crimmins@csli.Stanford.EDU (Mark Crimmins) (06/29/89)
A byte for your thoughts: I have been spoiled as a grad student with easy access to Suns, Nexts, Macs and various HP and Xerox toys. I've become addicted to emacs, and latex in particular (nothing terribly fancy, I know). Now that I'm moving on -- to Cornell, where humanities faculty seem to have less easy computer access, what I want to find is a set-up with a laser printer that will let me use those tools for writing papers, books and so on, with the kind of customizability, flexibility (including multitasking) and potential net-ability I'm used to from unix systems. I want the flexibility, but I don't want to spend an enormous amount of time supporting the thing. So I was wondering whether any of you could recommend a reliable set-up you've used that would fit the bill for a writer. I expect that a used workstation, or maybe a unix 386 box would be nice, but tell me if you think otherwise. A NeXT box would be great, but I'm hoping I can do it for less $. I need, in particular: a system that can run emacs and latex, a terminal or screen that can handle a long text window for editing, enough fast storage to keep all the programs, fonts and text that I'll be working on (I expect 80 megs would do me for a while), a laser or similar quality printer that wouldn't be *heavily* used (<100 pages a week), and needn't give publication quality output, but something reasonably fast, suitable for latex fonts and better than the usual dot matrix stuff. I would very much appreciate any suggestions (as would several other folks I know). I'll post a summary of responses. BTW, please tell me if this query would be more appropriate for a different newsgroup. Thanks, Mark crimmins@csli.stanford.edu