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Executor port to NeXTSTEP 486??!!
Dear Mr. Matthews,
I have been following the progress of your Executor project with
much interest for some months, being on the NeXTmusic Mailing List.
Congratulations on the progress you've made so far. I think that a high
priority should be getting the SCSI and serial ports to work (unless
you've already done that). However, another new development is on its
way:
I received email Oct. 14 from NeXT about the upcoming release of
NeXTSTEP 486 v.3.0, and called them in Redwood City; they said that
information about it would not be available until after the COMDEX
conference, November 16-20 in Las Vegas.
I am very much interested in both NeXTSTEP 486 and in finding out
if you folks at the Executor project are intending to make Executor run
under NeXTSTEP 486; since NeXT describes it as "a complete port of the
NeXTSTEP 3.0 software environment to Intel-based computers, {with} the
same User Interface, Development Environment, Applications, Networking
(NFS, NOvell, Appleshare), state-of-the-art color, Mach UNIX, Display
Postscript, 3D Renderman, etc.", it would seem that you should be able
to make it work without too much trouble. Especially, the new operating
system has object-oriented driver architecture that should greatly
facilitate writing device drivers for the myriad peripheral cards in the
IBM-compatible world.
As the October 14 email from NeXT states, in order to set up a
machine that has comparable performance to NeXT machines, one should
assume that the Intel-based hardware is equipped with a complete set of
high-performance peripherals, including 80486DX or DX/2 50 Mhz board
with processor-direct graphics system, EISA backplane, 32 bit LAN, 32
bit SCSI (-II), 16 bit sound, high-performance SCSI disk, etc. You
folks at the Executor project should try to plan on your Executor port
so that it includes capability to work with all of the above and more,
if (as I hope) you do plan to port it. NeXT claims that "a specific
NeXTSTEP 486 Hardware Compatibility Guide will be available in
November"; I hope that doesn't mean Nov. 1993!
NeXT claims that there will be a DOS 5.0/Windows 3.1 (including DOS
"protected" mode/Win-16 mode) Compatibility Package that will enable
several simultaneous DOS and/or Windows programs to run within NeXTSTEP
windows, taking "full advantage of the 486 microprocessor"; Win-32 mode
should be supported by mid-1993. When one combines that with possible
Executor capability, one can begin to see the potentially vast
versatility of such a machine.
I'll look forward to your reply on these questions whenever you can
get around to it. Thanks for all your good work so far!
Robert Gaylord <ODCDRAG@MVD.OSV.UCLA.EDU>