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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