grunwald@uiucdcsb.UUCP (08/29/84)
#N:uiucdcsb:4400072:000:1691 uiucdcsb!grunwald Aug 29 10:36:00 1984 Just a note about the PC/AT. I worked for IBM in Boca this summer and used the AT most of the time. Once you use the AT, you tend to avoid PC's or XT's. As far as I can tell, none of this violates my non-disclosure agreement. The disk bandwidth is much higher, making UNIX a reality on the machine. XENIX, while not the worlds best version of UNIX, does run on the AT and at a reasonable speed. Currently, there are few IBM programs available under XENIX, but companies such as Lotus and Ashton-Tate say that they have been writing all their applications with ports to UNIX in mind, so that one could expect to see a fair amount of software supported soon. The system I was using (I was using a dialup -- it is truely multi-user) didn't have any compilers or text processor, so I was unable to run any timing tests on it. For $6000 U.S. this seems like a reasonable, inexpensive XENIX machine. The AT CPU is at least 2-3 times the speed of the PC, and the faster disk gives it a faster overall repsonse than the increase CPU time would seem to indicate. The LAN that they've introduced is a 2Mb ring net (or so I was told). Software for it will not be introduced until early '85 or late '84. The 3.1 version of DOS is for the LAN support. At the announce, they mentioned that they are looking into gateways and interfaces for connection to the IBM cabling system which was previously announced. Topview, their window package, is rather well constructed. It sucks down memory like all git out, but the interfaces seem to be fairly well done. Tools are provided to quickly construct "plates" and "windows". Each task can have more than one window and the tasks are definitly concurrent.