melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) (02/24/91)
In article <1991Feb17.004210.5827@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
You can buy a 386SX box with VGA and room for 8 MB on the motherboard
for $875. That's big enough to run UNIX, easily. In fact you can probably
get the box, a big disk, and the UNIX license (V.3.2) for the neighborhood
of $2000.
Makes even the base NeXT educational price look sick.
Are we talking about the $3250 68040 NeXT? You're going to need at
least a 25MHz 486 to even be in the ballpark. At a campus computer
fair we had last week, I saw an IBM rep. demoing Word for Windows on
IBM's Model 55SX. I must say a Mac Classic looks faster than what I
saw. NeXT is still a price/performance leader in the
workstation(which is better than pc price/performance, of course). At
least until HP releases their 50mip machines starting at $15,000.
Anyway, let's set record straight, the 68040 smokes the 386(SX) and
68030. It's probably better than the 486 too. Intel's architecture
has always been a generation behind Motorola's.
-Mikepeter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (03/05/91)
In article <9.5G6e#u@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes: > In article <1991Feb17.004210.5827@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > You can buy a 386SX box with VGA and room for 8 MB on the motherboard > for $875. That's big enough to run UNIX, easily. In fact you can probably > get the box, a big disk, and the UNIX license (V.3.2) for the neighborhood > of $2000. > Makes even the base NeXT educational price look sick. > Are we talking about the $3250 68040 NeXT? Yes. > You're going to need at > least a 25MHz 486 to even be in the ballpark. For what? What are you getting the machine for? As a personal UNIX box the NeXTstation is short of the mark: it just doesn't have the disk space for its Mach: it requires something like 30M of virtual memory right out of the box for NeXTstep, plus the operating system executables and all the bitmaps and there's not damn much left of that 100M disk. > At a campus computer > fair we had last week, I saw an IBM rep. demoing Word for Windows on > IBM's Model 55SX. Two mistakes in one sentence. I could care less for windows: I'm talking about your basic UNIX box. Not quite so dependent on the crappy VGA display. I'm also talking decent clones, not IBM junk. > Anyway, let's set record straight, the 68040 smokes the 386(SX) and > 68030. It's probably better than the 486 too. Intel's architecture > has always been a generation behind Motorola's. That's why the 486 has been out for months, and the 68040 is just beginning to show up? The 486 and 040 are about the same speed integer, and the 040 is faster for floats. Ever since the 386 came out Motorola has been playing leapfrog with intel. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.