sean@petvax.medcor.mcgill.ca (Sean Marrett) (06/18/91)
I've just been made aware of what, to my naive ears sounds like a great deal. Apparently, it is possible to acquire diskless Sun 3/50 w. 19in Mono. monitors, and 4Mb of memory, (no floating point co-processor) for a very good price (between $600.00-700.00 US). This, to me sounds like an ideal platform for Seth Robertson's Xkernel - which apparently gives nice Xserver performance. We have had local discussions about the relative merits of getting Xterminals vs other alternatives, and the pricing that we have done seemed to indicate that a good 19in mono Xterminal, with a good university discount would still cost us about $3500.00 x 0.6 = $2100.00. As this is about a 3.25/1 cost advantage, I would appreciate hearing horror stories or c riticisms of this - by the way, the 600-700.00 price includes a 6 month warranty. No floating point coprocessor though ( which doesn't bother me - should it ?). I'm a bit concerned that these machines will be hosted by an SGI machine, rather than a Sun, but I do have access to a Sun 680X0 arch machine to get the executable files ready. Please e-mail any comments, criticisms etc. If there is enough interest, I will post a summary (discretely edited to remove the names of the innocent). Thanks. Sean Marrett Positron Imaging Labs Montreal Neurological Institute sean@petvax.medcor.mcgill.ca neuro@mcrcim.mcgill.ca