Date: Sun, 27 Oct 91 21:40:15 PST
From: ernest@pundit.cithep.caltech.edu (Ernest Prabhakar)
To: khare@cco.caltech.edu (Rohit Khare)
Subject: Review of Black Friday
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 91 00:47:05 PDT
From: khare@cco.caltech.edu (Rohit Khare)
To: ernest@cco.caltech.edu, lynell@cco.caltech.edu
Subject: Review of Black Friday
NeXT Sales Demos at Caltech: (this is presumably not for the Net posting)
* Ernest J. Franzgrote will vey likely be maintaining the remainder of the Voyager project from a NeXTDimension & NeXTStation setup @ JPL
* The X-ray Crystallography sysadmin is running an all-VMS shop.. may move over to NeXT
* Kim West, Dir. Residence Life, was suitably impressed
* Price sheets flew out the door
* Several ug/grad students are very close to purchasing
* NeXT in houses can work
* The Steve & ND & Mail promotional video was showing (Could we have a CaJUN meeting to show all the old promo videos?)
* Unless I personally badgered people, nobody signed the sheets
* What happened to the scanner petition in the CCO lab? Should we plan a software purchase petition?
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SCaN/CaJUN meeting (we should post this to the net, but idenitfy people better)
Presiding: Mike Mahoney of SCaN (CalState Long Beach Professor)
Ernest Prabhakar of CaJUN (Caltech Graduate Student)
* Mike reported on EDUCOM:
* NeXT was a big presence
* A lot of new software was shown off
* Bill Joy from SUN insulted everybody, probably because nervous about NeXT.
* Mike heard lots of neat rumours he can't share.
* Ernie introduced Andy
(and we heard about the all-Ernie NeXT On Campus (Ernie on the cover, Ernie on the back, Ernie on page 2, page 5, page 6. Ask Lynell Jackson for a copy)
* Andy demo'd Create, an incredibly powerful, incredibly easy-to-use drawing program.
< describe those things which made the most impression: neon outline, ease of adding features, text with fancy styles, his excitement>
* Andy demo'd Dataphile, a flat-file graphical database that handles many different types of data, including graphics, sounds, video, and calculated fields. Andy also told us of his love-hate relationship with Steve Jobs./ (no more details than that, I think)
* Mike gave away some Create shirts and NeXT pencils to SCaN members
* Ernie auctioned off SCaN grab-bags (NeXTWorld & NeXT T's) for relatively low prices ~$15. Ernie then brought out a copy of Create!. It sells for a retail of $500, educational of $250, and Ernie managed to sell it off for $450!!!!! Similarly, Ernie auctioned off a beta of DataPhile for $250 (Confirm this). We then tried to auction NeXT's NeXTDimension system they had brought, but no one had $30,000 in their pocket
[I don't need that much publicity]
* One copy of TextArt was awarded to "Best Rumor": that the NeXT DBKit (in Release 3.0) is being used to frontend Teradata database servers (these are the most powerful transaction machines available)
* In NeXT news: NeXT, Inc. is doing VERY well. The LA office has just closed a single deal worth $1.2 million, and the company is aiming to "shatter all growth and revenue records" in Q4 1991. HSD has announced a deal for $346.50 educational for a 9600 baud FAX, 2400 baud modem, OCR software, and a coupon for $200 off MicroPhone. RenderMan is coming RSN.
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Great job. try to ship it by Monday night (and mention the date). Have a great month.
-ENP