SHOLAR@CMU-CS-C.ARPA (11/02/83)
A small number of the Sritek boards are in use by CMU people. The reason more aren't installed is delayed delivery of XT's from IBM last spring and summer (but plenty are here now) as well as a long response time from Sritek when new boards are ordered. CMU has standardized on three configurations of IBM-based personal computers for the short term: (1) Standard PC with 192k RAM, 2 DD/DS drives, mono board, asynch board, MINCE, Scribble, and DOS 2.0; (2) Standard XT with 256k RAM, Hercules graphics board, plus above software; (3) XT with above plus Sritek coprocessor (with its own 512k RAM) and Xenix. The existing Sritek boards on campus are being used by people who are developing applications on the XT; there is not today significant use of the Sritek hardware and software by others on campus, largely due to lack of suitable "canned" applications. I expect 100 boards will be in use here by Christmas, and maybe 1000 by summer. (With Sritek shipping the 16032 board and Berkeley Unix this month, I don't expect us to have only the 68000 flavor of coprocessor.) -------