root%bostonu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (BostonU SysMgr) (05/17/85)
Ok, the opinions are coming in, mostly from people who seem to like them. Now two specific questions: Everyone alludes to bad I/O (read: disk) performance, can someone be a little more specific (don't feel you have to give high-quality benchmarks, just some reasonable examples, comparisons, of course, a benchmark would be nice, like if you're the only one on the system maybe write a program to read 1000 blocks and another to write 1000 blocks in a tight loop and just send us the output of the 'time' command.) Second question, does it or does it not support TCP/IP, particularly on ethernet but if it does a list of supported devices would be nice and if it doesn't will it in the near future? Thanks in advance, -Barry Shein, Boston University
craig@loki (Craig Partridge) (05/17/85)
I don't have a MicroVAX II but have some notes from a detailed technical presentation made in the Boston area yesterday. My initial reaction is that it looks very nice, and is competitively priced. The disks are surprisingly slow -- average seek times mentioned were 49ms on the RD52 (31 MB) and 30ms on the RD53 (71MB). I think the moral of the story is get lots of memory (you can get up to 9MB)-- swapping out pages will hurt. They will eventually (in few months or so) have a rackmountable uVAX II with a KDA-50 board (Q-bus version of UDA-50) so you can attach RA-81's. Yes there is TCP/IP, using a DEQNA board. DEC is supporting configurable binary kernels on the uVAX II (I gather they didn't on the uVAX I) and you can put TCP/IP in or leave it out as you wish. One should also note that Ultrix-32M has some minor peices missing because the disks were too small to comfortably fit all of UNIX. They didn't provide a complete list, but here's a partial one. No news, games, or user contributed software. Also, no troff (just nroff) and no eqn. These latter deletions because they say they hadn't found a device to support troff for yet (??!). Oh yes, it comes on 31 floppies, or one cartridge tape (DEC has developed another cartridge tape system). I may have gotten something wrong -- I'm working from notes scribbled as they were throwing information at us. If so, I hope the DEC guys reading this will send out a correction. Craig Partridge craig@bbn-loki (ARPA) craig%loki.arpa@csnet-relay (CSNET) {decvax,ihnp4,wjh12}!bbncca!craig (USENET)
rsp@decvax.UUCP (Ricky Palmer) (05/18/85)
TCP/IP (ala ethernet) is supported. Ricky Palmer - UEG