coleman@sdcsvax.UUCP (Don Coleman) (06/26/84)
The Institute for Cognitive Science here at UCSD has started a new project. The project is to modify a group of around 70 IBM-pc's to run unix as diskless work-stations for an introductory Pascal programming course, over a 1 Mbit/sec Omninet. We currently are evaluating XENIX as a possible version of unix to use, and we are interested in evaluating various others. What we would like to know is: a) What versions of unix exist(in all its various flavors, v7-4.2bsd) for the IBM-pc? I already know about pc/ix, xenix, idris, coherent and venix. b) What are the advantages of one version over the others, in terms of supported utilities and enhancements like csh and termcap? I already have a fair idea of the comparison between xenix and pc/ix, both through the available literature and through a couple articles already submitted to the net, but how about the others? c) Some sort of comparison of the performance characteristics of the various systems. The work-stations are limited to around 256K. We would like to use pc's as file servers also, but they would have to serve many disc requests fast! d) Is there anything we can strip out to make them run faster? These will be single user work-stations, things like cron and uucp are not really required. e) Is source available for a reasonable fee, keeping in mind that we already have 4.2, and possibly other, source licenses? The need for source is basicly to enable us to install our own device drivers, so this could be solved just by the availability of the proper .o and .h modules, plus some sort of skeleton device driver layouts. f) How do we go about getting evaluation copies? We already have an evaluation copy of XENIX, through the grace of the Santa Cruz Operation. f) What sort of pascal compilers are available? What we need is a very fast compiler, but we could care less about the quality of produced code. I will summarise all responses in a few weeks to net.micro.ibm-pc. I would greatly appreciate any help anyone could give us. Thanks, -- Don sdcsvax!coleman@berkeley.arpa [ ihnp4|decvax|ittvax|ucbvax ]!sdcsvax!coleman.uucp -- --- don "The Back to Hack Kid" coleman@sdcsvax.ucsd sdcsvax!coleman@berkely.arpa [ ihnp4|decvax|ittvax|ucbvax ]!sdcsvax!coleman.uucp