dave@safari.UUCP (dave munroe) (06/10/86)
In regard to several recent articles about the UNIX PC's performance and sales... The benchmark results reported in the May 1986 issue of Byte were comparable to my results (these benchmarks originally appeared in Byte, August 1984, with a correction to 'pipe' in January 1985). In relation to other machines in the tests, it consistently ranked above the Altos 986, and about half the time above the VAX 750. I believe its single-user performance exceeds that of the 750 (single user). The only test that I've personally been able to do between them is the running of the "Dhrystone" benchmark on the UNIX PC (giving a value of 861) and then on a VAX 11/750 (running VMS at priority 31 (top), single user) to get, at best, 845. Despite the differences in operating system (which shouldn't matter to Dhrystone), I would think that a single-user 750 at top real-time priority should do better (...well, you know what they say about the Microvax II -- it's a 750 with all the NOP's taken out of the microcode :-). Yes! The UNIX PC should have been offered to the universities -- with its developement tools it would have been wonderful. I think the main problem with the machine was lack of advertising (and once the decision had been made to aim it at the business market rather than engineers (probably a mistake) it did not have "enough" software to attract the business market - apparently you *do* need 20 different spreadsheet programs :-). Only recently have I seen ads for the UNIX PC in COMPUTER DESIGN and in BYTE. Whereas AT&TAGE, UNIX/WORLD, and UNIX REVIEW gave some initial coverage to the machine, most of 1985 passed with hardly any mention of the machine. In BYTE, AT&T had ads about long-distance phone service and about UNIX in general. By contrast, TV is full of Charlie IBM and even the most obscure of specialized trade journals will show some geologist or traffic engineer doing his job and, in the background there is -you guessed it- an IBM PC AT. Although I think the machine is wonderful and it "sold itself" to me, a $5500 - $7500 machine needs a lot more market visibility than it got. -dave P.S. a grateful "thank you" to those at bellcore!ihlpl in answering my previous questions regarding the "pop-up" call screen. "The move byte to a resistor is unique among the byte instructions..." -excerpt from the PDP-11/10 computer manual