jsl@cup.portal.com (John S Labovitz) (10/28/89)
I've been looking at various Unixes for a couple of weeks now, and have narrowed it down to either Interactive's 386/ix or Everex's ESIX. I was wondering if anyone had any comments on comparing the two systems. First, some background: This will be running on some type of 20mhz 386 machine with 4mb RAM, a large hard disk, tape drive, 8-port I/O card (have not decided between intelligent and dumb) -- a pretty standard machine. No graphics needed yet, but X may be used in the future. The purpose of the machine will be a public access Unix site and a development machine. There will probably be three 2400 baud modems, a Trailblazer, a PostScript printer, and possibly a 19.2k baud terminal attached to the machine. ESIX is attractive mostly because of the low price -- $1150 for the whole system (with manuals), versus over $3000 for the equivalent in 386/ix. However, I'm not yet going to be using X or TCP/IP (which are included in ESIX), so the actual cost difference is more like $1150 versus $1445. (This is all from the current price lists.) One thing I noticed about ESIX is the absolute lack of troff/ntroff. Everex says they don't even have a version planned. This is a problem, but not a large one -- I have a Mac, so I'm not planning on using Unix for text processing, but I can't even print out manual pages! (That is, if they even came with the system, which they apparently don't on either ISC or ESIX; I'm talking more about USENET software man pages and the like.) I've talked to ELAN Computer Group in Mountain View about their EROFF, but $895 is a lot of money just to print man pages. Are there any other companies that sells a troff/nroff for cheaper? (I just thought of something - - ISC sells their text processing package for $345. Would that work?) Or is there any public domain or shareware nroff clone? Is there anything major missing from ESIX? With a price so much lower than their competitors, I feel a bit hesitant. I don't want to end up having to pay a lot more later. Any help would be appreciated. Unless you think it's important for everyone right now, please mail your replies to "xylo@barn.com" (which is *not* what you'll get if you just reply to this message!). I will summarize. --John Labovitz * Domain: xylo@barn.com / jsl@cup.portal.com * UUCP: ...!pacbell!mslbrb!sly!xylo * Phone: 707/823-2919 * USPS: P.O. Box 523, Graton, CA 95444