Colour versions of the NeXT Computer System will be out later this year, confirmed NeXT Inc president Steve Jobs at the lavish UK launch of the system by Businessland at the London Palladium yesterday. Jobs said that his company had delayed the introduction of colour machines in order to develop a full 32-bits per pixel colour version rather than the small screen 8-bit systems, as used by the Macintosh. NeXT will offer a plug-in board including a custom chip as graphics accelerator. Colour will be used for desktop publishing applications and photo-realistic rendering for the computer-aided design market, and NeXT will also support the RenderMan three-dimensional photo-realistic graphics software from its sister company Pixar Corp. Real-time compressed video capabilities will also be available within a year, said Jobs. Other software in the pipeline includes combined financial analysis and spreadsheet technology by the second half of the year, and the Wingz graphical spreadsheet should ship within the next few weeks. Jobs said that IBM’s endorsement of the NeXTStep graphical development environment would be an added spur for software developers to use the NeXT machine, which uses the Berkeley Unix-compliant Mach operating system – but said there were no plans to license NeXTStep to other developers. Businessland UK has NeXT machines available for shipment immediately: a basic system is UKP6,500 for the 12 black cube with 8Mb memory, MegaPixel display, keyboard, mouse, 256Mb optical drive, 40Mb accelerator drive and NeXT’s bundled software. The same configuration but with 330Mb drive costs UKP9,000, and a network system with no optical drive is UKP5,000. Educational establishments get 20% discount, but Businessland will also concentrate the sales effort on software developers and on users in government.
