From: gordie@yamanote.dolphin.com (Gordie Freedman)
Subject: Letter to BYTE magazine (long)
Reply-To: gordie@yamanote.dolphin.com
Organization: Dolphin Software
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 07:42:50 GMT

Here's a letter I wrote to BYTE magazine about (you guessed it) - their  
recent "Ultimate (whooooo) Workstation" article. Maybe people will see  
this as food for thought to also write them (you can send email to  
ben@bytep.byte.com and rgacote@bytep.byte.com). 

I do think NeXT has to get some better HW at a better price out there soon  
to survive (maybe NS486 will be enough ... but I'd sure like to see a cool  
black slab/brick running some serious MIPS - I know, I know MIPS ain't  
everything for performance - you know what I mean). However, I am a  
BELIEVER in NeXTStep (Sorry for the regression back to my VM/CMS days  
there with the caps) - I want to see NeXT survive and thrive - so  
hopefully some magazines out there will give more press to the good  
features (i.e. all of them) of NeXTSTEP.

Anyway - here's the letter - correct me if I'm wrong on some of these  
points - my main mission here was to push these guys at BYTE to take  
another look at NeXT.

---------------Begin included letter-----------------

Dear editor,

I am writing to you about the recent article on Workstations ( SOLUTIONS  
FOCUS, Stalking the Ultimate Workstation , Nov 1992). I own a NeXT  
computer, and use both a Sun Sparc IPX and a Macintosh Quadra every day at  
work. I think the NeXT is a great Workstation, and hope to see NeXT (and  
the NeXTSTEP software) catch on and do well in the marketplace. Of the  
three machines, the NeXT is my favorite for development and general use.  
The other machines are fine computers and certainly have their benefits,  
but for many people the NeXT platform may be the best choice.

An article in your magazine reaches a lot of people and can help a  
computer like the NeXT get exposure that can increase people's awareness  
of the machine. I think there is much more to be said about the NeXT than  
your description of a lower end model reveals. This is why I was very  
disappointed in the Workstation article. 

Here are some of my concerns:

1.	The article compared a low end NeXT with much more expensive  
workstations. The NeXTStation Turbo with a 21 inch color monitor, 400 Meg  
hard drive and full developer's toolkit is around $13,000US. Add a 400dpi  
printer which prints Postscript when used with the NeXT, and you are still  
under $15,000. Because all of the other computers were color and much more  
expensive than the NeXT, I think it was an unfair comparison. Looking at  
the chart on pages 194-195, the comparison is seen to be very unbalanced.

2.	The NeXT computer was not running the latest version of the OS,  
NeXTSTEP 3.0. This has many significant new features which help it to  
stand out in the marketplace. The article was very brief in describing  
many of the NeXT's key features. The DB Kit, distributed objects,  
Interface builder, and project builder are extremely powerful tools which  
give the NeXT significant advantages over other computers for development  
of new programs.

3.	You did not mention many of the applications available for the  
NeXT.  Besides FrameMaker, there are other page layout programs (PasteUp,  
AppSoft Draw, WordPerfect), spreadsheets such as Lotus Improv and WingZ,  
the graphical math program Mathematica, presentation tools (Lighthouse  
Concurrence),  and others (media, scheduling, database). New applications  
for the NeXT are appearing all the time.

Because the  NeXT community is very active, and partially because the NeXT  
is based on a UNIX variant (MACH OS) and has a lot of UNIX support, there  
are many applications available for free or nominal cost (the excellent  
VirtSpace, NewsGrazer, and Stuart programs, to name a few), and a lot of  
support over the Usenet for the NeXT. Also, because it is built on top of  
a UNIX environment, many things just simply work, such as UUCP and  
sendmail support, netnews, support for standard UNIX data formats  
(compressed, tar, uuencode, etc.)

4.	You did not mention the incredible development environment that  
comes free with the NeXT. This includes the aforementioned Interface  
Builder and Project Builder, GNU's excellent C/C++/Objective-C compiler,  
GNU's Emacs editor and GDB debugger, and the Edit application which has  
rich text, graphic, and sound support built in. 

As well, you did not mention other applications that come bundled with the  
NeXT such as the Digital Librarian, Webster's Dictionary/Thesaurus, etc.  
Also all of the applications on the NeXT interact with each other (you can  
spell check and look up words in the dictionary from within other  
applications, send mail from within another application, etc.) The online  
help system on the NeXT is probably the best and most consistent help  
system I have seen. The NeXT also uses display Postscript with a  
sophisticated and easy to use  drag and drop , giving a consistent  
interface to fonts, graphics, and the sharing of data between  
applications.

5.	You also did not mention the source code that is shipped with the  
NeXT as development examples. These are invaluable to teach developers how  
to use the NeXT toolkit, and to help people develop applications. The NeXT  
paradigm of sharing knowledge and code resources enables people to do a  
lot of development very quickly, and this translates into more useful  
applications for users.

6.	There is no mention of abilities such as AppleTalk, support for  
Macintosh and PC floppies, and the third party support for X windows  
(which can run in tandem with the NeXT windowing environment). The fact  
that NeXTSTEP is being ported to the Intel platform was also not  
mentioned. This is an extremely important point about the viability of the  
NeXT software platform.

7.	There is more to the  ultimate workstation  than Framemaker and a  
CAD program. I have done development on workstations for years and issues  
such as connectivity, multitasking, program and object integration,  
communications, visual representation models, and programming tools play a  
huge role in determining what is the best workstation for a particular  
purpose. I think it was a bit ambitious to determine the ultimate  
workstation without examining these other uses more fully. 


I realize it is very difficult to organize and publish articles doing  
comparisons such as your article did. Perhaps NeXT was not very helpful in  
explaining the features of NeXTSTEP, or in supplying a more high end  
workstation. Perhaps you also started your investigation before NeXTSTEP  
3.0 and much of the new software was available. In any case, it is  
unfortunate that the article made a very skewed comparison, one that may  
leave many potential NeXT users unaware of the actual abilities of the  
NeXT.

I would also like to note that you said many good things about the NeXT,  
and made many fair and insightful points about it. It is also clear that  
right now some of the big selling points for the NeXT are the development  
environment, which does not show its strengths in the same market as other  
workstations. However, because of the development paradigm on the NeXT,  
and because of the excellent foundation and support for applications,  
people will see (and are seeing now) much more desktop productivity tools  
and applications on the NeXT platform. There are many people using other  
computers now who are just blown away when I show them the NeXT. While it  
has a different set of strengths than other workstations, it intersects  
and exceeds them in many ways. And it just keeps getting better.

Your magazine has a high profile in the computing industry, and as such  
your word is often taken at face value by many people. Therefore you have  
an added responsibility to make sure you give the fairest representation  
of the facts possible. In this article, I am afraid you fell short of that  
objective. 

I do not want the point of my letter to be to criticize you as I do not  
know the circumstances of the article, and I do not think debating whether  
you did the right or wrong thing is very useful. I also don't want to pick  
nits, and would rather you consider my opinions and take positive action  
than defend some of the small points (such as  we did provide that  
information in the chart on page 194 , etc.) As I read over this letter, I  
realize many of the things I am mentioning may not have fit into the space  
allotted for each machine in your article, although some reference to  
their existence should have been made. 

I would like to see you take a look at a color NeXTStation Turbo, and  
explore NeXTSTEP and the available applications a little more. I hope that  
you can do this and can publish an article about the NeXT which shows what  
a good computer it is, and where the advantages lie for someone in  
purchasing it. 

The NeXT is a groundbreaking computer in many ways, and you can do the  
computing community at large a great service by looking into this more  
thoroughly.

Thank you for your time in reading this letter,

Sincerely,

Gordie Freedman


CC: Ben Smith, Raymond GA Cote
-- 
Gordie Freedman gordie@yamanote.dolphin.com   ->   NextMail encouraged
(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are my own and represent no one else.)

Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy