NEXTSTEP Presentation 94 
A Users Point of View 
by Eric Tremblay

Introduction

Presenter's background

2 years of NEXTSTEP experience

Author of numerous public domain applications

Attended NeXTWorld Expo 93 in California

2 NEXTSTEP Products shipping

Nova cdrom for NeXT black hardware

Nebula cdrom for NEXTSTEP Intel

Equipment used

Intel 486 running NEXTSTEP

Concurrence presentation software

NeXT a software company

On May 25, 1993 NEXTSTEP for Intel ships and NeXT ends it's transition from a hardware manufacturer to a software company

Who buys NEXTSTEP?

Custom application developers

For Object oriented technology

For building application 5 to 10 times faster

For Database front-end development.

NEXTSTEP Supported Platforms

Black hardware

NeXT Cube

NeXT Stations

NEXTSTEP 3.2

Intel 486/Pentium

NEXTSTEP 3.2 on Intel

Shipping since May 25, 1993

Optimized for Pentium

Alliances to pre-install NEXTSTEP

Dell

Compaq

Epson

NEC

Hewlett Packard

Data General

AT&T / NCR

Hewlett Packard PA-RISC

Shipping in 1994

First RISC NEXTSTEP platform

The industry's fastest RISC processor

Beginning under $5000 up to quad-processor superserver costing well over $500 000

OPENSTEP NeXT / Sun

NeXT and Sun team up with OPENSTEP

Sun will integrate Object technology into Solaris

Full NEXTSTEP port for Sun SPARC computers

Break point for Live demo.

How much does it costs?

Low-end PC hardware

486 33MHz 8MB RAM Local Bus

Super VGA 1024 X 768 (2-bit grayscale)

200 MB IDE hard disk

Keyboard, mouse.

14 inch color monitor

Total: $  2470          (Canadian funds)

High-end PC hardware

486 DX2 (66MHz) 16 MB RAM Local Bus

ATI Ultra Pro 1024 X 768 (4,096 colors)

Adaptec SCSI adapter

Keyboard, mouse.

405 MB SCSI hard disk

17 inch color monitor

Total: $5600 (Canadian funds)

Software

User version $599.00 

Developer version $1499.00

Full NEXTSTEP License $2098.00

Evalutation $299.00 (available?)

Educational $299.00

Retail prices in U.S. funds

Alliance between Hewlett Packard and NeXT

Products from H.P. / NeXT

NEXTSTEP on PA-RISC

Portable Distributed Object System HP 9000 series server running HP-UX

Object-Enterprise targets financial-services

Reactions to the alliance

"The H-P alliance put a 'seal of approval' on NeXT's software,..." --Dataquest analyst Paul Cubbage for the SF Examiner,May 26, 1993

"Alliance with HP gives NeXT marketing muscle, credibility"
-- InfoWorld, May 31, 1993

NEXTSTEP Advantages

General

Large selection of bundled applications

Developer tools

Complete online documentation

Third party applications

Object oriented technology

Unix

User Interface

Help system

Compatibility with DOS and Windows Applications

Compatibility with the standard X/Windows

"NeXTStep for Intel Processors has a user Interface that's nothingshort of breathtaking."
-- PC Magazine, June 15, 1993

Languages supported

English

Francais

Deutsch

Espanol

Italiano

Svenska

Graphics

Display PostScript Level 2

3D  Interactive RenderMan

PhotoCD

Unix 4.3 BSD

Multi-Tasking

Multi-user

Single

Groups

Security

Remote logins

UUCP

File systems

Multiple-Architecture Binaries

Reads MS-DOS, Macintosh and Unix floppy disks

Reads MS-DOS, Macintosh and Unix hard disks

Reads MS-DOS, Macintosh and Unix CDROMS

Networks

Novell

NFS

AppleTalk client support and AppleShare server support offered through a third-party

Macintosh transition

1.4 MB Floppy compatiblity

CDROM compatibilty

SCSI devices, plug and play

Macintosh emulators

Daydream (Black only) System 7.1 etc... $995

Executor $500

Press Quotes

"NextStep. When Steve Jobs introduced this software as theoperating system for his Next computers in 1988, he claimed it wasyears ahead of its time.  He was right."
--  Fortune Magazine, June 14,  1993

"NEXTSTEP is the most approachable and full-featured of the Unixsystems available on the Intel Corp. platform."
-- PC Week, June 28, 1993

End of Presentation!