ENGINEERING
Reproduced with permission from NeXT Computer, Inc.
A Reference Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช 1992 NeXT Computer, Inc
For engineering faculty and students at schools like Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Georgia Institute of Technology, year-long development cycles on mini and mainframe machines to get software in the classrom and in the research labs are all but a thing of the past.
These schools, and more than 100 others, are using NeXT technology in a variety of engineering classrooms and research labs. With NeXT's object-oriented operating and development environment, faculty, researchers, and students can assemble an application's entire interface without writing a single line of code. The result: a development process that's five to ten times more efficient and cost effective than traditional software methods, yet eminently compatible with the knowledge and skill base of undergraduate students-like those at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, who have developed more than 75 custom applications using NeXTSTEP.
For experienced users, like Gregory Wakefield, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, using NeXT technology means that users are able to finish projects that probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground by using any other platform. "If we weren't using NeXT machines, we would have needed a support staff of software engineers and hackers," he said about a research project he and a team of students completed for Ford Motor Company. "We would never had been able to take the project this far on another platform."
And in the engineering classroom, NeXTSTEP coupled with software like Mathematica, has enabled faculty, like Gautam Dasputa of Columbia University, to cover ten times more material than he has in previous classes. In fact, real-life problems that Dasgupta spent hours of class time on in previous years, he no longer even reviews in class. Students just complete the problems as hands-on class work with Mathematica.
There are no compromises on the kind of technology engineers expect from NeXT-at an affordable price-and it shows in the quality of work they are able to produce.