garey@ut-ngp.UUCP (07/20/84)
I saw the Dimension demonstrated here in Austin, Texas a few months back at a user's group meeting. It seems pretty nice but is very expensive ( > $5000) and you have to buy an emulator board for each computer you want to emulate. The CP/M-80 emulator has a Z80 on it and was set to run Kaypro software from Kaypro disks with no modifications. Most o f the people there had kaypros and I saw several people put in their own Kaypro disks and run Perfect Writer and Wordstar etc with no problems. I also saw people put in their own Apple disks when the Apple emulator was running (again this is a separate board) and run a bunch of fancy games, again with no problems. The rep also showed the IBM emulator running and said it ran most of the stuff such as Lotus 1-2-3, but had a few problems with Microsoft's flight simulator. In its native mode, the machine is a 68000 based machine running CP/M-68K. The rep said Unix was supposed to be ready by the end jof the year, but he thought it would actually be much later. I can't remember exactly, but I think when the machine is running under emulation mode the 68000 handles all the I/O while everything else goes to the processor on the emulator board. The boards were I think close to $1000 each. The boards all plug into a proprietry bus. The machine is available locally here in Austin, I've spoken to the dealer about it several times. The rep at this meeting was the companies head sales honcho, and his presentation was obviously originally set up to impress investors in the company, not user's. I was inmpressed with the machine-I've been looking for a 68K based machine with UNIX, but I don't think its what I'm looking for. Its only advantage is the emulation. For the price of the boards you can buy a Kaypro, or Apple anyway. Also, they'll be so busy trying to support so many different operating systems on the thing I have my doubts when and if they'll get and properly support UNIX. Jim Garey garey@ut-ngp.arpa