campbell@maynard.BSW.COM (Larry Campbell) (02/19/88)
From article <3330@killer.UUCP>, by elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green): > Well, I did a similiar cost comparison some time ago. A decent Sun or DEC > system, with Unix, came out at about $12,000 for a usable system. A 286 clone > with 4 serial ports & Microport Sys V would have come out at about $3500 at > the same time. Current 386 prices are running about $1500 more than 286 > prices, so add it up... around $5,000 for a quite reasonable Unix system. Of > course it doesn't have the graphics of a Sun, or the support of a MicroVAX. ... etc. Get serious. No businessperson in his or her right mind is going to entrust their critical applications to a clone running Micropork or anything else. Why? Because after you've farted around trying to get the goddamn thing to work, and to diagnose it when it breaks, you've wasted so much precious time that you could have purchased a real machine and saved yourself a giant headache. I made the mistake about eighteen months ago of buying a clone with Micropork for general text processing and mail. The clone ran PC-DOS just fine. Wouldn't run Micropork. A week after I took delivery, the clone manufacturer went belly up. Fortunately, they had made arrangements to have support picked up by the motherboard's manufacturer (an apparently reputable one, as these things go). They had no idea why Micropork wouldn't run, but they did say my board was an old rev, maybe I should have it upgraded. The upgrade did the trick -- Micropork finally installed. Then I got to discover all the bugs in Micropork (to be fair, many of them were AT&T's fault, like the almost totally non-working C compiler). Oh, I forgot backups. Forget it. You can't get real tape drives for a clone, or at least not with a Micropork driver. Or maybe you can if you scrutinize the back pages of UNIX Review long enough. Wonderful, now I have about six different vendors to deal with (motherboard, clone box, hard disk maker, Micropork, tape drive maker, tape drive driver vendor), and when things don't work they all point fingers at each other and my goddamned system is useless and pretty soon I'm out of business. Now, if you need a CHEAP system for fooling around at home, this is all OK. But it's irresponsible to run a business on this kind of basis. You can NOT afford to have your business stop while you try to debug some frankenstein's monster of a system. It is far cheaper to just buy a system from a SINGLE VENDOR who can fix the damn thing when it breaks (they ALL break sooner or later), and one that supports REAL backup devices. Notice that I didn't even mention the networking facilities that VAXes and Suns have that the PC-based Unices completely lack (uucp? get serious...) or the ridiculously slow serial I/O on PCs, or the Micropork serial driver that panics whenever you type faster than 300 baud at it... -- Larry Campbell The Boston Software Works, Inc. Internet: campbell@maynard.bsw.com 120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109 uucp: {husc6,mirror,think}!maynard!campbell +1 617 367 6846