New York Ð With back-to-back performances at two important New York trade shows, NEXT-STEP 3.1 made its debut in the Big Apple this June.
At the Securities Industry Association's (SIA) annual Information Management Conference and Exhibit, NeXT's booth drew a running crowd of prospective customers from the financial-services market. Meanwhile, at New York's mammoth Jacob Javits Convention Center, NEXTSTEP got its first introduction to the mass-market world of personal computers at this year's PC Expo.
Attendees at the SIA show were generally enthusiastic about NEXTSTEP. "I would like to get one in my shop once the dust settles Ð we're in the middle of a merger," said Jonah Giacalone, a systems architect with Chemical Bank in New York. Like most of the visitors to NeXT's SIA booth, Giacalone said: "I've read a lot about it, but this is the first time I'm actually seeing it."
But others were skeptical that they would be able to adopt NEXT-STEP in their firms. "We're trying to comply with an open-standards environment. How do I do that with NEXTSTEP?" said Arkady Krutkovich, a programmer with Prudential Securities, who nevertheless said he was considering purchasing a copy of NEXT-STEP for his personal use.
In a market dominated by systems running on DOS, Windows, and Sun workstations, NEXT-STEP's main chance of penetration seems to be new applications that are currently in planning or the early stages of development, said Maryann Hays, a lead design analyst with the Securities Industry Automation Corporation.
Although NeXT did not have a formal presence at PC Expo, NEXTSTEP could be found in the booths of most of NeXT's new business partners, including NEC, Dell, DEC, Advanced Logic Research (ALR), and Epson. Many of the computers were demonstrated by volunteers from New York's Gotham NeXT Users Group, who explained the advantages of the object-oriented operating system to curious onlookers.
In NEC's booth, NEXTSTEP was featured on one of the fastest Intel-based computers present at the show: an Express/II Pentium-based system that NEC billed as a "fantasy" system (see story, page 1)
Two Epson Progressions running NEXTSTEP attracted the attention of Joseph C. Trubisz, a researcher at State University of New York at Stoneybrook. "I want one personally," said Trubisz, who added that the the university was considering the purchase of 25 machines for a research lab.