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 -------