halls@tut.UUCP (Andy Halls) (05/01/85)
This artical contains a represenative example of the responses I received
from my inquiry on cheap Unix machines. I really appreciated all of the
responses I have received, but, they have missed the mark. I'm looking for
a really cheap machine. I've seen s-100 bus card cages with power supplies
for under 300 dollars. I've seen 502 hard disk drives with controller's
for under 400 dollars. If I could find a 32000 processor that runs on
this bus for little money, I might have a starting place for a cheap machine.
Does any have any ideas along these lines.....or am I being totally naive.
I want to hear your opinion on this subject...but don't send your response
to tut. Send it to my boulder address. The powers that be here in boulder
say that only the main node (boulder) needs to be unique on the net. The
other machines here at CU can have any name because the boulder machine
will distribute mail and news, thus the outside world won't have to
know about tut. Unfortunatly, the software does not yet support this
philosophy.....
Andy Halls
Minicomputer Systems, Inc.
2037 Sixteenth Street
Boulder, CO 80302
(303) 443-3347
uucp: {cires | hao | nbires}boulder!halls
csnet: halls@boulder
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary of responses:
Check into the recently announced AT&T UNIX PC. It is based on the
68010, has UNIX SYS V and a windows interface. The base price is
$5095 but you probably have to spend 6-8k to get a reasonable system.
It is advertised as supporting 4 users-heavy editing or 9 users-casual
use. Looks like a neat machine (a biased sentiment, of course).
Guy Starner
AT&T Bell Laboratories
...ihnp4!ihuxe!no5om
Try an IBM-compatible PC with a hard disk (Plug--> AT&T 6300).
You can get UNIX systems such as Xenix or Venix.
Alternatively, we just released the AT&T UNIX PC 7300. I've only seen the
trade articles, but it's around $6K, and pretty nice.
I have seen Venix/86 running on floppy-disk based IBM-compatibles. The
performance isn't exciting, because floppies weren't designed for swapping
on, but it is real UNIX for cheap hardware (it's also pretty nice on the
DataGeneral 1 portable 2-floppy micro).
Bill Stewart {allegra,ihnp4}!ho95c!wcs
We (Burlington Coat Factory) are currently running Xenix on several
Altos micros, and are quite satisified with it. (We having been using
Altos machines at over 50 of our stores for several years, and are
impressed with their reliability and price. Those sites are running
MP/M, but we are starting to use Xenix for in-house work, and plan
to gradually move our software over to it).
Xenix is currently based on an early Berkeley release, but Altos is
in the process of porting System V. They promise that it will be
well supported.
We particularly like their local-area network, Worknet. It allows
jobs on one machine to use files on another, without modification
to programs. For example, you can say
grep 'HELP' <@mymachine/usr/fred/file1 >@yours/usr/joe/file2
to search a file on one machine and send the output to another, or
run machine2 cc longprogram.c
to do a compilation on another machine without tying up your own.
You can also tie IBM PC's into the LAN; it's a little clumsy, but
seems to work.
Model Disk Processor RS-232 RS-422 List price
ports ports
--------------------------------------------------------------
486-20 20Mb 80186 4 1 $5700?
586-20 20Mb 8086 5 0 7200
-40 40Mb 8086 5 0 9200
986-40 40Mb 8086 8 0 11200
The 486 is the newest machine, and also the fastest. On the older
machines you need an adapter to run Worknet through an RS-232 port;
on the 486 it uses the RS-422 port.
The list price includes a "run-time" version of Xenix -- sh, the
usual editors and utilities, but no compilers. For an extra $1000
you get csh, C, lint, etc.
Andy Behrens
Burlington Coat Factory
I had good results with an IBM PC/XT & Mark Williams Co's Coherent.
Also a Compaq with 20M external, same OS. Our cost for the PC/XT was
~$3800 US with printer, for the Compaq ~$2400 US incl hard disk &
controller.
Blessed Be,
Jeff Hull