richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) (11/06/90)
In article <2828@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes: >| If this happens (and of course, we've all been looking forward to it >| for some time now...) it could greatly open up the market for unix >| workstations. > Right. Just like MINIX did, Coherent did, etc. Neither MINIX nor Coherent are (or, as far as I know, claim to be) "industrial-strength" modern unixes. I don't think the comparison makes much sense. > You can't get a workstation >size performance (ie. enough resolution and CPU to run X) for less than >$4k, and you have to build it yourself to do it. Really? You can get a 33MHz 386 with 200Mb disk, 8Mb RAM, and 1024x768 colour screen for under 3000 pounds here, and I would have expected US prices to be lower. That's quite a powerful machine. It should certainly be possible to run a reasonable unix on a 386sx with 80Mb of disk - after all, that's more powerful than Sun 2s which ran X useably (lack of memory was usually the problem, rather than CPU). Processors, memory and disk are all getting cheaper at present. I would expect that within a year it will be possible to but a machine on which unix and X can run quite adequately for around 1000 pounds. At that stage, whether the OS costs 700 pounds or zero makes all the difference. As to reliability, my experience is that GNU software is better supported (in terms of real fixes, rather than someone at the end of a phone saying helpfully "no you can't do that" or "yes we'll be fixing that in the next release which will only cost you 100 pounds and be available in June") than the commercial software I've used. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed AI Applications Institute, ARPA: R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Edinburgh University. UUCP: ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin