shepperd@dms.UUCP (Dave Shepperd) (07/22/88)
I have had the opportunity to test both XENIX/386 from SCO and UNIX V rel 3 from Bell Tech. XENIX cost us (my company) $1200 and Unix cost me $290. There were, however, some hidden costs in UNIX that weren't present in XENIX. (FYI: the system under test is a 16Mhz 2Mb/0ws 386 clone). First, you don't get all the manuals with the Bell Tech system so you'll have to run down to your local computer book store and stock up. You can control your costs here by not buying what you don't need. For me, it came to about $50. With Xenix, on the other hand, you get a truck load of manuals in open leaf hard back binders and even though I don't care much for the way they are organized, I appreciate that everything is there. Second, you can't get UNIX to even load onto your system with less than 2.5Mb of memory regardless of what the salesman or System admin guide says. I can testify (and Bell Tech support will confirm) that 2.0Mb is not enough. (It will get stuck while creating the disk partition table then fail with an error message: too many processes). In my case, my memory board had 2.0Mb which was all it could hold. There's only 1 32 bit slot in my system so I would have had to buy a daughter board and stuff it with another 2Mb (the memory could be 1, 2 or 4Mb but not 2.5 or 3). At current prices, that would have been another $1000 or so. I could have bought a new 4.0Mb memory board (uses 1Mbit chips) for about $700 and I may still do that. In the meantime, I've borrowed a 0.5Mb memory board that plugs into a 16 bit slot (6MHz) which allowed the install to succeed, however, running programs on the system in this configuration is very slow. How slow? They run about as fast as they do on a 10Mhz 286 PC, or roughly 1/5 as fast as they do on Xenix/386 (and probably UNIX too, in a more normal configuration). Needless to say, this is unacceptable. If your system has a cache, you may be able to do this and not notice a slowdown. In contrast, Xenix will install and run with 1Mb of memory, however, programs that need more than about 128k will page fault heavily. Two megabytes leaves lots of room for user processes. Third, neither of the stock dumb PC/AT serial ports that I have on my system work under UNIX. They work just fine with MS-DOS and with XENIX. I believe that Bell Tech serial boards are required (at undoubtly $100's of dollars). This is also unacceptable, since at the minimum I expected to be able to plug my ASCII terminal and a modem into the system. The conclusion: Yeah, it's cheap to buy Unix from Bell Tech, but I'm not convinced it's a deal. If you also have to buy lots of memory for your system and serial interface boards from a single vendor at, lets us say, not necessarily the best prices, you may not have saved any money. With Xenix, at least in my experience, it works right out of the box in a 1Mb system (although slow, it doesn't bomb) and you get a number of Berkley utilities in addition to all the normal Unix stuff. Neither XENIX from SCO nor UNIX from Bell Tech is without problems (some of my C programs that compiled successfully on VAX C, GreenHills C and MicroSoft C 5.0 broke the Xenix and Unix C compilers with "internal error, abort" type errors). I've switched back to MS-DOS on my system at home until I can psyche myself up to spend the money for more memory. -- Dave Shepperd. shepperd@dms.UUCP or weitek!dms!shepperd Atari Games Corporation, Sycamore Drive, Milpitas CA 95035. (Arcade Video Game Manufacturer, NOT Atari Corp. ST manufacturer).
pzl@hjuxa.UUCP (Pete Lega) (07/28/88)
In article <475@dms.UUCP>, shepperd@dms.UUCP (Dave Shepperd) writes: > [ info on bell tech SVR3] ... > Second, you can't get UNIX to even load onto your system with less than > 2.5Mb of memory regardless of what the salesman or System admin guide says. With mucho typing you CAN get a 2Mb system to load, (you have to partially run the install script, and manually run portions of it.) then reconfigure a kernel without a lot of extraneous drivers, which will boot, run, and support a reasonable 2 user load. I've done it. The problem with 2 Mb, is that there is no swap on the boot floppy, and you are limited to 2 user processes because of no swap. If you want specifics, mail me.