buckley@dalcs.UUCP (A. Buckley) (01/05/84)
H E L P !! I have recently been shopping for a micro, and I am having trouble evaluating all the possibilities. Some assistance would be greatly appreciated, since my experience is much more with mainframes than it is with micros. To be more specific, I am currently considering as prime candidates: 1. the HP 9816 (=216) with 512K and Pascal 2.1 OS and 5 or 15 MB disc; 2. Lisa with 1MB and 5 MB disk; 3. the DEC PRO-350 with 512 K and 15 MB disc and Professional OS. These should give a good idea of my price range: here in Halifax it seems to be about $12000-$15000 Canadian. My requirements: It MUST have full Fortran 77; it would be nice to have UNIX available since we have a VAX running UNIX here in the department; it MUST be able to transfer files to and from the UNIX VAX, and it would be nice to be able to do it with a Cyber running NOS; it must have a good full screen editor; and (although this is of course not really important) my children are adamant --they insist!-- that it should have all games available on a Commodore 64! I wish to use it for scientific program development (with a mainframe available for serious stuff) and for document preparation and text processing. General advice is welcome...but I have some specific questions. 1. HP: is it limited to 64K programs as someone suggested..that seems unreasonable from what I know of the 68000. Comments on the Fortran 77 from IEM? Is a third party UNIX available? HP does not seem to have UNIX at this price level. Is software availability limited with Pascal 2.1? 2. Lisa: Lisadraw, Lisacalc etc. seem impressive enough. Can third party UNIX be found? At what price? Is Lisa as slow as some have suggested? Is there a Fortran 77 available somewhere? Will it soon be possible to run other Apple software on Lisa? Are bigger disks than the 5MB available which are compatible...that would seem essential for UNIX? 3. PRO 350: Is there UNIX available? Are programs limited to the 32K address space of the 11? What about software availability, esp. Fortran 77? I have heard that the PRO is very slow...has that been solved? Thanks in advance for any advice which can help me avoid making a dumb! choice. If anyone else would like a summary of whatever comments I receive, pls let me know at dartvax!dalcs!buckley.