NeXTstation Intro
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Transcript
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Good morning.
Today, we're going to introduce four new products.
we're going to show you some of the neatest apps that have ever been created for any desktop
platform we're going to show you the best color that's ever been and we're going to talk about
what we think is going to be the most important new application area of the 1990s called
interpersonal computing people told us they loved next step and that it was three four five years
ahead of anything else they'd ever seen in the industry.
And they loved the fact that we built it on top of Unix,
because together, this gave them the multitasking
that they really wanted.
It gave them the transparent networking that they needed.
It gave them the object-oriented development environment
so that they could build applications in a third of the time.
It gave them PostScript everywhere, not just on the printer,
but throughout the system.
It gave them multimedia, and they told us they loved how they could take computer illiterates
and they could be using the system within a very short amount of time.
So this is what people told us they loved.
We heard this over and over and over again, and it all came down to next step.
All four of these new products used the Motorola 68040.
Every single one of them, running at 25 megahertz, and they turned out very fast.
How fast?
Let's take a look at a real-world example.
I got out Mathematica,
and I used Mathematica to calculate and plot this chart.
And all the next 040 machines came in at 26 seconds.
That's 10 times faster than the Macintosh CIs.
So we're really pleased at this performance.
Now let me take an opportunity to tell you a few other things that we were able to build
into all of these products.
Every single new product has a 2.88 megabyte floppy disk built in.
That's twice at the capacity of the current IBM PC world, although they're moving to this
next year we hear.
And it's totally backward compatible with DOS.
You stick in DOS floppies, they immediately show up in the next workspace manager.
You can read and write them all day long.
The second thing we built into all four of our new products is to continue to increase
our connectivity and networking capabilities.
These are the first computers in the world with built-in twisted pair Ethernet right
alongside the BNC for the thin Ethernet, all four new products.
And this is it.
It's in a slab, sits right underneath the monitor.
You'll be able to get your hands on one in a few hours.
This is what it looks like. It's called NextStation.
It's a slab, monitor, keyboard, the mouse, the software.
That's what it looks like from the side.
We have a new megapixel display that's the same as our old one,
except it's 10 pounds lighter, has an anti-glare screen on it,
has a microphone built into the bezel.
So let's go through real briefly.
Briefly, it's got the 68040 running at 15 MIPS.
Comes with eight megabytes of memory,
expandable to 32 inside the slab.
Our 2.88 megabyte floppy, DOS compatible,
and 105 megabyte Winchester preloaded with all the software.
And you can expand that to up to 340 megabytes
inside the slab.
It's got twisted, pear, and thin ethernet.
Our megapixel monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
It's got all of our sound stuff in it, DSP, CD sound, microphone, and NextStep 2.0 and
our bundled applications, and the complete system is $49.95, whether you want to be a
standalone user or a network user.
One of the neatest things to me is that we have been recognized as having the most automated
factory in the computer business.
Every single one of the products here today at Davies
was built in that automated factory.
And after we finished building the boards,
the next station goes together with only seven
screws. Now, we've updated the Cube as well for 1991. We've added a floppy disk inside,
an 040 board, and we've added some new storage options. In addition to the floppy disk
and the 256 megabyte optical disk, which is optional in the Cube, we've added full support
for CD-ROMs in our Next Step 2.0 release,
and you can get a CD-ROM drive inside the cube.
And we are also announcing 1.4 gigabyte drives today,
which you can add one or two of inside the cube
for a total of up to 2.88 gigabytes
in this one-foot cube to be used as a server.
For our existing customers,
we're offering them the same 040 board as an upgrade with release 2.0 for $1,495.
So no one is getting left behind as we speed these machines up by a factor of at least four.
And we've decided if we're going to be successful,
we have to be best of breed in each of these three existing categories.
So let's take a look at where we are.
In terms of spreadsheet analysis, here's a sampling.
Today, Lotus is going to introduce Improv.
The company that invented the modern spreadsheet with 123
is going to reinvent the spreadsheet for the 1990s.
Improv takes us into an entirely new realm.
Why do we choose Next for this fundamentally new product?
Quite simply, we would not have been able to invent such a revolutionary new product
on any other platform.
That's the absolute truth.
In fact, NeXT provided far and away the best platform for us to innovate.
Improv would not have been nearly so good, not nearly so innovative anywhere else.
We wanted a platform and we wanted a spreadsheet, not just for next year, but for the next decade.
We wanted a spreadsheet that gives users new, better ways of viewing information,
and that goes hand-in-hand with Next's innovative graphical user interface,
big screen, and high resolution.
There is categorically no better development environment in the world.
Let's move on to publishing.
In publishing, we have some equally exciting news.
WordPerfect is announcing their product today.
Just like Lotus, we went to the mainstream provider in the category.
WordPerfect, as you know, has a greater than 70% market share for mainstream word processing.
And they're announcing a very fine product today.
QuarkXPress is also announcing a very fine product today.
Quark, as you know, in our opinion, is the number one provider of the high-end publishing software.
And we're extremely excited to have them on our platform.
So we think with these products, we've got an awfully good start at the publishing market, which is one we care deeply about.
Let's talk about the third one.
People want to build their own custom apps.
And we've heard universally that Next Step is allowing people to do this faster than ever, generally around a third of the time,
and in a much more interactive fashion with their customers or internal users.
For custom apps, I'm going to build an app today.
So I'm going to pick the customer info database.
And this is now going to automatically hook me up to the customer info database.
The next thing I'm going to go do is get a data list here.
Just drag this over and stick it in the window where I want it.
Pull it down here.
And I'm going to hook this up to my customer info database.