In what is likely to be the company’s last chance to make an impact on the market – Canon Inc and Ross Perot can’t go on bankrolling it for ever – Steve Jobs NeXT Computer Inc is betting everything on Motorola being able to deliver the 25MHz 68040 in adequate quantities. Claiming signed orders from higher education, commercial and government bodies and resellers for more than 15,000 of the new machines – when will it receive 15,000 68040s from Motorola? – the company announced a 68040-based successor to the NeXT Computer System (which it quietly stopped selling in May), the 8Mb NeXTstation, with Toshiba Corp’s 2.88Mb 3.5 floppy and 105Mb Winchester at $5,000 with mono screen; the $8,000 NeXTstation Color 16-bit, PostScript colour version of NeXTstation; NeXTcube, an $8,000 expandable machine with flexible configuration options that can be used as a server or high-end desktop computer; and NeXTdimension, a high-end, 32-bit PostScript colour board at $4,000. The NeXTstation and NeXTcube ship in November, the other two by March next year. The machines come with Release 2.0 of the Unix-derived operating system. Lotus Development Corp is bundling a new spreadsheet for the NeXT computer, Improv, with the new machines and upgrades to them from the originals, for the rest of this year, thereafter it’s $700. A new DynaView feature in Improv enables users to view and compare data in different ways without manually rebuilding the spreadsheet. Adobe Systems Inc also launched Illustrator-NeXT Version for first quarter 1991, $600.
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