What's NeXT?: (Or, Don't Name Your Children After Adverbs—It Makes It Difficult To Talk About Them!)

Few product announcements in the field of scientific computing have drawn as much notoriety as the introduction of “The Cube” from NeXT Inc. Targeted at the university market, the commercial release 1.0 of this product is yet to become available at the time we go to press. Nevertheless, wide interest in the community prompts us to publish this preliminary review based on experience with developmental versions 0.8 and 0.9 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We are in the process of preparing a full‐length feature covering physics applications on NeXT.