Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site cornell.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!vax135!cornell!rej From: rej@cornell.UUCP (Ralph Johnson) Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: IBM vs VAX/unix Message-ID: <6738@cornell.UUCP> Date: Mon, 5-Mar-84 08:08:31 EST Article-I.D.: cornell.6738 Posted: Mon Mar 5 08:08:31 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 6-Mar-84 02:39:06 EST References: <571@pucc-h> <6683@cornell.UUCP>, <378@hocda.UUCP> Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Lines: 17 It used to be said "The power of a computer goes up as the square of its price." This was probably due to marketing decisions and not technology, but it is certainly no longer true. VLSI mass production lets anything that can be put on a chip be cheap, thus, a 68000 is cheap (compared to a VAX) while a winchester is not cheap. Thus, processing power costs zero, if it fits on a single chip, and is expensive if it does not. Unfortunately, it is hard to replace disks with processors. :-) Multiuser systems have the added expense of supporting all the security and resource allocation overhead that single user systems do without. Besides, I only want to communicate with others, not share my computer with them. A collection of communicating single user systems is better than a single multiuser system. Ralph Johnson rej@cornell cornell!rej