NEXTSTEP RELEASE 3.3 UPGRADE

NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 combines the robustness of mainframe operating systems with the flexibility of PCs, making it the best environment for enterprise-wide deployment of object-oriented custom applications.

NEXTSTEPä is the first and only UNIX-based operating environment to integrate leading edge object-oriented technology, industry standard networking and connectivity, and an award winning graphical user interface. With the addition of NEXTSTEP Developer, users can rapidly develop client/server custom applications that can be seamlessly integrated with shrink-wrapped software to create comprehensive business solutions.

NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 incorporates enhancements based on feedback from customers with large-scale NEXTSTEP environments. Release 3.3 addresses many critical deployment issues including scalability, robustness, interoperability, and ease of use. By incorporating core technologies from Mach 3.0 and BSD 4.4 networking, Release 3.3 operates more reliably and scales better to networks with tens of thousands of users.

NeXTmailä has been significantly improved in Release 3.3 to give users greater flexibility in how electronic mail is accessed, managed, and stored. In addition, MIME support enables NEXTSTEP users to send and receive multimedia messages with users of other popular e-mail applications through the same intuitive NeXTmail interface.

To make NEXTSTEP run on a wider selection of PC configurations, Release 3.3 includes support for PCMCIA, PCI and ISA Plug & Play, Advanced Power Management, 8 bit color, and many new peripherals. 

HIGHLIGHTS

The NEXTSTEP User Experience
NEXTSTEP is the only object-oriented operating system available today. NEXTSTEP delivers a consistent graphical user interface across wide-area networks such as NFS, NetWareâ, and AppleTalk.   NEXTSTEP unifies the desktop by providing interoperability between custom solutions developed for NEXTSTEP and applications written for the MS-Windows, X/Motif, and mainframe environments. 

ROBUSTNESS
The smooth operation of a company depends on the uninterrupted service of its mission-critical applications. If a financial trading company cannot make trades for fifteen minutes due to a system down-time, it could lose hundreds of thousands in revenue.   NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 is designed to service these mission-critical applications 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Hundreds of carefully chosen focused enhancements and improvements have been added throughout the system to increase the overall robustness of the operating system while ensuring backward compatibility. This strategy enables NeXTä to introduce new technologies to the NEXTSTEP community while providing a seamless and painless upgrade path. 

SCALABILITY
Today's enterprise-wide deployment means tens of thousands of users on the same network across multiple routers and bridges.  NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 includes critical technologies to enable large-scale networks and reduce support costs by allowing enterprise-wide deployment with a much lower ratio of system administrators to users. For example, with the new UserManager, system administrators can now install and maintain large numbers of network user accounts quickly. With the enhancements in NetInfoä, NEXTSTEP can now support tens of thousands of network nodes.  With NEXTSTEP Release 3.3, companies can grow their installation exponentially with ease without the need to increase system administration resources at the same pace. Release 3.3's system administration tools allows new system administrators to be productive with minimum training, and empowers experienced system administrators to maintain a large enterprise-wide network with greater ease. 

PERFORMANCE
In a large-scale deployment with tens of thousands of users, productivity gains from overall increased system responsiveness and better tools means thousands of dollars in savings. By taking advantage of BSD 4.4 networking, NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 delivers better wide-area-network performance while technologies from Mach 3.0 enables NEXTSTEP to task switch more efficiently. By streamlining and accelerating frequently performed tasks such as finding, sorting, and addressing in NeXTmail, adding or deleting a large number of users in UserManager, bulk upgrade in Upgrader, and on-the-fly NetInfo backup & restore in NetInfoManager, NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 provide tools that enable users to work faster by working smarter.

OPEN STANDARDS
With Release 3.3, NeXT continues its commitment and willingness to adopt industry standard technologies to ensure interoperability, flexibility, and a high degree of collaboration between technologies from different vendors. MIME support enables NEXTSTEP users to easily exchange files and images with widely used PC and UNIX mail applications. The support of PCI and ISA Plug & Play greatly reduces the complexity of PC hardware configuration. PCMCIA, 8 bit color, and Advanced Power Management enables users to operate NEXTSTEP on standard PC notebooks.

EASE OF USE
Just as performance gains translate into productivity gains, tools that enable new users to learn an operating environment quickly are equally important. In addition, support costs can be significantly lower if users are equipped to help themselves in times of trouble. Release 3.3 includes a new Quick Start Guide that enables new users to learn all the basics in 30 minutes; this tool greatly accelerates the learning curve of NEXTSTEP. Once these users are familiar with the basics of NEXTSTEP, they can rely on the new Documentation Roadmap to provide pointers to all the documentation including comprehensive on-line help for most of the major applications that are bundled with NEXTSTEP. To empower those who are already familiar with the system, a new Power Tips manual provides many tips and shortcuts. These tools keep support and training costs low as the number of users and network nodes increases. 

NEW FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Mail
MIME Support
As a widely supported standard, MIME support enables NEXTSTEP users to exchange mutimedia e-mail with other non-NeXT MIME users.  Through the same intuitive NeXTmail interface, users can transparently read and send messages containing file attachments, rich text, images and sound objects.

Mail Size Management
Information such as the number of read and deleted messages, size of each message, and the number of new messages is now easily accessible. Users can also quickly locate large e-mail messages through the feature ªsorting by sizeº. These features greatly simplify the task of overall mailbox size management.

Selective & Summary Printing
Users can now print out the summary of an entire mailbox or a group of selected messages. This feature enables users to manage their e-mail messages off-line when necessary.

Enhanced Searching
In addition to searching by subject and sender, users can now locate mail by searching through the message body. A new ªFocusº feature makes it more efficient to navigate and view only the selected messages. After several iterations of ªFindº and ªFocus,º users can quickly filter all non-relevant messages. 

Save & Restore Drafts
Similar to a word processing document, partially composed unsent messages can be saved and brought back with the subject and address fields intact.  Users can now begin composing multiple messages and use this feature to preserve work-in-progress from accidental lossÐor to conveniently come back to it at a later time.

Outgoing Message Archive
In addition to automatic archival of all outgoing messages, users who are concerned with disk space can selectively archive specific messages.

In-line Address Completion
By typing the first few letters of an address in the ªToº field and pressing the Esc key, NeXTmail will automatically scroll through the possible options from the list of public and private users and groups.   This feature reduces the number of keystrokes and the frequency of access to the Address panel.

Hierarchical Mailboxes
Mailboxes in Release 3.3 can now be organized into a tree-like hierarchy. Messages stored in a meaningful structure of mailboxes gain relevance through their implicit association with folder names. Retrieval of messages can also be faster by simply navigating through the hierarchy. 

User Defined Fields
Custom fields can now be added to a message header to label outgoing messages. For instance, a user can label a message with a field called ªpriorityº and set it to ªhighº or ªlowº. This allows recipients to quickly identify important messages.

New Productivity tools
The mail icon now displays the number of unread messages in the Active mailbox. In addition, users can manage the incoming mail workload by individually marking messages in any mailbox as read or unread.

Networking
NetInfo
The only proven enterprise-wide network administration database. NetInfo now supports 10,000+ nodes across wide-area networks which enables corporations to grow their NEXTSTEP networks globally without sacrificing data integrity or network performance.  Other new features include integrated DNS support and improved diagnostic messages.

UserManager
The tool for managing user accounts and user groups has been updated to support large corporate networks. With the new bulk add-and-delete feature, system administrators can manage thousands of user accounts using custom templates and domain-based settings. Support for international user accounts is also provided through templates.  In addition, UserManager can be customized to perform specific task through APIs. This feature allows system administrators to add or override default functionalities to tailor UserManager to the needs of their sites.

NetInfoManager
The graphical tool for accessing and manipulating NetInfo databases has been dramatically improved. Administrative tasks are simpler, allowing the system-administrator to dynamically restart NetInfo services, save and restore NetInfo databases, or join NetInfo hierarchies. The user interface has been improved to ensure ease-of-use throughout the application.  Searching in NetInfo data is more efficient with Multi-domain and regular-expression search. Remote Server Management allows the system-administrator to comprehensively manage resources from any part of the network.

SimpleNetworkStarter
The simple but powerful tool for setting up small networks of NEXTSTEP computers has been extended to include NetInfo Configuration across subnets and SNMP configurations. All transactions are fully logged. The undo feature allows dynamic configuration changes. 

Networking Commands
NetInfo data can be accessed and manipulated via a variety of new and extended set of UNIX utilities.  Niutil's new options provide a full set of data-management features, including resync, rename, and statistics options.  Nigrep, nifind, and nireport complement the existing NetInfo utilities to provide full search and report capabilities in a multi-domain environment.

BSD 4.4 Networking
New gateway congestion and header prediction algorithms improve overall network performance, especially in large networks that include bridges and routers.   In addition, IP Multi-Cast support has been added to provide the framework for multimedia networking.

OS
MACH 3.0
Core components of MACH 3.0 have been integrated into Release 3.3 to improve the robustness and performance of the operating system, especially under heavy load.

Intel Enablement
PCMCIA
NEXTSTEP users can now take advantage of PCMCIA modems, SCSI adaptors, LAN cards, and wireless networking cards both for portable and desktop systems.

ISA Plug & Play
On a system with the ISA Plug & Play BIOS, NEXTSTEP automatically configures ISA Plug & Play cards bypassing the need to deal with jumpers, switches, and configuration utilities.

PCI Plug & Play
Similar to ISA Plug & Play, NEXTSTEP automatically configures PCI cards.

Advance Power Management
By taking advantage of power saving features on systems that support the APM BIOS, NEXTSTEP now operates efficiently on portable systems for an extended amount of time.

720K Floppy
In addition to 1.44 megabyte floppy support, NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 also supports 720k.

More Drivers
NEXTSTEP Release 3.3 comes bundled with over 50 drivers to support a wide variety of peripheral cards and systems.

Installations & Upgrades
Network Install
User can now install NEXTSTEP through a network NFS server without requiring a CD-ROM drive. System Administrators can also preconfigure a template server so that all systems built from the server inherit the same configurations. This greatly reduces the overhead of installing NEXTSTEP at large sites.

Network Bulk Upgrade
The Upgrader application now enables system administrators to pre-configure ªtemplate serversº and propagate upgrades from these servers to designated NEXTSTEP systems. In effect, this allows system administrators to ªpushº upgrades automatically onto systems on the network without the need for any user intervention.

Learning Tools
NEXTSTEP Quick Start:  By stepping through this small manual, users can quickly learn all the basics of NEXTSTEP and be productive within 30 minutes.

Power Tips & Documentation Roadmap
The power user's guide contains a comprehensive list of short cuts and tips for the Workspace and bundled applications.  A new on-line & hardcopy roadmap helps novice users to easily and quickly navigate through existing documentation.

Internationalization
Global Software
NEXTSTEP can be customized at setup or installation time to provide global settings for keyboards, paper sizes, time zones, etc. This allows users to tailor their environment to specific local needs.  Key globalization features include updates to Preferences.app and Configure.app.

International Installation
Users can now select which language needs to be installed at the ªpackageº level. Instead of installing a specific language for all of NEXTSTEP, users have a choice of installing specific languages for each Installer package similar to Installer's support for different platforms. Users with limited disk space now have greater flexibility in the installation of packages.  This feature applies to Upgrader, CD Installation (e.g., BuildDisk), as well as the Installer. 

ORDERING INFORMATION

NEXTSTEP includes all user environment system software, the end-user oriented applications, runtime portions of the object-oriented kits, system administration applications, and assorted other software. 

NEXTSTEP includes English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian user interfaces. 

End-user documentation is available in English, French, and German.

The entire NEXTSTEP user environment comes on a single CD-ROM. 

Installation of NEXTSTEP requires a minimum of 120 MB of available hard 
disk space.

NeXT Telesales is now taking orders for upgrades to NEXTSTEP User 3.3 for Intel and Motorola processors.  For additional product information or to order, please contact NeXT Telesales in North America at 1-800-848-NeXT.  Visa, Mastercard and American Express accepted, plus shipping/handling and applicable state sales tax.  Please have serial number of previous version available.  International ordering procedures to be determined by early November.
  
NEXTSTEP User 3.3 Upgrade (part no. 5683)  - Motorola $199
NEXTSTEP User 3.3 Upgrade (part no. 5659) - Intel $199

Orders placed before December 16, 1994, will receive a complimentary copy of NEXTIME, a $99 value.

NEXTIME is NeXT's entry into time-based digital media for corporate customers interested in video applications.  In its first release, NEXTIME provides NEXTSTEP users the ability to play movie files.  NEXTIME supports the industry-standard QuickTime file format and Cinepak compression scheme. Future releases will add support for recording movies using video capture cards, as well as additional file formats and compression schemes.

NEXTSTEP upgrades are scheduled to ship mid-December 1994.

For additional information, call 1-800-TRY-NeXT or via the Internet send e-mail to trynext@next.com.

NeXT Computer, Inc.

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 1993-94 NeXT Computer, Inc. All rights reserved. NeXT, the NeXT logo, NEXTSTEP, Application Kit, Database Kit, Digital Librarian, Digital Webster, Indexing Kit, Interface Builder, NeXTmail, NetInfo, Project Builder, Sound Kit, 3D Graphics Kit, and Workspace Manager are trademarks of NeXT Computer, Inc. TEX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. PostScript and Display PostScript are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. VT100 is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and Collegiate are registered trademarks of Merriam-Webster, Inc. and are used herein pursuant to license. Novell and NetWare are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. PANTONE is a registered trademark of Pantone, Inc. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press and is used herein pursuant to license. RenderMan is a registered trademark, and Interactive Renderman is a trademark, of Pixar. ORACLE and SQL*Net are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. Sun is a trademark, and NFS is a registered trademark, of Sun Microsystems, Inc. SYBASE is a registered trademark, and DB-Library is a trademark, of Sybase, Inc. UNIX is registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned belong to their respective owners. NeXT will from time to time revise the specifications described herein, and reserves the right to make such changes without obligation to notify the purchaser.

10/27/94