haapanen@watdcsu.UUCP (Tom Haapanen [DCS]) (09/12/84)
I am somewhat disappointed in the new AT. I saw it, and came away
not-so impressed. Here are some of my gripes:
- It is being sold as a *single-user* system. Xenix will not be
available (according to the IBM hotline) until early 1985, and the IBM
sales literature doesn't even *mention* the fact that you might be
able to have multiple users!
- It's slower than I thought. I'm told it'll work with up to three
(!) users, and the iAPX 286 is *up to* two or three times as fast as
the 8088. I interpret this as saying it's, on the average, maybe
twice as fast. Would you want three users, each with 33% less power
than a normal PC? And the 287 chip is (say the rumours) not much
faster than an 8087...
- The disk is not very big. 20 Meg may be big for micro standards,
but even two of those (the max) for 40 Meg is not very big by Unix
standards.
It's now several years since Radio Shack introduced the Model 16.
That one handles three users and runs Xenix. So what's the big deal
about the AT?
Tom Haapanen
{allegra,decvax,ihnp4,utzoo}!watmath!watdcsu!haapanen
The opinions above are certainly not those of my employer, and
possibly not even mine...jim@randvax.UUCP (Jim Gillogly) (09/23/84)
----- Although the blurb you saw might not have made an issue of Xenix running multiple users on the AT, it will. I saw an AT at the Dallas announcement meeting running Xenix, and it had two PCs running off of its serial ports as terminals. 3 is the limit for now - I guess that's a limitation on the number of serial ports. However, the Xenix comes with a user license for 16 users (if you want to run that many on an 80286). Jim Gillogly