NeXT Demo @ Canon
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
when we first started to design this computer we looked at our history which was from personal
computers we said what is a PC architecture will a PC architecture is you go get some memory and
and you add to it some video and a CPU
and everything works fine the problem is
is that when you decide that you want to go 10 times faster
and put 10 times as many dots on the screen the path to memory burns up
and you cannot get the information out fast enough so
PC architecture breaks and we thought
what should we do well we looked at workstations
And workstations put a cache on the CPU, and they put some dual-ported memory on the video, and it works.
The problem is that's where they stop.
Because if you look at a typical workstation, the minute you add a network, it starts to bog down the system enormously.
And then you add fast disks.
You might add some fast I.O. in terms of a backplane or a bus.
You might add something like audio.
And for high-quality audio, like you find in a CD player, it demands quite a lot of data.
So this can also start to pull your computer down.
And you might want to put an attached processor, like a digital signal processor, on your computer.
And you've got to get a lot of information to it and back from it.
And again, things just don't work.
and so what we found was that
this didn't work and we had to invent something new
we asked ourselves has anyone else done this yet
maybe we're getting a little lazy as we get older but rather than reinventing it ourselves
we looked around and the answer was of course yes
who saw this problem?
mainframes, this is exactly what mainframes have done for the last 25 years
and it may sound funny coming from us but we decided to copy this architecture
and so what we did was we looked at how mainframes do it what they do is they
have I O processors on every single I O channel as they call them and then they
have a very sophisticated memory system which doesn't let the processors into
memory until they're ready to get in and very efficiently get out and what that
all adds up to is this. If you look at the overall system throughput of a computer,
PCs have about 10 megabytes per second, workstations about 20, and mainframes about 40.
And you can see some of the other parameters there. So what we wanted to do was make something
more like a mainframe. But rather than making something like this, which is how the mainframes
typically do it we decided to build a VLSI group and we put a mainframe
architecture on two VLSI chips it took us three years to do this but the
performance is staggering we are within striking distance of a mainframe we have
one board and about 45 integrated circuits and this is the board right
here so this is our architecture we actually use three processors a Motorola 68030 floating
point unit and a new type of processor to computers a digital signal processor and we'll
talk a little more about that later and we have 12 IO processors each with their own
direct channel to memory and you can see what they're for for the backplane the serial ports
the printer the DSP the audio the discs etc and we can be running all of these at one time and
still only be chewing up about a third of the overall system performance now let's take a look at the
sound hardware we wanted to build in sound in this computer and we thought to ourselves when you pay
thousands of dollars for a computer why should you get less good sound than you get on a few hundred
compact disc player? And the answer is, of course, you shouldn't. So we built in CD-quality
sound, built in high-quality digital to analog converters, and we also built in this new
thing called a digital signal processor. And a digital signal processor is a processor
that's optimized for processing certain types of algorithms about up to 100 times faster
than the main CPU. And this is useful for things like sound, music, and speech, which
which we'll hear some of today, faxes, image processing, all sorts of other types of things.
and there's one built into every next computer
now
why did we build it in
like many things we built into the computer
we discovered in talking with software vendors
that if it takes an additional plugin board
that cost a few thousand dollars
with a dsp on it
they won't use it in their software
because they won't sell very many pieces of their software
they'll only use it pervasively
if it's built into every computer
And what they told us is if you want to make a revolution,
raise the lowest common denominator,
and you'll see the revolution happen in the software.
And that's what we did.
And this is our lowest common denominator.
That's the board.
These are the two mainframe on the chips here.
Processors, custom video, all the networking built in.
We'll go through some of this other stuff a little bit later.
Okay.
most of you have probably seen pictures of the next computer I thought I'd run
through a few
this is what it looks like it's in a one-foot cube
and this is the back of it
we have one board that is the whole computer as we just saw
we have slots for three additional boards we have a power supply here
the plugs in anywhere in the world you find the power cord it works
this is what the inside looks like
very easy to service we have a room for two full-size five and a quarter inch
Winchester drives inside
so that we can put over a gigabyte of storage inside this one foot cube
this is what the display looks like it's on a stand
it tilts very easily and the back of it again
has a connector to go to the
cube connector for the keyboard connector for an external microphone
and it has a speaker built in down below but it also has a stereo walkman
headphone jack and gold-plated line output jacks to go to your stereo it
connects to the cube
well wait until you hear the sound it makes it connects to the cube with one
three meter cable here and that three meter cable supplies it video at 100
megahertz it also supplies it power so because this works anywhere in the world
this also works anywhere in the world it supplies it with digital sound which is
converted to analog in the monitor
It takes back the keyboard and mouse data to the cube,
and it also takes back the digital microphone data to the cube.
So it does its work.
And this is our laser printer.
It's a very interesting laser printer in that it's a price breakthrough.
It also has 400 dots per inch, which is about 75% greater aerial resolution than 300 dots per inch.
And it's a full postscript output.
So truly what you see is what you get.
Now, let's get to software.
we went out and asked software developers
what would be a revolution
we're designing this new computer
what do you want to see
and it was almost unanimous what they wanted
what they told us was
before Macintosh
the world was simple
it had agreed on a user interface
of 80 by 24 characters
and when you wrote a program
you wrote the guts