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From: phil@unisoft.UUCP (Phil Ronzone)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: IBM vs VAX/unix
Message-ID: <223@unisoft.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Mar-84 17:11:58 EST
Article-I.D.: unisoft.223
Posted: Mon Mar  5 17:11:58 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Mar-84 01:11:22 EST
References: <571@pucc-h>, <6683@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: UniSoft Corp., Berkeley
Lines: 26


>> Microcomputers CAN replace most uses of VAXen.  Not all, of course, and
>> I wouldn't want to replace a VAX with any number of PCs, but there are
>> much more cost effective ways to provide VAX equivalent power than with
>> a VAX.  68000 Unix systems are surprisingly powerful.  I judge the Callan
>> Unistar-100 to be about one fourth the speed of a VAX11/780 for long
>> compiles.  It is about 60% of a VAX for non-floating point computation
>> intensive tasks.  A 68000 with 2 or 4 Meg of memory is probably the cheapest
>> way to run Lisp.
>> ...
>> The major advantage that microcomputers have is that each user can have his
>> own machine.  Every VAX user knows the "it's two in the afternoon and the
>> load factor is too high" blues.  A VAX may beat a Callan at 7 AM, but a
>> Callan will get my job done faster at 3 PM.  While one nroff job saturates
>> a VAX, it takes 10 nroff jobs to saturate 10 microcomputers. (And the jobs
>> will probably finish two to four times as quickly.)
>> ...
>> A major problem with connecting lots of microcomputers together is that it
>> requires lots of unwritten software.....

Just to let y'all know -- here at UniSoft (makers of UniPlus+, our port of
V7, SIII, and SV, to the Callan, among many others) we have BNET running on
UniPlus+. To offload our VAX'en from their ``2:00 blues'', we ship
everything from C compiles to troffs over the Ethernet to one of many 68000
boxes. Rather than add VAX'es, we add 68000 boxes. It is a really economical
way to go.