Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!hocda!houxm!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!sri-unix!MCB@MIT-MC From: MCB%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.works Subject: Unix Workstation query - results. Message-ID: <12046@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Sat, 15-Sep-84 08:27:00 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12046 Posted: Sat Sep 15 08:27:00 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 03:56:32 EDT Lines: 338 From: Michael A. BloomI can't resist. You requested info on PC's running Unix, and I've just got to throw in my two cents worth. Last July, I asked people on works and info-unix what computers they would recommend (or not recommend) as a personal computer. I indicated that I was particularly interested in machines that run Berkeley UNIX (either 4.1, or 4.2). The replies I received are at the end of this article. Missing are those replies that only asked for copies of what others sent. I have also done some slight editing to reduce the size of this summary. This editing consists of header removal, and removal of text extraneous to the subject material ("Please forward your other replies"). Some commentary first: A couple of machines that I received no mail about are the AT&T 3b2 and the DEC MicroVax I. The microvax runs one of the two versions of Ultrix. This version is based upon 4.1BSD, unlike the Ultrix for larger Vaxes, which is based upon 4.2. This machine is of interest to me especially as a DEC rep at the UNIX Systems Expo (This past week in L.A.) informed me that the machine is available under their educational discount plan, which (if I choose the machine) will mean a substantial discount when ordered thru the computer dept. of my school's bookstore. The machine is, however, reputed to be slow, and is not a true VAX; it lacks compatibility mode. This isn't much of a problem, as playing zork is not one of my intended uses. Tho it would be nice to be able to run pdp-11 binaries under compat. The 3b2 seems like a nice machine. I'm waiting for some technical data from ATT, but I'm not likely to buy it as they are unlikely to supply Berkeley Unix in the near future. Now if someone were to sell a port at a reasonable price for it... One thing that bugged me about the AT&T rep's speil is that he kept throwing words at me about how "Berkeley enhancements" are continually being "added" to the system. The same is true for a lot of vendors. MANY of them have literature that touts their UNIX xx system with "{4.1BSD,4.2BSD,Berkeley} enhancements". I was surprised at myself when scanning through the literature from a major mfr. (I forget which it was at the moment - it may have been Honeywell), while watching their windowing demo. I caught the words "4.2 BSD" and until I discovered otherwise shortly afterward, I was believing that this major mfr had a system that might meet my criteria. The wording itself was not misleading, but I believe that it was designed so that one making a quick scan would see something that wasnt there. Several vendor reps have tried to tell me that they've turned their system V port into Berkeley UNIX by "adding the Berkeley paging code". Some asked "what else do you want?". One told me that he couldn't believe that AT&T wouldn't provide a reliable signal mechanism. "I'm sure we have that" was his response. Come to think of it, that may have been the AT&T rep. A friend of mine who works for an oem software house suggested strongly that I wait until the end of the year before buying. He couldn't tell me why (due to non-disclosure agreements), but I trust his judgement. Unless something spectacular appears on the market before then, I'll hold off on making a decision. Here are the replies: >From tektronix!teklds!upvax!bobbyd TRCC demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, in *July, 1979* the prototype of the Perq 1A graphics workstation. In August of that year, I believe, they began production. Keep in mind that these facts I now present are in 1979-80 terms: o a 16-bit, bit-sliced microcoded cpu with 170-nsec microcycle, with 4K writeable control store o ~1-1.2 MIP Pascal performance* o 20-bit physical addresses (1MB dynamic RAM, 680-nsec average cycle), 32-bit virtual addresses o 768 x 1024, 60Hz, non-interlaced b & w portrait display (100 pixels/inch) o Hardware RasterOp, 32Mbits/sec transfer rate o 10Mbit/sec Ethernet (to be fair, it wasn't fully up until arount '81, when my stepdad worked there...) o 24MB Winchester, 1MB DSDD floppy o CVSD speech/audio output hardware *Their Pascal is the greatest programming language I have EVER encountered. It puts today's Modula-2 to tears - modules are BEAUTIFULLY implemented! It has dynamic strings fully supported, and even lets you do C-like bit twiddling with shift() and rotate() and 'and' and 'or' etc. Graphics through rasterop(). The entire operating system accessible through the very modules it was built from! "Ah, so this marvelous machine from the old days...why haven't I heard of it", I hear you cry. Hate to admit this, but they did some things wrong. TRCC has GREAT engineers, but LOUSY management... o They didn't bring up Unix as their primary OS. Look at how big a plus that is NOWadays... o Color. They STILL don't, I believe, have a color machine out. o Software floating point. Um, an engineering work- station that can't do FAST floating point...? o Software development tools. Their Pascal is, as I mentioned, the GREATEST. But they didn't bring up a good debugger, or any kind of SCCS (?) or real development tools. o Standards. They are soon to announce a Multibus adapter. Though I am tremendously proud of their CPU (it's one HOT machine, and is a hacker's dream), they didn't put it on a very accessible bus...so now folks go out and buy a Nu Machine or a Sun and slap just about any peripheral or uprocessor they choose on it... o Advertising. Like I said, they could have had better management (money troubles for a while, but they're pulling out of their slump) Well, if you haven't seen their new ads, here's (finally) Perq 2. I'll note that I saw the prototype of the gate array version of Perq 1 in ~81-82, BEFORE uVax and uPDP-11 and Tower-1632 and MegaFrame and all the skinny lookalikes there are now...(no gate array version - money problems). Anyway, Perq 2 is essentially a souped-up version of P1, but actually lower priced. o 2MB RAM (from 20-bit addresses? I assume they really mean 1Mwords which turns out to be 2Mbytes...dunno) o 1280 x 1024 landscape display optional (100 pixels/in, 60Hz non-IL) o 16K writable control store o Carnegie-Mellon's Accent OS o FORTRAN, C and CommonLisp (Poplog from ICL in Britain?) o up to 288MB Winchester disk internal (faster than the old units @ 30msec) Now, you asked about Unix PC's. Well, I've finally gotten to that. Accent. A damn good hack, if the old CMU folks are still around...(did I mention that Three Rivers Computer (Perq Systems) is in Pittsburgh, PA? Oh, well, my stepfather went to CMU, and I used to hang out there even before I knew him, and he says that they write far better code than the Bezerkeley types...) OOPS! Verbosity! Back to Accent: o The 16K WCS and the great demand for Perq microcoders back when they were hacking Accent as part of CMU's Spice Project makes me want to believe that the Accent kernel is in microcode. THAT means, and if you see the old issue of Byte that showed the Perq 7TH (YES, 7th, AHEAD of ALL the DEC machines benchmarked!) fastest at the Sieve, that Accent SCREAMS! (Like, what if they wrote a Pascal->microcode compiler for that Luscious Pascal?) SCREAMS, as in >5 MIPS... o Well, ATOP the Accent kernel can be Qnix, which is their validated SysV. Or you can have the Lisp environment, or the default Accent shell. Why they never tried SmallTalk on the Perq mystifies me... o INSIDE the Accent kernel is their completely distributed, virtual memory, message passing networking scheme. Now, I'm no wizard, and I've never used or seen or touched Accent. But they claim: Up to 64 windows (viewports); completely transparent networking; icons for window and PROCESS control; completely distributed processing, with automatic distribution of network-wide loads; priority scheduling with pre-emption and aging; demand paging; etc. I'll just end (abruptly) this rambling with Perq Systems Corporation 2600 Liberty Avenue P.O. Box 2600 Pittsburgh, PA 15230 (800)-222-4489 (outside PA) I'd estimate ~$15K for a low-end machine. A bit steep? Maybe if you find out anything from PSC you could let me know...just your impressions should you get a chance to see the machine or some literature... I'm through. Flame off. All that jazz. I notice that my friendly Vax has put 1:52am in my mode line...about time to hit the sack...or better yet... time to play rogue! Hope my flaming wasn't too much of a good thing...good luck with your survey! World B. Free Perq Fanatic ...!ucbvax!tektronix!teklds!upvax ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: Wilkinson@HI-MULTICS.ARPA I am currently trying to get detailed info on NEC's recent Unix/Graphics machine (Advanced PC - III or APC-III). It is 8086 based but has two; one for memory management. Also resolution is great; 600 X 400 on a 14" NEC monitor (colour or mono), with NEC7220 graphics chip. Can partition hardisk to run Unix and MS-DOS. This I gleaned from a news release kit and am looking for more DETAILS from NEC. I am VERY interested in both subjects (Unix and Graphics) on PC's Richard BTW NEC is out in Boxboro MA 264-8000. I am trying to get the details from Steve Abt 264-8128. He is blaming mail for slowness but that is over a month. I think they are still putting documentation together, maybe even the system - it was supposed to start shipping this month. ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: nbires!mccallum@Berkeley (Doug McCallum) I work for NBI and we make a 68010 based workstation which runs 4.2BSD UNIX. The UNIX workstation was just announced this week at NCC. It is a full port of 4.2 with virtual memory, job control, etc. We have our own multiwindow system for the bitmapped display which makes job control less necessary, although it is still there if you want it. The windows are a similar to SUN's in that a process thinks of it as a terminal. I don't remember all the details of the configuration and pricing, but I think it is something like 1 Mbyte memory, 24 Mbyte disk, 4.2BSD, bitmapped display, keyboard and mouse for slightly under $16,000. If you need more information I can probably get it. Doug McCallum NBI, Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: Rusty (Where's the fish?)Haddock Michael, I'd be very interested in receiving anything you get with regards to UNIX machines as I plan to buy one in about the same timeframe. I'd like to get something based on the National Semi's Series 32000 (alias NS 16000) uP. Unfortunately there remains several small bugs in this processor family; the main one being that a handful of instructions will not restart after a page fault. I've been told that this should problem should be fixed sometime this fall. May I suggest that you stay away from the Altos machines at least the ones based on the 8086 (e.g. the 8600 [discontinued] and the 586). My experience with Microsoft's XENIX for this machine is not very good and Altos/Microsoft do not deliver everything listed in the UNIX documentation. Their service could be called friendly but they don't have the manpower to fix bugs in their software. I don't know about the 68000 and 568 machines which are based on Motorola's 68000 uP. It may be possible that the software on this machine is more reliable as it is System III and Microsoft is not involved. (Sorry for the harsh words toward Microsoft but, from my experiences with them and their software, I think they deserve it.) Another good possibility for a UNIX machine may be the LMC MegaMicro which is advertised in BYTE. I spoke with those folks last year and was impressed with, what sounds like, an exceptional piece of hardware. Unfortunately they boosted their minimum system configuration from $15K to $20K by supplying a 30-Meg disk instead of the 10-Meg plus some other. They are running HCR's version of Berserkley 4.1 (could be 4.2 by now) and their disks are the 30-millisec average access time which ain't too bad. ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: masscomp!tjt at mit-vax I work for Masscomp. The MC-500 is a 68K based machine. Our current software is a mixture of System III and 4.1BSD, including virtual memory and job control, although the terminal driver is basically System III and multiplexed files are not supported. We also have 4.1aBSD style Ethernet support, including ARP support plus support for FTP and TELNET. Soon to appear (i.e. November release) will be a 4BSD compatible terminal driver, System V source code compatibility (shared regions, messages and semaphores), remote file access (not just remote disk access), and symbolic links. By next January, we will support 4.2BSD source code compatibility. The machine is fast: at usenix benchmarks the machine has consistently outperformed 750's and most other 68K based machines, including those running at 12.5MHz (our processor runs at 10MHz). Our performance degraded somewhat with our virtual memory release as the system had not been tuned. Our November release will recover that performance. Tom Teixeira, Massachusetts Computer Corporation. Westford MA ...!{ihnp4,harpo,decvax}!masscomp!tjt (617) 692-6200 x275 ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: Rich Zellich At the NCC last week, NBI was showing a nice system for $15,475, which was a 68010 running an apparently-total 4.2bsd port with a bit-mapped screen, 1 meg memory (2 meg optional), 22 (or 24?) meg Winchester, 640K floppy, and custom raster-ops processor. The bit-mapped screen was used for Star/Lisa/ MacIntosh style icons and overlapping windows; a separate process could be run in each window, and the system could also emulate a VT100 (and other terminals?) in a window connected to a mainframe while running local programs in other windows. Besides UUCP and cu, TCP/IP are also supported (as said above, apparently \all/ of 4.2 was ported). vi, ed, and ex are of course available, and I think emacs is, also. Oh yeah, the "U!" system also has a 3-button mouse. The literature, as I remember it (I haven't unpacked all the NCC stuff yet) compares the U! machine as slightly slower than a single-user VAX 11/750 and, in some cases, slightly faster than a 4-user 11/750. -Rich ---------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mats Wichmann How long a line would you like? We build 68k machines, and have been delivering for a long time (since January, 1982 - introduced at Comdex November 1981). I don't want to give you the whole sales pitch, but our machines perform very nicely - have benchmarked very well against people like Plexus (blow them away in disk-intensive stuff, in fact), and far superior to things of the class of Callan, Heurikon, Pixel, etc. However, we ain't real cheap, and we run Sys V, with no job control. (Deal is: $21k gets you .5MB memory, 80MB disk, 68000 @ 10 MHz, 4 serial ports). For further information, please call our sales people - phone is 415-549-3854. The following is my personal opinion, having nothing to do with Dual: If you must have job control and 4.2BSD, look at Integrated Solutions. They really have their act together. Mats Wichmann Dual Systems Corp. ...{ucbvax,amd,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!mats