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