I'm running NEXTSTEP 3.1 for Intel on a high-end '486 DX2/66, 525MB SCSI disk, and an S3 local-bus video board, but I cannot talk to our corporate network, nor can I run in anything more than 640-by-480 grayscale mode Ð despite the fact that I'm using a 3COM Etherlink III and an S3-805 local-bus video card. Both of these devices have drivers in 3.1, but they both don't work.
Here, in my opinion, is what NeXT needs to do in a hurry:
John Eduard Venema
North Sydney, Australia
Thyl Engelhardt
TŸbingen, Germany
NEXTSTEP for Intel is a very fine product. Now, if only I could make it work with my hardware. I have a Sound Blaster Pro sound card, but I don't have a driver for NEXTSTEP. It goes the same for my Telepath fax-modem that I cannot use under NEXTSTEP because of the lack of drivers. I can't even use my HP4 printer in non-PostScript standard mode.
Jacques Garbi
Lausanne, Switzerland
Ultimately, what decides the success or failure of NeXT will not be the pricing of its OS or a lack of applications, but how it responds to problems like mine.
Barry Vinson
New Iberia, Louisiana
Fred Zimmerman
Ann Arbor, Michigan
You're right that the White House didn't keep the technology train rolling after its initial installation of a "closed" e-mail system. But if you think back to 1982, there were few, if any, corporations on any e-mail system, much less connected openly to the rest of the world. Those of us in the White House at that time were the second corporate account in the world that had PROFS; we literally helped IBM design it.
Similarly, who in 1982-83 was doing cross-country video conferencing? Not many, because the video codecs (compressors/decompressors) and communications lines were too ex-pensive Ð only those who could justify the expense used them.
The Bush White House merely followed what the Reagan administration had done and did not move to modernize the White House for the '90s. It took a new administration of young turks to wake everyone up. Ð Jim Opfer
So what does "as fast as a '386/16" really mean? Does it mean messing with system buggers in the ROM monitor as the SoftPC Read Me file suggests? Or fiddling with color settings somewhere? All this reminds me too much of my real PC. Until now, no NeXT app has recommended editing low-level configuration data (and in the monitor of all places). Indeed, maybe SoftPC has emulated the PC experience all too well.
David L. Neumann
Exxon Production Research
Houston, Texas
Our reviewer tested SoftPC on several NeXTstations, including a never-released Nitro. On a stock Turbo, he found performance to be sluggish but acceptable. Now, we are looking forward to NEXTSTEP 3.2 to discover how SoftPC performs on Intel hardware. ÐNW
Bill Brown
Hollis, New Hampshire
We take our first shot in this issue at testing developer boxes. We plan to expand our evaluation criteria in the future as we continue to review NEXTSTEP PCs. Ð NW
In the June/July issue, the article titled "Pyromania!" has one virtually unreadable figure caption, since the text is as black as the underlying picture of the burning Cube. Another not-so-great choice of colors appears in the NEXTSTEP PCs article. Red figure captions over orange images are highly unreadable. In the same article, one figure uses white text Ð too bad it's over light-colored areas in the figure.
Alvin Jee
Santa Cruz, California
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