peterd@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) (09/21/90)
In article <Fp1nw$62@cs.psu.edu>, melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: > > > Why doesn't NeXT offer machines w/o the 105 Mb drive and sell them for > $500 less? A network of NeXT's would only require the 40 meg hard > drive for swapping on each machine. I think it's still going to be a Well, I would guess that the price difference between a 40Meg and a 100Meg drive is definitely not $500. Besides, you can configure /tmp, as well as swap on the local disk and really cut down on net traffic. That's what we plan to do. (Of course, you can also set up a phantom NFS server to make a chunk of each drive in a lab a "hidden" file system, available only to special users, like, umm, systems staff? Imagine 60 on a net, take 60Meg each, hmmm, 3.6Gig of hidden files! Yup, we have some configuring to do before we put these in service! :-) > hard sell for NeXT on college campus'. The Mac is entrenched(Apple is > hard at work unloading SE's on unsuspecting college students at PSU), > and the PC just won't go away. Besides, the NeXT's are still priced > out of the average college student's market. In fact they are still > priced out of the home user's market. Networks of NeXTs on college > campuses and in corporate America are where they are going to sell, so > the 105 meg. drives won't be needed. I just plain disagree. As memory needs rise, the swap must grow, in the long run you'll be saying "What, only 100 Meg disk! Braindamaged ratzen, fratzen. . ." Enjoy, it wouldn't be that much cheaper. It's that much better. I think they got this one right. - peterd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ " Although botanically speaking a fruit, in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that tomatoes are a vegetable (and thus taxable under the Tariff Act of 1883) because of the way they are usually served. " ref: Smithsonian, August, 1990. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------