Subject: Season's Greetings
Sent: 12/21/96 2:46 PM
To: PAUG Distribution List
Season's Greetings, PAUG'ers!
Thanks to all of you who joined us for our December meeting, elections, year 1996 year-end wrapup. Everyone was enthusiastic in welcoming in Rog and his new team for 1997, and in thanking Ted, myself, and our 1996 Board for serving this year. We sincerely appreciate it, and wish you and your families a wonderful holiday season.
Little did we know: momentous events were taking shape at Apple as we met. We all now know, from the newspaper headlines, that the Jean Gassee/Be OS deal was scotched -- in favor of a deal with Steve Jobs and his NeXt corporation.
The rest of this is technical stuff. The merger/acquisition will affect us all in the coming months and years. I think it will prove exciting, rewarding, and at least the equal of anything we might have hoped for before. Here's why:
First, I confess to having had very high hopes for Be. Apple and we badly need a modern operating system with protected memory, true preemptive multitasking, and true virtual memory. In English, this means that when NetScape or Microsoft Word crashes, it shouldn't drag everything else down with it, forcing you to restart and just possibly lose all your work. I've really "had it" with restarts.
When I first heard Apple had "bought" NeXt, I first jumped to the worst possible conclusion. I feared that Amelio, to avoid paying Gassee an inflated 300 million for Be, would limp us along with a grafted, patched operating system into the yeat 2001. Loyal though I feel to Apple ("we've been through a LOT together!"), that would have been (and still would be) the very last straw. I felt closer than ever before in my life to a certainty that my next box would run Windows NT -- a very scary thought.
Happily, Gil Amelio is still even better at the Apple helm than I ever gave him credit for. I found the official Apple press release through a (Macintouch) link. It was straightforward, free of marketing hype, and said that Apple bought the whole Next team, lock, stock and barrel, and will use the NeXt OS shell. Apple and NeXt engineers will craft the next OS. It is stable, proven, fully developed, established in the industry, and NeXt is run in high-end corporate and scientific markets now. It is reportedly better than IBM OS2, certainly will present a better user front end than Windows NT (in whatever form the Apple/NeXt OS finally takes), AND it will support, and be supported by, the Common Reference Hardware Platform (CRPH), due in mid or late 1997 from Apple, IBM, Power Computing, and possibly some high-end PC clone makers.
CRPH is extremely important to you if you are thinking of buying any "higher-end" machine in the next one to three years. CRPH means you should be able to run Mac, OS2, Unix, Be, Windows NT on the same box (until IBM and Motorola droppped support for NT development). You may have no plans to run Unix (!), but you do want your machine to be able to run whatever Apple and others in our market are actually offering by the turn of the century -- don't you?
I then read the official NeXt announcement (broken Next link). I'm very encouraged, and happy for employees of Apple and NeXt. This will be wonderful for those of us on the Internet. I really think this is an ideal solution to what will be needed for Apple to survive and prosper for another decade and beyond. The stock market seems to think so, too.
There are still lots of questions. I'll be asking many of them at the Expo:
Finally, I'm really happy to see Steve Jobs back at Apple. I never envisioned this happening. I'm glad Gil Amelio did.
See you "early" on Thursday, January 16th, at 2124 Brewster Ave, in Redwood City, from 6:30PM - 9:30PM!
A Merry Christmas to you all,
 |
Alex Forbes - 1996 Vice-President, PAUG |
E-mail: Write Summitlake.com
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