Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!vaxine!wjh12!genrad!decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!akgua!mcnc!ecsvax!ctk
From: ctk@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro,net.arch,net.followup
Subject: What's in a 3b2?
Message-ID: <2680@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Jun-84 05:41:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2680
Posted: Thu Jun  7 05:41:41 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 13-Jun-84 04:55:30 EDT
Lines: 34

This morning I attended a sales presentation given by ATT at TUCC*. The
object was to sell us all 3b2's. The machine (at least the $10,000 model)
comes with .5M of ram, a 10M hard disk, and a 720k floppy. The operating
system is a subset of System V UNIX (trademarks ... etc.). A simple
floating point benchmark was run on the machine and it looks considerably
slower on floats than an IBM PC with an 8087, a Sage II, and many other
boxes that sell for half the price or less. Languages cost about $300-$400
extra. No programming language at all comes with the machine.
	I asked if hardware floating point support was available and was
told that it was not (even for the larger 3b5) but they were thinking
about it. For floating point work it looks like we're all better off with
8087 equipped IBM PC's .
	I asked one of the ATT people if he could tell me a little about
the architecture of the 32000 processor. He said that he couldn't tell
me anything about the architecture, instruction set, etc. as a matter
of ATT policy. He also said that he had not been told that this would
ever change. It seems to me that this is insane. Who (certainly not me)
would ever buy a computer whose innards were top secret? Maybe they're
trying to sell these things as dedicated word processors. As to the 3b5
and larger machines, will anyone buy a $100K+ mini with top secret
architecture? I was pretty disappointed in the 3b2 but was even more
disappointed in this policy of secrecy. Is this why no details of the
WE32000 processors appear in net.arch?

		* TUCC is a local computer center.




    C.T. Kelley
    Dept. of Math.
    N.C. State U.
    Raleigh, N.C. 27650
    decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!ctk