Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU!SCHMIDT
From: SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Schmidt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.xerox
Subject: Re: Recycling 1186's
Message-ID: <12397155541.16.SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 10 May 88 09:29:18 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 33


    I had a suspicion that my $30K 1186 was obsolete when it was delivered
    in November 1986.  Confirmation came when my $2000 AT clone was much
    faster.  Further confirmation came when Xerox announced a 50% discount.
    Now that Xerox has decided to move Interlisp-D into the Sun environment,
    we are faced with the problem of what to do with our pretty worthless
    Xerox hardware.

Since your measure of utility is based on speed and price (rather than,
say, quality of software, programming environment, accessibility and
extensibility of network architecture, virtual memory, or customer
support), you are indeed stuck with an inappropriate workstation.

[I'm sure you also discovered the hard way that d-machines far prefer
networked operation to standalone.  And owning only one instance of
any kind of hardware makes for hard-to-diagnose problems.]

Since you paid way too much for your 1186 in the first place you never
had a chance of recovering your costs by resale.  In particular, the
nominal value of Xerox Lisp--which can't be resold--was about $8000
at the time.  (You should have paid more like $20,000 for an 1186, BTW;
$7000 unit cost for the hardware, $8000 for the software, and $5000
"overhead" for buying quantity one.)

If the absolute speed of an 1186 is no good to you, I think your best
chance of seeing it put to good use would be to find someone else on
your campus who is working on a problem that doesn't require so much
speed; eg. someone working on user-interfaces.  Since you have only
one machine, your inheritor may not be able to justify the time in
learning such a unique piece of equipment, though.

Good luck-- Christopher
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