across the world. Most of the time, these graphics
Now I know why the network is so slow all of the time :-).
>are generated on some sort of supercomputer (at least for scientific
>applications). I've never seen a NeXT supercomputer (have you?) and
>consequently, I've never seen a supercomputer running NeXTstep. Wow, so you
>have a windowing system that can interact with other NeXTs... What good does
>that do you? So you can run apps off of some system with the same computing
>power as yourself. Oooh! I personally run X whenever I need graphics output
>from a Connection Machine/Cray. Mainly because I can't afford to pay $500
>to fly to the site of the machine just so I can look at a framebuffer.
>THAT'S the point of X, and THAT'S the downfall of NeXT. Who needs a
>network GUI for a system that's identical to your own?
I'm getting a little tired of all the NeXT bashing that has been going
on in this thread, especially in the area of GUI's. A number of people
have been saying that the only way that a GUI can be successful is if it
is 'standard' and non-proprietary. They then use X11 as an example.
To those comments, I have to disagree. Although X is available on a number
of machines, I would hardly call it a standard. (Which version are you
talking about? I started using X when it was X10R4 and am now up to
X11R3. Most other people are at X11R4, and I have heard that X11R5 is
on its way. Just which one is the standard?)
I would also question any GUI where the byte-order of the
server machine is important. Also, half that applications for X either
run on a color (8 bit) machine, or a monochrome (1 bit) machine. Heaven
help those of use with either a (4 bit) or a (2 bit) machine.
Side Note: Why is the color gray given the value of c0c0c0? It should be
given the value of bfbfbf. :-)
X does have some nice points, but as a network GUI, I'm not sure. The network
capability of X is so slow and network intensive, that most apps would
work better having a client send data to a program on the server which then
does the GUI.
X is also limited in it capabilities. So much so, that a number of vendors
add DPS to their X11 servers. These X11 clients then no longer will run
on the other vendors' servers. (But hey, its a standard, right?)
Now lets take a look at the proprietary argument. A number of GUI's
that are proprietary are very successful. A few that come to mind are
the Mac GUI, Windows 3.0, and SunView (or is it suntools?). The case of
Sun users is the most interesting. In that case, the user can use either,
and many of them chose SunViews even though it is proprietary. Why?
First, it is faster then X, but more importantly, the existing base of
software supported SunViews, not X. A number of CAD packages only work
under Sunviews. The vendors didn't find it cost effective to support
X11. A number of packages (lotus 1-2-3 for example) have been around
for a couple of years for SunViews. I haven't seen a version for X
yet. (I keep getting told that there is going to be one real soon now.)
Even if they do support X11, some vendors then require you to use a
particular toolkit (Wingz requires Motif.)
My point is that just because the main GUI of a system is not X, doesn't
make the system bad. However, having said that, I would also like to
say that I do feel it is important for these computers to have some support
for X. In this regard, I would say that the NeXT is the best of both
worlds. For those that want to use NeXTStep but need an X server to
view data from a remote client, there is CoXist. For those that
think X is the only way to go, there is XNext (mouseX) which takes over
the entire screen. (Now, if only the mouse had three buttons :-))
Sean Eric Fagan
eni...@beta.gov' or whatever it was would work? I don't look at followup
lines normally; I assume that the poster was reasonably intelligent. I
guess I was wrong in this case. It does explain some of your comments,
though.
In article <27...@beta.gov> eni...@beta.gov (Michael Neuman) writes:
> Yeah, that's the button I'm referring to. Whenever I get Email from ANY
>NeXT system (including when I send it to myself), it's ALWAYS in 128 colums
>(or somewhere right around there.. Maybe 132). Again, that's my point.
>Mail.app users don't care that other systems can receive their mail, only
>that other NeXT users can!
I didn't believe this was the case, so I sent myself some non-next mail from
a next to a non-next, replied and included it (in the normal fashion),
replied to *that* from the nExt and edited and included *that*.
In none of the cases, was the message longer than 80 columns, even though
some of my sentences were over 200 characters.
I'm using 2.0; you may be using a previous version, at which point I would
suggest you upgrade. Based on the responses to your message, I would have
to assume that the person sending you mail is screwing up, not next.
> That's not the point. It's NOT superior if no other system uses it!
That is a non-true statement. Even though I do development with X, I prefer
NeXTstep (just me, though; I just like the way if feels). Having Mouse-X
is enough for me; I do my development under nextstep, and flip over to see
what it looks like. This also allows me to run the application under a
debugger and not have to worry about any events accidently getting to it.
>The primary function of X is to transport graphics in near real time to
>Internet sites perhaps accross the world.
Really? I would say that that is an incredibly tiny portion of X's
functionality. The main advantage I see for X is that many systems have
adopted it. Other than that, it's huge, slow, complex, and getting more so
every day.
>Most of the time, these graphics
>are generated on some sort of supercomputer (at least for scientific
>applications).
Fine. Display them on the next using Mouse-X. Or even Pencom's package.
Is that so difficult? I don't think so.
>I've never seen a NeXT supercomputer (have you?) and
>consequently, I've never seen a supercomputer running NeXTstep.
High-end models of the RS/6000 are rather fast, and can (or could) run
NeXTstep. By "rather fast," I mean that they approach the speed of a cray,
if not surpass it, under some circumstances.
>I personally run X whenever I need graphics output
>from a Connection Machine/Cray.
Most people running X do not have access to a CM or a Cray. I guess that
means X is worthless, doesn't it?
> What great networking? So it runs Ethernet... I can buy a $200 card for an
>Amiga that does the exact same thing.. And, the Amiga will run X!
And. So. Will. The. NeXT. Should I repeat this a few dozen more times?
Should others?
>SPARC is a really nifty way of using
>registers which speeds up the system a heckuva lot.
You're not going to impress people with your knowledge with *that*.
Register windows are a lot of trouble, possibly more than they're worth.
The MIPS chips and 88k don't have register windows, yet they don't have too
much trouble (my personal observation is that MIPS is keeping ahead of
SPARC, but that may be biased by the R6000).
Izumi Ohzawa
(Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
>
>In article <27...@beta.gov> eni...@beta.gov (Michael Neuman) writes:
>>NeXT system (including when I send it to myself), it's ALWAYS in 128 colums
>>(or somewhere right around there.. Maybe 132). Again, that's my point.
>
>some of my sentences were over 200 characters.
>
Although I disagree with just about everything Michael says, there is
one thing I agree with him.
Many of the mails and news sent out from NeXT are indeed UGLY.
And I hope they format it nicely before they send messages out.
Although one would like to value contents rather than appearance,
ugly formatting of messages from NeXT, for things like press
releases, reflects badly on them. And it's hard to read.
Mails are formatted to fit within 80 columns all right (contrary to
what Michael says), but NeXTmail forces line-wrapping at 72 columns
in non-NeXT mail mode. This causes major ugliness when forwarding
messages that are already formatted for 80 column widths.
If any line is longer than 72 chars, then it just moves a couple of
words at the end to a new line.
This results in interleaved long line, short line, long line, short
line ... sequence which is extremely unsightly.
I think NeXT Mail is great, but this must certainly be fixed
in future versions.
NeXT hardware is beautifully done. NeXT software is even more
beautiful. The whole package is affordable and I use it and rely
on it everyday for my work.
It is sad and ironic that NeXTmaill does beautiful multi-media
mail so nicely, but fails to produce readable straight ASCII text.
Otherwise, it is a great program, and I use it for nearly all my
mails.
Izumi Ohzawa [ $@Bg_78^=;(J ]
USMail: University of California, 360 Minor Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Telephone: (415) 642-6440 Fax: (415) 642-3323
Internet: iz...@violet.berkeley.edu NeXTmail: iz...@pinoko.berkeley.edu
Meinhard E. Mayer (Hardy)
Enough talk--tomorrow evrybody has to get up early and work!
May I propose you hold off with replies to this and the "Revolution"
till Tuesday and post to the virgin newsgroup comp.sys.next.misc. This
will give a chance to those who read this under X, NewsGrazer, or on
simple vt100 emulators to calm down and spare the rest of us
repetitive arguments for or against....
Good night to all,
felix.a.lugo
| (or somewhere right around there.. Maybe 132). Again, that's my point.
| that other NeXT users can!
|
delivering "plain" text e-mail messages that are happily received
by NeXT AND non-NeXT systems! If I know a particular e-mail message
will be delivered on a NeXT, I don't hesitate to make it in NeXTmail
format. But if I don't know the destination system, the message will
go out in non-NeXT format with appropriate columns!
| [...]
| >| That's not the problem though. The problem is when developers say, "Oh,
| >| we don't need to run X, we have NeXTstep which is far superior!" How's a
| >
| > NeXTstep IS far superior than X in many ways! Being able to run
| > X11R4 is also good! But if you can get a good implementation for
| > *FREE*, why should NeXT worry about producing one!
| >
| That's not the point. It's NOT superior if no other system uses it!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Say what?!! What nonsense!
| The primary function of X is to transport graphics in near real time to
| Internet sites perhaps accross the world. Most of the time, these graphics
| are generated on some sort of supercomputer (at least for scientific
| applications). I've never seen a NeXT supercomputer (have you?) and
| consequently, I've never seen a supercomputer running NeXTstep. Wow, so you
| have a windowing system that can interact with other NeXTs... What good does
| that do you? So you can run apps off of some system with the same computing
| power as yourself. Oooh! I personally run X whenever I need graphics output
| from a Connection Machine/Cray. Mainly because I can't afford to pay $500
| to fly to the site of the machine just so I can look at a framebuffer.
| THAT'S the point of X, and THAT'S the downfall of NeXT. Who needs a
| network GUI for a system that's identical to your own?
|
Again, you're missing the point; NeXT CAN RUN X! But why should
NeXT worry about bundling it with the machine if you can get a
pretty good implementation for free.
Oh, thanks for comparing a NeXT to a supercomputer, that's great!
| [...]
| >|
| >| EXACTLY! And NeXT can't compete against systems that CAN network well.
| >| Especially since Sun, DEC, etc. are all working to IMPROVE networking,
| >| whereas NeXT's view seems to be, "Well, our system is superior, if no one
| >| else can see that then we'll die rather than conform to Open System ideals."
| >|
| > Are you quoting this from NeXT, or is this a PERSONAL quote?
| >
| > This all sounds very good, but what if your application doesn't
| > require internetworking with other systems???
|
| Personal quote of their apparent attitude. Great! If your application
| doesn't need internetworking, then you don't need to look at Suns, HPs,
| IBM RS/6000s, SGIs, etc. You're absolutely right. However, if you're going
| to be using your NeXT for word processing, spread sheets, or ANY non-
| scientific application, why did you spend $3300 on a NeXT when you could
| have fulfilled everything you need with a $500 IBM? Besides, if people were
| buying NeXTs to NOT use them on a network, why would NeXT build in Ethernet
| interfaces? The majority of people ARE using them on a network, and need
| compatibility between worker computers and themselves.
|
Let's see, why did I get a NeXT: UNIX, PostScript, NeXTstep, DTP,
software development, you name it! Try these on a $500 IBM!
So if their networking is so bad, what are all these people doing
with them?
| >| >>If an open
| >| >>system solves their problem, people will buy it. If a proprietary
| >| >>system solves their problem, people will buy that instead.
| >|
| >| Heheh... When was the last time you ever saw ANY proprietary system
| >| solve ANYONEs problems?
| >
| > I see it everyday at work on my NeXT cube!
|
| Just out of curiosity, what exactly do you do there? Do you word
| process? Do you use spreadsheets? Do you really need a 68040 to run this
| stuff? Wouldn't a $500 IBM with OS/2 or Desqview have done the same thing
| for you? If you are using it for scientific purposes, why aren't you
| even in the slightest interested in having a GOOD interface with worker
| computers? It would seem to me that there are some problems that can't be
| solved in your lifetime on a machine that gets only 3.5 Mflops. Ever have
| a serious number crunching problem? The Cray has been timed up to 4 Gflops,
| the CM2 up to several hundred Gflops. Both of them spit out graphics onn
Wow, now NeXTs against Crays! If I only had the $$$! 8^)
Come on, you can do better than this!
| X window systems. Ooops. You own a NeXT! So much for output. Better go down
| the hall and use some coworker's Sun that happens to run X11.
|
Ohh, I think I'll launch mouse-X. Boy/Girl (Man/Woman) what a
wonderful machine these NeXTs are (and cheap too)! 8^)
| >| The NeXT has no key features that make it stand
| >| out from every other system.
| >
| > No??! I've never seen Sun, DEC, HP, etc. running Display PostScript!
| > Then there's the DSP, the 400 DPI NeXT laser printer, etc. etc. etc.
|
| You must not have seen many Suns or DECs then (I can't speak for HP)!
| Sun's primary graphics environment is Postscript. AND it's color!!! The DEC
| has several Postscript viewers, as well as several paint & word processing
| programs that all come with the system. I know. I used to own a DECstation
Are they running Display PostScript? Is this PostScript licensed by
Adobe (or supported)? How well integrated is it with the environment?
Can you import PostScript into ANY application? Please ...
| 5000 model 200. A 400 DPI NeXT laser printer??? How much does THAT cost,
| and then, how much does a 3rd party printer cost? I'll comment on the
| DSP in a sec...
|
$1300 + tax! 3rd party printer that can do 400 DPI with unlimited
fonts and memory (well, limited by how many fonts and memory you
install on your NeXT; In my case 64MB memory and ~50 font-families),
THERE IS NO EQUAL!
[...]
| Sure. It has a decent resolution of 2 bit color. That's another reason that
| I'm going for the NeXT over something like an Amiga. The Amiga has 640x400x12
| resolution, and the NeXT has 1080x800x2 (sorry--not exactly).
| What great networking? So it runs Ethernet... I can buy a $200 card for an
| Amiga that does the exact same thing.. And, the Amiga will run X! As I said,
| what good does it do you to have a network GUI if it only works with other
| NeXTs? So you can suck resources from your friends NeXT accross the country?
| What if not everyone owns NeXTs (As most of the scientific community doesn't)?
Come on. Learn more about the NeXT!
[...]
| I could get my Amiga to sample at up to 1MHz. It sucked a lot of disk space,
| but the quality was VERY nice. 16 bits--you're right. It couldn't do that. BUT,
| it was in stereo.
|
Weird, the highest sampling rate an Amiga can handle is ~29KHz
(it's in the tech docs). How did you manage to come-up with such
an incredible figure of 1MHz (gee, if CDs could handle that)! 8^)
NeXTs have stereo output!
Let me reiterate, learn more about NeXTs before posting your
assumptions!
Peter da Silva
> The problem is that Steve Jobs judged X to be brain-dead
... which it is ...
> and decided
> to roll his own.
... when what he should have done was licenced "NeWS" from Sun. It has all
the advantages of Display Postscript (and is IMO a better basic design),
plus it doesn't lock people into (and out of) NeXT.
Of course, that's probably what he wanted to do.
--
Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180;
Sugar Land, TX 77487-5012; `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"
Tyler S Gingrich
[stuff about Steve Jobs deleted]
>
>... when what he should have done was licenced "NeWS" from Sun. It has all
>the advantages of Display Postscript (and is IMO a better basic design),
>plus it doesn't lock people into (and out of) NeXT.
>
DPS does NOT lock you into NeXT. Right now, NeXT is the only vendor who
supports DPS & NeXT was involved in the development of DPS, but you don't
need a NeXT to run DPS. BTW, NeXT has included some additional DPS commands
and other neat stuff. So (this is additional ammo for all you NeXT bashers)
I can write some Display Postscript on the NeXT which WON'T run on any other
DPS platform. Oh HORRORS -- NeXT is messing with standard software AGAIN!!!
How could they do that?? Don't they have any respect?? :-) :-) :-)
>Of course, that's probably what he wanted to do.
I don't think so. IMHO Steve Jobs & NeXT are trying to provide the best
price/performance machine on the market & bundle it with an easy-to-use/easy-
to-program interface. Should he license clone makers to build NeXT-compatible
machines?? Maybe, but that's a different argument altogether. Right now if
you want a NeXT (with DPS, NeXTStep, IB, etc) you just have to buy a NeXT.
I wanted a NeXT & bought a NeXT. If you want to run NeWS, etc then buy
something else -- a Sun or Sun-Clone.
Tyler
Roger Dean
Having been in the position of doing simultaneous NeXTStep and
Sun/OpenLook (XNeWS) development, several things are clear to me.
NeXTStep (w/Mach/Display Postscipt) is only about 1 or 2 billion
times more interesting/fun/pretty/enjoyable/easy to work in than
Sun. To suggest the following:
> ... when what he should have done was licenced "NeWS" from Sun. It has all
> the advantages of Display Postscript (and is IMO a better basic design),
> plus it doesn't lock people into (and out of) NeXT.
>
> Of course, that's probably what he wanted to do.
is reality is to have missed or forgotten several facts.
Namely:
Sun (Bill Joy?) is on the record bashing X at least as vehemently
as Jobs ever did. Sun's move to replace SunView was NeWS, and let's
just say it didn't go over too well. Sun's jumping on X could be
considered "last minute" and is, at best, an attempt to cover all
bases. (see IBM)
What it comes down to (for me and most people I talk to) is this:
NeXT supporting X would kill NeXTStep (as we think of it), because, as
is the case with Sun, why would anyone invest in development in
an environment like NeXTStep or NeWS while:
1. If you port the application, everybody else uses X.
2. There are few NeWS developers around, and they are hard
to find (read expensive).
I will admit that early on I was scared and wanted NeXT to support
and bundle X. But if they did it now, I might just sell my
machine (though I probably couldn't), because the large part of it's
value is in it's software.
In my opinion, NeXT set out to change to existing definitions. That's
kind of hard to do if you use the same words the same way as
everyone else.
Bye!
____________________________________________________________________
I speak for the human race, and my every action should be viewed
as a reflection upon them. Flame away!
Roger Dean
Jim Gettys
> In article <CUG...@xds13.ferranti.com> pe...@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
> [stuff about Steve Jobs deleted]
> >
> >... when what he should have done was licenced "NeWS" from Sun. It has all
> >the advantages of Display Postscript (and is IMO a better basic design),
> >plus it doesn't lock people into (and out of) NeXT.
> >
> Display Postscript can be licensed by anybody from Adobe Systems, Inc. --
> DPS does NOT lock you into NeXT. Right now, NeXT is the only vendor who
> supports DPS & NeXT was involved in the development of DPS, but you don't
> need a NeXT to run DPS. BTW, NeXT has included some additional DPS commands
Digital supports DPS on its workstations, as an extension to X. Has for a long
time... If memory serves, IBM may support DPS as well, but I don't play with their
machines very often :-).
> and other neat stuff. So (this is additional ammo for all you NeXT bashers)
> I can write some Display Postscript on the NeXT which WON'T run on any other
> DPS platform. Oh HORRORS -- NeXT is messing with standard software AGAIN!!!
> How could they do that?? Don't they have any respect?? :-) :-) :-)
No, they don't. Depending on your point of view, this may be a feature, or
a bug...
Jim Gettys
Digital Equipment Corporation
Cambridge Research Laboratory
(one of the folks who brought you X, which runs on essentially
everything, including NeXT machines...)
dr...@drake.almaden.ibm.com
>Display Postscript can be licensed by anybody from Adobe Systems, Inc. --
>DPS does NOT lock you into NeXT. Right now, NeXT is the only vendor who
>supports DPS
Not exactly true. DPS is available as an extension to X, and is shipped
as a standard part of X ("AIXWindows") on the RISC System/6000. I believe
at least one other vendor (HP?) does the same. So if you like the DPS
imaging model, go right ahead and use it! It's not restricted to NeXT
at all.
Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center
Internet: dr...@ibm.com BITNET: DRAKE at ALMADEN
Usenet: ...!uunet!ibmarc!drake Phone: (408) 927-1861
Anthony A. Datri
>the advantages of Display Postscript (and is IMO a better basic design),
Memory and cycles don't matter?
>plus it doesn't lock people into (and out of) NeXT.
But would instead lock people into Sun. Would that be any different?
--
Use your wheels: that is what they are for.
da...@convex.com
Brian Corrie
this before this could be kinda fun 8-)
g...@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes:
>In article <bcorrie.678644149@csr> bco...@csr.UVic.CA (Brian Corrie) writes:
>> m...@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin) writes:
>>
>> [Stuff deleted]
>>
>> >In any case, the cheapest NeXT is a factor of 6 times as expensive as
>> >the cheapest PC and a factor of 3 times as expensive as the cheapest
>> >Mac. You can not compare NeXT with either the PC or Mac; NeXT's
>> >competition is SUN, DEC, and other workstation vendors.
>>
>> Reality check here..... If you ask me (Yeah, I know, no one did 8-) you
>> are comparing apples to oranges here. Or at least Granny Smiths to Red
>> Delicious 8-)
>>
>> I have been shopping around for a new machine. Two of my final choices were
>> the Mac and the NeXT. When looking at these machines, you can not compare the
>> cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope to get anything meaningful out
>of
>> it. What you should be comparing is the high end Mac (the FX) and the NeXT,
>> since they are the most comparable systems. When you do this, the Mac is
>> twice as expensive as the color NeXTstation.
>Reality check yourself. You're talking about buying a Mac that has equivalent
>horsepower to a NeXT. Most students are only concerned about a machine that
>gets the work done that they want to do. A person can get a color Mac IIsi
>(which is plenty good enough for what most students need) for around $3700 here
>at RPI. Maybe add a printer and some memory and call it $4100.
>Do the same kind of figuring with an LC and you could walk away with a color
>machine for under $3K. A slower one to be sure, but the price is nice.
>The *cheapest* color NeXTstation a student could buy is $5720, and that's for a
>machine that has too little disk (105 meg) and too little memory (12 meg) and
They are about $7000 Canadian up here 8-(
>no printer. If you're a student with $5K to spend, which machine are you going
>to buy? Forget the question of which machine is faster/better/cooler
>/slicker/runs-farther/jumps-higher, the fact is you can *get* a pretty nice
>color Mac for quite a bit less than any color Nextstation.
>In fact, your "reality check" proves the very thing that you claim is false.
>You say "you can not compare the cheapest Mac with the cheapest NeXT and hope
>to get anything meaningful out of it". That's exactly the point of the
>original poster. You may sneer at the low end Mac (as would I, for that
>matter), but Apple is selling them by the bushel. NeXT is *not* competing with
>the majority of machines that Apple is selling. Nobody buys a Mac Classic
>because they think it's a high-powered machine, they buy it because it's all
>they can afford. NeXT is competing at the high-end of the Mac universe, and is
>competing with Sun, DEC and the other unix workstation vendors (which is what
>the original article said).
Actually, that was what I tried to say, but maybe it didn't come across to
clearly. In fact, I think later in my post I said almost exactly what you did
here, that the NeXT was targeted at the high end MAC, low end workstation
market, not the low end MAC market. I therefore said that it wasn't fair to
compare the prices of the low end Macs and the low end NeXTs without saying
something about the difference in performance.
>disclaimer: I'm speaking as someone who very much wants to buy a color
>NeXTstation for my home use, but I haven't been able to justify the $$$ for the
>model I want. I could, however, come up with the $$$ for a color Mac IIci.
>Don't tell me how much neater/keener/cooler a color nextstation would be (I
>already understand that), just send me $3-4K so I can afford to buy one...
Me too, thats why at the bottom of my original post I said I almost went for
the low priced MAC, but decided to wait until I could afford a NeXT. Me thinks
that we are in the same boat and should be on the same side 8-)
>Meanwhile I guess I'll just have to suffer with this greyscale nextstation
>that's here in my office... :-)
You think you have to suffer. My boss gave me a Color NeXTstation on my desk for
a month, and then took it away 8-( Talk about cruelty..... ;-)
> - - - - - - - -
>Garance Alistair Drosehn = g...@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
>ITS Systems Programmer (handles NeXT-type mail)
>Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA
Anyway, enough out of me on this topic, I just didn't want anyone out there in
net.land to think that the low price of the low end Macs represented a much
better price/performance ratio than the NeXT.
--
Brian Corrie (bco...@csr.uvic.ca)
Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature,
volume, humidity and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well
pleases. Sounds like some of the code I have written...... 8-)