cornish@mprvaxa.UUCP (06/17/83)
We had the occasion to use a IBM PC running Coherent for a week. It is basic V7 compatible (icheck, dcheck, ncheck, cc, nroff, yacc, lex), and has the bourne shell. The operating system and utilities are all unix emulators, having been written entirely from scratch. The minimum configuration to use it is 256k memory and a hard disk. About 2 Mbyte of the hard disk will be used by the operating system. A scaled down version can be created to use 256k memory and a floppy, although the main use of this configuration is to fix severe hard disk errors. In terms of speed, a single-user PC runs at about 1/10 the speed of a single user Vax 11/780. However, during the day when our 780 is under load, we had timed the PC at 22 sec., versus the 780 at 96 sec., to do a nroff job. The big advantage of a PC appears to be the predictable performance. You are not impacted by how many other users there are, and what they are doing. The big disadvantage is that you will never get the performance of a Vax 780, even if you are the only person working. For further info, I suggest you contact: Mark Williams Company Chicago, Ill (312) 472-6659