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11/14/91
Number 5 Vol 2
ANuG
Newsletter
The Albuquerque NeXT Users Group
President: Gregory Burd
gburd@nmsu.edu
Treasurer: Donald W. DeLand
deland@unmvax.cs.unm.edu
Librarian: Chris Zoeller
zoeller@lampf.lanl.gov
Intro, And Meeting Information:
First and foremost the meeting of the past Sat. Nov the 9th was a total
success. Again I must thank DIT for coming down to Albuquerque and
giving a demo of OnDuty with its new and much improved user interface(UI).
The demo was amazing and no doubt OnDuty will give Who's Calling a run
for market share in the personal organizer arena.
Second I would like to thank our surprise guest Clifford Matthews of
Abacus R&D who is the author of Executor a set of programs for the
NeXT that allow the execution of Macintosh programs without modification.
His demonstration of the first release of the Mac emulator showed a
great deal of work deciphering the Mac ROMs and the Mac file system.
Currently Clifford and Abacus is the only company working toward this
goal, there was another group out of MIT, but according to Clifford they
suspended efforts when they saw Executor. Clifford is attacking the
legal aspect of this project head on, several copies of Executor were
sent to Apple's legal department to allow any legal proceedings to
take place as soon as possible. Currently Executor is lacking some
major features of the true Mac OS. Future versions will incorporate
a print driver, device drivers for the NeXT serial ports, System 7.0
support and a more integrated program. Currently there is no Mac
desktop persay simply the ability to run Macintosh programs. Executor
guarantee only one program to run under it, MicrosoftWord 4.00d and
it does run with all the conventions of MicrosoftWord. Other system
stable programs should also run, but there are no promises. This
project is extremely complex and lengthy and the main reason for its
release before a complete version is monetary. If you want to see what
is being done in this program go out and buy a copy of the Macintosh
resource manuals (yes the ones that are over a thousand pages long) and
add to that the translation to the NeXT OS and the project is beyond
most of us. If you are interested in seeing this program completed and
a fully functional Macintosh emulator available on the NeXT buy this
program in its first release and then upgrade.
Also a big thanks to William Edney who recompiled and hacked with the
best of them at the meeting to find out what error checking and string
handling were all about. Bill was demonstrating his ScriptWriter, a
graphical tool for building and execution unix shell scripts in
NeXTstep. In future versions he plans to add the ability to make IB
palettes from the graphical scripts that can be added to any program.
This is the program that several of us have been waiting for, a program
that allows us to not even have to open a terminal window to accomplish
things normally done in command line UNIX.
Again thanks to Mark Williams for the use of his loft in the Corner
Bookstore in Albuquerque, although a little tight on space things worked
out well. Also thanks for the fruit drink Mark, it made a difference. : )
Thanks should also go out to Chris Zoeller who made a short presentation
on the importance of multi-lingual applications and offered his services
as a translator to programmers.
Thanks to Andrew Stone who made a short presentation on how to get
started in the NeXT world of programming, and then digressed into more
fun information on Steve Jobs and interactions with him. Also thanks for
the Create! Tee-Shirt that was donated and given away to the person with
the best Steve Story, Bill Edney was the winner.
There was even more to the meeting than the events already mentioned.
ANuG now has a Librarian, and a Treasurer as well as a President. Chris
Zoeller is the Librarian, and Donald W. DeLand was elected to the post of
Treasurer. To help bring in outside demonstrations and to offset the
cost of running a UUCP and/or SLIP connection for ANuG dues are now set
to $35 annually. Anyone can attend meetings, but to have the UUCP or SLIP
access you must pay dues. Very soon there will be a P.O. Box to mail
dues and questions etc to ANuG and there will be a savings account
established in Albuquerque to hold the money. With the idea of dues
comes the need for a charter of sorts, to be ratified at the next meeting.
For the meeting place of the next meeting we hope to have professor
sponsorship and be able to meet on the UNM campus. If anyone has access to
or knows about a projection system for the NeXT to allow for better
demo's please inform me. Meetings will be held on the second Saturday of
every month. If anyone is interested in having a pre-meeting meeting of
developers to hack and help one another, please tell me. This is a
possibility and might help to lessen the level of technical talk in the
meeting.
The idea of a UUCP or SLIP login was brought up by me, a frustrated
non-internetworked NeXT users who wants NeXTmail at my machine. There
will be three stages to this process that will most likely take over a
year to fully implement. First, I am developing a utility that will
allow a NeXT user who has a university account to grab that mail and move
it to his/her local NeXT machine, and send mail through the remote account
also. This will not require SLIP or UUCP in any way. I call it MailPlus.
Second after we are all logging into UNM or NMSU to grab our mail,
we will try to put TV-I (with its 26 NeXT's) on Technet and draw a UUCP
login off that to a server machine for the user group. And third
we will try to draw a Usenet feed as well as a feed from Telenet or
Tymenet and allow high speed SLIP access first for our user group and
then to the entire United States (for a nominal fee) and try to draw
money into our group for Non-Profit reasons, such as an annual large
developers meeting in either Albuquerque or Las Alamos. Again I would
like to get feedback on these ideas.
Tid Bits:
- Don't forget about NeXTworld EXPO and the idea to go as a user group
if you are interested in a joint venture please send me email now so
we can plan far enough in advance.
- Release 3.0 of NeXTstep will come out on CD ROM. If there is enough
interest there may be a way to get a group discount on CD ROM drives.
Email if interested!
- A interactive and real time version of Render Man is said to be
bundled with NeXTstep 3.0 This could mean death to the Mac and the
SGI Iris Indigo as the high end graphics workstation.
- Don't ask any NeXT person what 'NRW' stands for because they might
mad.
- Don't count out Neuron in the race to make a 96/96 fax modem that works
the race isn't over yet...
- Osaka University in Japan purchased 400 NeXT's and announced their
desire to remove IBM as the main computer on that campus.
- Rumors of layoffs are true, but hardly alarming or any reason to
say that NeXT is in hot water.
- Rumors about the selling of the NeXT prize factory have been proven false
- Rumors of NeXT porting NeXTstep to the 80x86 machines as well as the
SPARC based Sun machines are still rumors, but NeXTstep is up and
running on those platforms.
- Rumors that NeXT is going public are true, and it will happen in the
NeXT year! (hehe)
Thanks again for your time,
Greg Burd
President (by election) of ANuG
;-)
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.