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From: a...@wb1.cs.cmu.edu (Avadis Tevanian)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NextStep Receives Fluegelman Award
Message-ID: <8653@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 90 02:56:08 GMT
Organization: NeXT, Inc.
Lines: 128
Posted: Thu Mar 29 03:56:08 1990
FYI (wish I could post RTF or a WriteNow file), any errors translating from
WriteNow format are mine:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Allison Thomas Associates
Allison Thomas, (818) 981-1520
Emily Brower, (415) 780-3786
NeXT WINS MAJOR SOFTWARE AWARD
FOR ITS NEXTSTEP ENVIRONMENT
SAN DIEGO, March 28, 1990 NeXT, Inc. today announced that its NextStep (R)
development team has won the prestigious Andrew Fluegelman Award, sponsored
by PC World, Macworld and the Software Publishers Association (SPA). The
award, which carries a $5,000 cash prize, honors software programmers for
their innovative contributions to the personal computer community. The
award was given at the SPA's annual black-tie awards ceremony at the Hotel
Del Coronado.
Past winners include the developers of Adobe's PostScript (R) page
description language, HyperCard (R), FidoNet and Aldus' PageMaker (R).
This year, 40 nominations were pared down to five finalists. Besides NeXT,
the finalists were the developers of FrameMaker (R) 2.0, Lotus (R) Notes,
Interactive Physics and THINK C-TM.
"This award means a great deal to NeXT because it signals recognition from
our peers," said Guy L. (Bud) Tribble, NeXT's vice president, software
engineering, who accepted the award on behalf of the 36-person NextStep
team. "It also emphasizes that NextStep is working in the marketplace: It
is the reason that NeXT, only six months after the 1.0 software for the NeXT
Computer began shipping, already has a wealth of application software from
third-party developers. And more products are in the pipeline than would be
possible with a less innovative development environment."
NextStep is a user interface and application software development
environment that makes complex, powerful operating systems manageable for
both users and programmers. Users can take advantage of powerful
UNIX(R)-compatible operating systems without learning arcane UNIX commands.
At the same time, developers who want to create easy-to-use applications can
avoid spending the inordinate amount of time previously necessary to program
the user interface.
Already, developers are finding that NextStep is accelerating their product
development time. For instance, according to Jeffrey Bork, vice president
of marketing at Informix Corporation: "Our development under NextStep cut
our time in half. I know of no other development environment that would
allow us to achieve that kind of productivity and to end up with a product
that looks as good as Wingz does on NeXT."
Already, 18 products from third-party software developers are available for
NextStep, ranging from document layout and sophisticated graphics programs,
to office automation, relational database management and communications
packages. Most of the major software development companies, such as Lotus,
Ashton-Tate, WordPerfect and Informix, as well as those who make peripheral
products, have announced products or development plans for NextStep.
What is NextStep?
NextStep consists of four components: the Window Server, the Workspace
Manager-TM, the Application Kit-TM and Interface Builder-TM. The NextStep
development environment uses an object-oriented programming language,
Objective-C (R). A single imaging model, the Display PostScript (R)
system, makes both on-screen and printed images look the same.
NextStep simplifies the creation of complex, multitasking applications that
have graphical user interfaces. It provides developers with a set of
interactive "objects" e.g., buttons, scroll bars, windows that they
can arrange on the screen with the mouse, without any programming, to create
their application's user interface. They can also use the mouse to
graphically connect these user-interface objects to the objects in the guts
of their application. NextStep provides a basic set of objects, to which
developers can add their own objects or objects created by others.
Users benefit from NextStep in a number of ways. First, the user interface
obviates the need to learn complicated UNIX commands. Also, because all
applications are built from the same basic set of objects, there is a
consistent, high-quality interface to all of them. As a result, once users
have mastered one application, other applications are easy to learn. Also,
because programmers can develop products quicker and easier under NextStep,
users are likely have a wider range of products, in a shorter amount of
time, from which to choose.
NextStep and IBM
When NeXT introduced the developer version of the NeXT-TM Computer in
October 1988, the company also announced that IBM had licensed NextStep.
Recently, IBM announced that it will offer NextStep as a UNIX application
environment for the office market. NextStep will join OSF/Motif as a
graphical user interface for IBM's 80386/80486 PS/2-TM and RISC computers
running AIX-TM, IBM's UNIX operating system. IBM will support the same
application programming interface (API) as NextStep, providing compatibility
and consistency to help customers learn to use new NextStep applications.
Because the NextStep environment offered by IBM is the same as NextStep on
NeXT's own computers, developers can offer a single application on both
machines, resulting in a much larger market for their efforts.
The Fluegelman Award was established in 1986 to commemorate Andrew
Fluegelman's contribution to the software field. Fluegelman developed
PC-Talk, the first easy-to-use and powerful communications program for the
IBM PC. His concept of "freeware" remains one of the most innovative means
of sharing and marketing software. An annual award and cash prize is made
possible through the Andrew Fluegelman Fund, based in San Francisco.
NeXT, Inc., of Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 1985 to develop
innovative, personal and affordable computing solutions for the 1990s and
beyond. The privately held company began shipping the NeXT Computer with
1.0 system software in September 1989 to customers in a wide range of
business, government and academic environments. The computer is available
from Businessland throughout North America and the United Kingdom, from
Canon Inc. in Asia and directly from NeXT for selected university and
federal customers and authorized developers.
NeXT, Application Kit, Interface Builder, and Workspace Manager are
trademarks of NeXT, Inc. NextStep is a registered trademark of NeXT, Inc.
All other names marked by TM and (R) are trademarks or tradenames of their
respective software manufacturers.
--
Avadis Tevanian, Jr. (Avie)
Manager, System Software
NeXT, Inc.
a...@NeXT.COM