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Executor on sale: July 12 - August 31



Dear Folks,

Assuming you've been following this list for a while, you already  
know about our DOS development effort and have seen all the work that  
we've been doing on the NEXTSTEP side of things lately.  We're  
bearing down on a 1.3 official multi-architecture-binary release of  
Executor, and in anticipation, we are putting Executor on sale: $149  
+ shipping non-academic, $99 + shipping academic.

The purpose of the sale is to jump start our DOS release.  The basic  
idea is that we will use the money brought in from the sale to get  
sample copies of Executor/DOS out and evaluated and finance the first  
run of documentation and packaging.  Then, with the DOS dollars  
coming in at a steady pace, we will hire more engineers and provide  
color support, a very high degree of compatibility with the major  
applications and release Executor on a variety of platforms, all  
while continuing to release our experimental and incremental versions  
of Executor/NEXTSTEP.

This sale rewards people who purchase Executor now.  If you have  
access to anonymous ftp, you should be able to see how much progress  
we've made and the direction and speed we're going.

Our competitors are selling their products at a considerably higher  
price.  Liken, selling for about $700, available on the SPARC and HP  
requires that you obtain a copy of System 6 and use it on non-Apple  
equipment, contrary to the license that comes with it.  Equal  
available on SPARC and MIPS doesn't require anything from Apple, but  
as far as I know will primarily be sold bundled with Word and Excel  
(the only two applications they're officially supporting) for a  
retail price of around $1,200.

If you know someone who could use Executor, now is the time to buy.   
A few thousand dollars of sales now helps ARDI much more now than it  
will in a few months, and Executor, especially with the free update  
policy at $149 or $99 is a steal.  Please note however, for once, we  
are going to be hard asses about deadlines, if we don't receive an  
order by August 31, it will not be entitled to the sale price.

If you know of a nest of NeXTs, be it in an academic, commercial or  
government setting, please pass the word.  A University NeXT lab with  
a dozen NeXTs and a dozen PCs running NEXTSTEP/Intel could get a ten  
concurrent user license (every machine doesn't have to run Executor  
at the same time) for < $1,000 and run courseware that's normally run  
on Macs.  ARDI gets some money at an important time, the lab gets  
inexpensive Macintosh emulation and you get the satisfaction of  
seeing NEXTSTEP being used for more activities.

With the ability to pick up Executor from ftp.cs.unm.edu and test it  
out in demo mode, people should be able to figure out whether or not  
it's a good match, and if not, send us the feedback that we're  
putting to such good use.

Thanks for your consideration.

	--Cliff