From: Alex Raftis
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.marketplace
Subject: Re: Having trouble deciding betwee NeXT & Tatung: Please help!
Date: 10 Oct 92 19:28:10 GMT
Reply-To: alex@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu
Organization: Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo

Despite people who say I'm evangical, here's why I bought a NeXT over a Sun  
(besides that fact that I couldn't get a Sun anywhere near the price of the  
NeXT a year ago).

I've programmer on Sun's, Macs, Apple II's (GS also), and PC's. Of these, the  
NeXT has been by far the easiest. Since I'm not rich (it was a fluke that I had  
the money for a NeXT), I prefer to write most of my own applications and save  
up for the few, really big ones I need. Because the NeXT makes it so easy to  
write applications, it came out the winner in my book.

Other than that, NeXTstep is _all_ that special when compared to other  
platforms. Applications work similarly, etc... The main thing NeXTstep  
currently has is that it's dilivering features right now that Sun has promised  
to bring out in the future.

Also, NS3.0 does bring some nice features hard to find on other platforms, such  
has hot links between applications, interprocess communication, and  
multithreading. However, many NeXT apps have yet to make use of these features,  
but the future is promissing.

Sun/Clones, on the other hand, make the better hardware. I'm not particularly  
fond of the Sparc or it's architecture, but they can produce machines that are  
faster for less money (assuming clones). Also, there are currently more  
applications out for Solaris. However, note that many of these applications  
tend to be highly localized, like scientific visualization software. You'll  
have a harder time finding a word processor or a spreadsheet.

On a final note, NeXTstep is much faster than Solaris. The amount of overhead  
that sun managed to work into X is extraordinary. A 17 Mips IPC feels about  
half as fast as a NeXTstation (25 Mhz, ~17 Mips). The over head comes from  
running X, OpenWindows, News, and SunView simultaneously. Sun, I think, took  
backwards compatibilty a little _too_ far. Were you to run just Motif, it  
probably wouldn't be a problem.

Paul Vallee writes
> OK, I'm in the market for a new machine, and I'm considering a Next,
> and a Sun Compatible.
> 
> They both cost 9000$ CDN new, so please advise me solely on the
> features.
> 
> NeXT machine:
> NextStation Turbo Colour 
> 424M HDD
> 16M RAM
> 17" Colour Monitor.
> (Approx 25 Mips) yes I know how unreliable that is.

Note, now that memory prices and hard drives have come down so much, it'd be _a  
lot_ cheaper to buy the smallest configuration and upgrade on your own. This  
will require that you build the extended release, but with the money you save,  
you could afford to buy the CD-ROM to do the upgrade with money left to spare.  
On a rough scale, memory is about $50-$100 cheaper street price, a montor about  
$500 cheaper, and you could probably get a 600 Meg external hard drive to add  
to the internal 250 M of the Station for around the same price. 

All these quotes assume NeXT has not lowered prices recently (I haven't  
checked).

> Tatung Machine:
> SS2 compatible
> 520M HDD
> 32M RAM
> 19" Colour Monitor w/ GX accelrator module
> Solaris & Motif
> (Approx 28 Mips)

The monitor is probably better, and some graphics will be faster, especially  
when they do not rely on the window server. I'll also assume this will give you  
24 bit color, which, acurate picture reproduction is important (ie, will you be  
makeing slides, movies, etc. from the screen) then this is a big plus. Also,  
the addional memory is nice. After a short time of working with big graphics on  
the NeXT you'd probably want to upgrade to at least 32.

> Any advice is greatly appreciated,

One thing you might consider doing is look at future expandability. Does the  
Clone have slots? The NSC doesn't. However many SCSI do you plan to connect?  
The NSC will limit your to 6, where as you might be able to get a second SCSI  
adaptor in the other. Also, consider networking. Will you need high speed  
serial? What's got faster? The NSC can handle up to 38K, and this will slow the  
CPU to do.

Finally, Sun (but not a clone maker) is almost gauranteed to be around for ten+  
more years. The future of NeXT is still not written in stone. It's user base  
has become large enough that if it died tomorrow, it'd be around for five or  
more years, but little new would be developed for it. Also, as software houses  
begin writting more and more software for UNIX, many may choose to go to the  
Suns first, since it does have a larger user base, even if NeXT has begun to  
catch up.

Alex
--
______________________________________________________
    Internet: alex@data.acs.calpoly.edu (NeXT mail)
              alex@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.marketplace