Soul of The Next Machine

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

To be a hit with humans, a computer needs to be more than the sum of its hardware and software and metal skin. The most successful machines have a built-in emotional component, something that connects the tools in the computer with the whims of its user. Perhaps no one understands this better than Steven Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and the man who made the personal computer a household term. In the three years since he was forced out of Apple, the dreamer behind the Apple II and the Macintosh has been trying to do it again -- to create out of silicon his vision of what it is that makes people feel a bond with their machines.

In one of the most widely ballyhooed product launches ever, Jobs last week unveiled his latest offering: a machine called, appropriately enough, the next computer. Housed in a matte black magnesium case, the $6,500 device is designed to combine the computing power of a $20,000 engineering machine with the simple congeniality of a personal computer. It will be sold, at least initially, only to colleges and universities. But by all accounts, Jobs has his eye on a much larger prize: the $3.6 billion market for high-powered workstations that represents the fastest-growing segment of the computer industry.

"It's a real mindblower," declares Stewart Alsop, editor of P.C. Letter and one of 3,000 industry leaders invited to San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall to witness the debut. The event was vintage Jobs, a sound-and-light show designed to inspire the faithful and persuade the skeptical. Among other stunts, Jobs demonstrated how the machine could run four stopwatches at once, simulate an oscilloscope and give a synthetic rendition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. For the most part, the crowd was duly impressed. Says Richard Shaffer, editor of Technologic Computer newsletter: "I arrived a nonbeliever, and I came away a convert."

Since the first market-ready models of the Next computer may not be available until next summer, definitive appraisals will have to wait. But the range of standard features -- from the ability to connect with high-speed networks to the crisp stereo sound -- adds up to a strong package. At the same time, some of the machine's main components represent noteworthy technical advances.

The biggest surprise is the computer's built-in disk drive. Rather than rely on standard floppy disks, Next comes equipped with an erasable magneto-laser disk built by Canon and controlled by a proprietary chip. The 5 1/4-in. disk, which will be the first of its kind to come to market in the U.S., slips in and out of the computer like a floppy, but holds 256 megabytes -- more data than 300 IBM PC or Macintosh disks. As if to underscore the massive storage capacity this represents, Next's disk comes loaded with software programs, operating instructions and four fat reference books -- a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of quotations and the complete works of Shakespeare. Yet it still has enough free space to store 100 copies of Moby Dick.

The design of the machine is equally advanced. Most of the serious hardware is encased in a 1-ft. cube that can sit on the floor, leaving only the keyboard and a streamlined monitor to clutter a desktop. Yet the cube packs plenty of power. To bolster the performance of its main microprocessor, the top-of-the-line Motorola 68030, Next added one chip that specializes in fast numerical computations and a second one to handle sound and music.

For customers who would use the machine for desktop publishing, Next offers a Display PostScript system in which the image on the computer screen precisely matches what will appear on the printed page. For musicians, language students and other users who may want to record or transmit voice messages, the machine comes equipped with a microphone that can convert a sound into bits and bytes and then reproduce it with uncanny accuracy.

For programmers, the computer tries to marry two important software technologies: the Unix operating system favored by scientists and engineers and the user-friendly screen displays popularized by the Mac. Other companies have also painted over the complexity of Unix's commands with easily understood screen images, but Next goes further. It provides programmers with a set of graphic tools dubbed NextStep that allows them to build their own snazzy screen displays without having to write a line of code. The programmer simply selects images from a palette of prefabricated components and drops them into place, a feature Jobs claims could cut the time it takes to write software by a factor of ten.

Not everyone is bowled over by the machine. William Gates, chairman of Microsoft and champion of a competing software system, declined to attend the unveiling. "That would be lending too much credibility," he sniffed. "There's nothing revolutionary about it." Another software developer points out that Jobs has been associated with as many commercial failures as successes, including the ill-fated Apple III and Lisa machines.

Next does face some difficult hurdles. Last week it still lacked several features that had been promised in its advance publicity, including a color screen, a built-in facsimile machine, a high-speed modem and the ability to display video images from a television or VCR. Moreover, its $6,500 price tag is more than twice what Jobs predicted, even though it may prove to be competitive. Most troubling is that after three years of development, the computer's main system software is still not ready for release to the general public, and is not likely to be ready for six to eight months. That delay will ^ give competitors -- notably Apple and Sun -- time to deliver new or improved machines.

But for now Next has captured the hearts and minds of some influential people. Says Shaffer: "It's the kind of computer that will excite programmers. They will want to work on this machine." In this business, making a computer with soul may be half the battle.

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/San Francisco