Speculation about the long-awaited scholar’s workstation from Steve Jobs’ Next Inc, which could be launched within the next few weeks, is again mounting – but details remain confused due to what appears to have been a number of changes in the specification during the development process. What does seem fairly certain is that the scholar’s workstation will be Motorola 68030-based, with specialised chips dedicated to graphics performance – perhaps including Inmos Transputers. The operating system is expected to be the back-to-basics Mach variant of Unix developed at Carnegie Mellon University, which offers multi processor support and is largely based on Berkeley Unix. Key members of the team who originally developed Mach now work for Next Inc. Software is likely to include a screen-based version of the PostScript page description language developed by Adobe Systems in conjunction with Next. Display PostScript will offer true WYSIWIG and be windowing system-independent. One candidate for the windowing and interface software is the X-Desktop product from small Cambridge company IXI Ltd, an X-Window-based systems that visitors to the European Unix User Show last week could see demonstrated for the first time. IXI says a number of customers have taken on the product, but are not yet ready to reveal their plans. The most likely date for the launch of the Next workstation is this Thursday, June 16, a few days before California’s Usenix conference, but sources are almost unanimous in setting the launch some time in June.
