From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Deutsch@PARC-MAXC@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.works Title: Re: CPU-per-user architectures Article-I.D.: sri-unix.1479 Posted: Mon May 17 12:55:15 1982 Received: Tue May 18 01:17:49 1982 One thing about your figures doesn't make sense to me. If a non-bitmapped terminal has a retail price of $500, then it must cost $125 to make, electronics AND packaging together. How can a diskless workstation have more than 4 times the packaging cost of a terminal, when the package is essentially the same? I think the problem here is that you're comparing apples and oranges -- terminal packages are made in much larger volume than workstation -- but I don't see why they HAVE TO be significantly different. The other thing you aren't doing is allocating any cost for the packaging (or more generally non-electronics cost) of the shared system. Say you get an economy of scale such that the non-electronics cost per user goes down by a factor of 4. (I actually think this is a bit generous, but you know more about this area than I do.) Then the per-user non-electronics cost of the shared system is an additional $500/4, or price of $500/4*4, or $500. This puts the shared system price up to $4000.