kdh (12/17/82)
Having previously ignored this group since I had no vested interest, I
now find myself paying the price. I have a friend who is considering
purchasing an IBM PC. He asked me to send out feelers as to recommendations.
Should he? (I'm sure that since you're reading this, you'll say yes.)
More specifically, what does it have going for it that makes it better
than other small systems? Is there lots/a reasonable amount/not much
software/software support out there? How about languages? The
application for which this beast is intended is non-real time data
base crunching, with fairly large data bases (100K+) which can
be modularized to fit diskette constraints, if necessary. Any
random comments? All would be appreciated.
I know that I am asking for a repeat of information which has already
been hashed out over the net, so please respond by mail to me, to
keep the general band width down.
"Thanks in advance", as they say in net.land,
Kevin Hunter
houti!kdh
{houxg, houxe}!houti!kdhtom (01/04/83)
Friends and countrymen. Put this in the "I didn't think I needed to
know but..." message category. A local entrepreneur wishes me to write some pc
software, in return for which he plans to buy me a pc. Any help on the following
will be greatly appreciated.
1. It appears that one gets the most bang for the buck by getting a bare
bones pc (16K, color board, no drives) from IBM and adding on. My current plans
include Tandon DD/DS drives with a Maynard controller, a C-Itoh prowriter, a
Princton graphic RBG color monitor , and an Alpha-byte 256K memory board
w/RS232. Any comments, recommendations, or warnings about any of the above or my
intended suppliers ("The Computer Line" in Colorado and Alpha-byte of Cal.)?
2. I seem to remember a communications program in Basic appearing in
this newsgroup a few months ago. Does anyone have a copy that they could send
me?
3. What experiences have people had with the various C compilers
available?
4. The software I'm writing should hopefully be runable on different
pc configurations (64k-up; 1 drive-up; b/w,composite,or high-res color monitor).
Any words-from-the-wise on methods of achieving this? I'll initially be writing
in compiled Basic, with graphics no fancier then bar graphs.
5. Can basic (interpreted or compiled) access all 256K?
Thanks in advance. Please mail responses to me directly and, if there is
any demand, I will digestify.
Thanks again,
Tom N.
mcnc!idis!tom or decvax!idis!tom or floyd!idis!tom