*BSD News Article 19201


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From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux,comp.unix.questions,comp.os.mach,comp.unix.solaris
Subject: Re: Unix close for 486 - commens requested
Date: 5 Aug 1993 21:14:12 GMT
Organization: Montana State University, Bozeman  MT
Lines: 46
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <23rt74$num@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <CEH.93Aug5102012@alouette.sce.carleton.ca> <23r8kl$la4@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <CBAs9D.MH4@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu

In article <CBAs9D.MH4@murdoch.acc.virginia.edu>,
Jon Gefaell <jeg7e@livia.acs.Virginia.EDU> wrote:
>In article <23r8kl$la4@pdq.coe.montana.edu> nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>>
>My disagreements with this article are legion.
>
>1.) Last I was quoted, by Rob Kolstad (@bsdi.com) full source license
>to BSDI's product is ~$1K NOT $2K

$2K is the University price, and since he was a .edu site and wanted 10
copies, $1K + ( ( * $200/binary) > $2K University price.

>2.) You don't need accelerated video, 32M RAM, EISA, etc etc ad nauseum
>    for what you've asked for. It's nice to have more and faster, but a
>    lot less will produce very nicely for you. Especialy I have to wonder
>    about the display recomendation given the stated application is for
>    BATCH simulations.

Regarding accelerated video, as I stated, IF you decide to do X work, you'll
want accelerated video.  If they sit in a machine room, Hercules or MDA does
quite nicely. :-)

As far as EISA and 32M memory, if these machine are indeed going to be used
for serious computational work, then the more memory you have the better. 
And if you want more than 16MB of memory then EISA is really the only choice
you have on a PC.  (And you get the added advantage of faster I/O, video,
etc. if you need/want it).

32M is a nice # for any CISC based workstation.  I run 16MB on my ISA
box running a free variant of BSD *nix, and I've run my machine up to
48MB of processes w/out trying very hard.  Can you say swap yourself
silly?

If you've got the $$, spend them wisely.  In my opinion, you'd be much
better off buying 10 high end 486's than 15-20 lower end 386/486's.

(That is assuming you want to buy PC's)


Nate

-- 
nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu     |  In the middle of it ........ again. 
nate@cs.montana.edu          |  Running/supporting one of many freely available 
work #: (406) 994-4836       |  Operating Systems for [34]86 machines.
home #: (406) 586-0579       |  (based on Net/2, name changes all the time :-)