Technology: Soul of The Next Machine

To be a hit with humans, a computer needs to be more than the sum of its hardware and software and metal skin. The most successful machines have a built-in emotional component, something that connects the tools in the computer with the whims of its user. Perhaps no one understands this better than Steven Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and the man who made the personal computer a household term. In the three years since he was forced out of Apple, the dreamer behind the Apple II and the Macintosh has been trying to do it again -- to create out of silicon his vision of what it is that makes people feel a bond with their machines.

In one of the most widely ballyhooed product launches ever, Jobs last week unveiled his latest offering: a machine called, appropriately enough, the next computer. Housed in a matte black magnesium case, the $6,500 device is designed to combine the computing power of a $20,000 engineering machine with the simple congeniality of a personal computer. It will be sold, at least initially, only to colleges and universities. But by all accounts, Jobs has his eye on a much larger prize: the $3.6 billion market for high-powered workstations that represents the fastest-growing segment of the computer industry.

"It's a real mindblower," declares Stewart Alsop, editor of P.C. Letter and one of 3,000 industry leaders invited to San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall to witness the debut. The event was vintage Jobs, a sound-and-light show designed to inspire the faithful and persuade the skeptical. Among other stunts, Jobs demonstrated how the machine could run four stopwatches at once, simulate an oscilloscope and give a synthetic rendition of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. For the most part, the crowd was duly impressed. Says Richard Shaffer, editor of Technologic Computer newsletter: "I arrived a nonbeliever, and I came away a convert."

Since the first market-ready models of the Next computer may not be available until next summer, definitive appraisals will have to wait. But the range of standard features -- from the ability to connect with high-speed networks to the crisp stereo sound -- adds up to a strong package. At the same time, some of the machine's main components represent noteworthy technical advances.

The biggest surprise is the computer's built-in disk drive. Rather than rely on standard floppy disks, Next comes equipped with an erasable magneto-laser disk built by Canon and controlled by a proprietary chip. The 5 1/4-in. disk, which will be the first of its kind to come to market in the U.S., slips in and out of the computer like a floppy, but holds 256 megabytes -- more data than 300 IBM PC or Macintosh disks. As if to underscore the massive storage capacity this represents, Next's disk comes loaded with software programs, operating instructions and four fat reference books -- a dictionary, a thesaurus, a book of quotations and the complete works of Shakespeare. Yet it still has enough free space to store 100 copies of Moby Dick.