BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (08/05/83)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> We just took delivery of a Faraday Electronics IBM-PC compatible motherboard. Single quantity price is $500. Quantity discounts can bring the price down to $250, but Faraday's idea of quantity is 10K boards per month. The board is a superset of IBM-PC motherboard in that it contains two asynchronous ports and a printer port. The board is about the same size as the IBM board but gains a lot of space by using 16K EPROMS and getting rid of the cassette port. It comes with 64K RAM installed but is expandable to 256K. There are 5 expansion slots compatible with the IBM-PC. There is no BASIC in the ROM but the BIOS supports the Async port if the switches are set to no display. There is also a provision for a reset button, a feature sorely lacking in the PC. For anyone out there who is into roll-your-own PCs this looks like a pretty cheap way to get started. Faraday Electronics operates on a cash in advance basis and took about two weeks to deliver. The profit margins on this sort of product can't be much. Faraday Electronics 1029 Corporation Way Palo Alto, CA 94303 (415) 961-0600 rice Unix MS-DOS Multi- Hard disk Applic support user support Features ------- ------- ----- ---- ------- ------ --------- -------- Mark Williams Coherent $500 V7 None +$300 XT Ethernet 1430 W Wrightwood corvus support Chicago IL 60616 Davong 312 472-6656 Tecmar Whitesmiths Idris $1100 V6 File xfr yes XT Screen 97 Lowell Rd edit Concord MA 01742 DBMS 617-369-8499 8087 sup Sritek micro- $2695 sys 3 file acc $300 Any Multi 3637 S Green Rd card 512K [nt]roff plan Cleve OH 44122 216 526-9433 Quantum Softw Sys QNX $650 V7 file xfr 16 usr Davong Comm 7219 Shea Ct Genie Word Pr San Jose CA 95139 Tecmar 8087 sup 408 629-0402 XT Lantech Sys Inc uNETix $298 V7 emulation fall 83 none 8087 sup 9861 Chartwell Dr Dallas TX 75243 214 340-3904 VenturCom Venix $400 sys 3 file xfr Yes Davong Sunburst 139 Main St XT RM/Cobol Cambridge MA 02142 8087 sup 617 661-1230 COHERENT is the oldest and has ethernet support. It also includes lex and yacc. IDRIS runs on lots of machines (vax >> 8080) and is very portable. System call compatible with Version 6, and is much smaller. nroff/troff are $200 extra each. MICRO-CARD is a 68000 with 512K of memory. Expensive, but fast. QNX (alias QUNIX) supports full 1M of memory. V7 compatible. $650 for cc, screen editor, word processor, RAM disk support. Designed for the PC, support for windowing promised. UNETIX has full MS-DOS emulation. Up to 10 windows can be defined each running a separate process. (In the body of the article, they say it is only $99, but the above table says $299 (?)). Claims to run MS-DOS programs faster than MS-DOS due to the Unix buffering system (reducing disk access). No hard disks, though (aargh!) and only single user. Real winner when hard disks/multiuser happens. VENIX is based on original Bell Labs Code. Optimized for size, speed, and reliability. Version on the PDP11 kernel is only 45K, about half of normal. It has DBMS system, graphics post-processor, and FinalWord. MS-DOS emulation underway. Not currently available except to *qualified* users -- software development types. IBM is teaching UNIX on the PCs to its employees using Venix. Lars Nyland ...{duke|mcnc}!lsn ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 1983 1627-PDT To: INFO-IBMPC From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> Subject: Faraday PC Motherboard We just took delivery of a Faraday Electronics IBM-PC compatible motherboard. Single quantity price is $500. Quantity discounts can bring the price down to $250, but Faraday's idea of quantity is 10K boards per month. The board is a superset of IBM-PC motherboard in that it contains two asynchronous ports and a printer port. The board is about the same size as the IBM board but gains a lot of space by using 16K EPROMS and getting rid of the cassette port. It comes with 64K RAM installed but is expandable to 256K. There are 5 expansion slots compatible with the IBM-PC. There is no BASIC in the ROM but the BIOS supports the Async port if the switches are set to no display. There is also a provision for a reset button, a feature sorely lacking in the PC. For anyone out there who is into roll-your-own PCs this looks like a pretty cheap way to get started. Faraday Electronics operates on a cash in advance basis and took about two weeks to deliver. The profit margins on this sort of product can't be much. Faraday Electronics 1029 Corporation Way Palo Alto, CA 94303 (415) 961-0600 ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 1983 1803-PDT To: INFO-IBMPC From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> Subject: Lotus 1-2-3 Memory Requirements One of the primary uses of the microcomputers has been for spreadsheet programs. The large memory space has made these programs more useful. I have never seen published just how big a spreadsheet can be handled in an IBM-PC fully stuffed with memory. An accountant friend of mine needed this information so he could plan ahead and not run out of memory on April 13th. The following tables are officially unofficially from Lotus and apply to the 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. If you have 320K memory and a cell width of 10: Fill all cells with: Characters (10) = 14,160 Cells Numbers (9) = 18,400 Cells Formulas (simple) = 6,150 Cells If you have 544K memory and a cell width of 10: Fill all cells with: Characters (10) = 28,500 Cells Numbers (9) = 37,600 Cells Formulas (simple) = 12,480 Cells ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 83 21:46:57-PDT (Thu) To: info-ibmpc @ Usc-Isib From: harpo!gummo!whuxlb!mkg @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Word Processing Query My wife is using WordStar in her business and has come to despise it. Having looked at the manuals and played with it a little, I can see why she dislikes it. Yes, it's no nroff, but it does have a habit of going out of its way to make simple tasks time consuming and tedious. Does anybody have experience with other word processing packages for the PC? I'd like to hear what you think about it and why you'd choose it over WordStar. Please respond to me by mail and in a week or so, I'll post a summary of all the comments I get. Thanks in advance. Marsh Gosnell BTL Whippany (201) 386-7095 whuxlb!mkg ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 1983 1807-PDT To: Gene Autrey-Hunley at SRI-KL cc: info-ibmpc at ISIB From: HFISCHER@USC-ECLB Subject: Re: Hard Disk I've been very pleased with the hard disk on my XT. Having worked with Caelus and Diablo's on last generations mini's, it's hard to imagine that this size package is so quiet and fast, and that there is no way to have to open it up for "spring cleaning" and alignment! Its performance for disk-intensive work seems much better than what I expected based on mini performance of the past. Of course, It's not an IBM 3038, but did you want everything? Herm Fischer ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Aug 83 17:47:39 PDT To: info-ibmpc@usc-isib From: Scott Burris <v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS> Subject: 8 Inch Drives Has anyone had any experience with 8 inch drives for the PC? I have a friend who is going to buy 3 of them (PC's that is), and he wants 8 inch floppy disks that can hold 1 meg. (i.e. double sided, double density). Any suggestions, experiences, etc. would be appreciated. Scott... v.burris@UCLA-CS (ARPA) or v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS or ...ucbvax!ucla-vax!burris (UUCP) ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 1983 1921-PDT To: Scott Burris <v.burris@UCLA-LOCUS> cc: info-ibmpc From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> Subject: Re: 8 Inch Drives At ISI and the ARPA office we have 8" drives from Flagstaff Engineering. Flagstaff's strong point is that they make software and hardware that allow you to read just about any format of disk. Our primary goal is to be able to read Displaywriter files. (A Displaywriter is an IBM stand-alone word processor). The Flagstaff software will read display writer files and turn them into Easywriter, Wordstar, or ASCII text files. In addition, we can read just about any format of CP/M, EBCDIC, or whatever disks. These programs are utilities which convert files from the foreign format to normal DOS files. The Flagstaff board is a modified disk controller card. The drive is in an outboard box and uses its own power supply. A ribbon cable connects this box to the modified IBM controller card in the PC. I believe the modifications are exclusively to read and write single density disks so this might not be the route for you. If you are into maximum 8" capacity in DOS format, the Tall Tree JFORMAT program may be the answer. This program will format any 8" drive at various densities. I believe the max is 1.2 MByte. Tall Tree gave us a list of manufacturers but Flagstaff was the only one we contacted due to the Displaywriter capability. As I explained in an earlier INFO-IBMPC, beware of controllers that use digital data separaters! If you are going for double density on 8" disks, the controllers that use digital data separaters may get you into trouble. This is why Flagstaff uses modified IBM controllers. IBM has a custom chip set that does this function in analog logic (analog phase lock loop vs digital phase lock loop). ------------------------------ End of Info-IBMPC Digest ****************************** -------