haapanen@watdcsu.UUCP (Tom Haapanen [DCS]) (02/01/85)
< ... > Subsequent to the information I received in response to my questions abut UNIX for the PC/XT and PC/AT, I did some shopping around in Toronto yesterday. The amazing thing is that all these computer stores at least now recognize the word 'UNIX'. Not so a few years back. Computerland says the PC/AT is not available right now, and they don't know when it will be. IBM Product Centre says "Yes, they are available, but we don't know when we will get some, or how many." I.e., they don't have any either. AT XENIX is supposedly having problems, and nobody knows when it will be out. "There's still two months left in the first quarter..." says the IBM salesman. Several stores offered Lisas with 15M of hard disk and SCO XENIX for *very* good prices. Alas, Lisa hard disks are *slow*. However, to quote a Lisa salesman: "The Lisa blows the PC out of the water, and is still much faster than a PC/AT." Right. The Xerox store offered a Compaq Deskpro with UNIX. "Is that XENIX," I asked. "Well, what do you want, UNIX or XENIX?" I was asked. She had no idea what the UNIX was except that it came "directly from AT&T". That's the first I have heard of AT&T doing a port onto the 8086. In any case, using an 8086 with three users did not appeal to me. The last, and most productive, stop was at (surprise!) the Radio Shack Computer Centre. Model 16Bs were being sold dirt-cheap, as they are being replaced by the Tandy 6000. This new machine still runs a 68000, but at 8 MHz instead of 6 MHz. It also allows much more memory (using 256K chips), and more serial ports. It comes with XENIX 3.0 instead of the old XENIX 1.3. To quote an internal document: "After a brief appearance ... IBM has indicated that the AT is experiencing some difficulty running XENIX 3.0 and will return to the marketplace again 'sometime during the second quarter of 1985.' The 6000 will come with XENIX 3.0 and the capability of running with nine users as opposed to the AT's three." The prices are also down --- $8000 with a 15 Meg disk (that's about $5500-6000 US) and the 16B's can be upgraded. Comments? \tom haapanen university of waterloo (519) 885-1211 x2324 allegra \ clyde \ \ decvax ---- watmath --- watdcsu --- haapanen ihnp4 / / linus / The opinions herein are not those of my employers, of the University of Waterloo, and probably not of anybody else either.