Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sean!news
From: news@sean.UUCP (Mike Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Is the 8088 dead?
Keywords: 8088 obsolete
Message-ID: <170@sean.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 89 06:27:39 GMT
Organization: Intelligent Systems, Okla. City
Lines: 45

Sorry to come in late on (after) the end of this discussion...

Whatever the technical (de)merits of the 8088 and the PC/XT
systems, if they accomplish the task needed, they are cost-effective
systems.

I manage small and medium size apartments and self-storage
businesses. Each business has an XT-clone running Unix and
a property-management application that I wrote in C. An additional
machine acts as a central node and all machines pass every
transaction to "central" via uucp. A tenant payment, invoice,
or other transaction can be made at any site and the transaction
makes its way to the central site and to the appropriate
apartment or self-storage. A daemon at each site integrates
remote transactions into the local database automatically. I 
know about each transaction within seconds at the central node.
uucp and mail also provides for quick exchange of documents
and communication among the businesses.

Additionally, the machines at the self-storage operate a keypad-
activated security gate. The gate-operator program reads the
tenant databases to allow or deny access based on outstanding
balance. Some of the machines have an additional terminal as well.

The purpose of describing the application is to show that these
machines can do real work. The machines are the cheapest clones:
6, 8, or 10 Mhz 8088 or V20, ST225 drives, internal modem, and
an 8087. The application has NOT been optimized for performance
using indexes, fixed point, or any other technique. File and
record locking is done with semaphores and shared-memory.

The machines are fairly reliable,
although applications must be carefully written and debugged
so as not to crash the OS. Some redundancy and audit measures
are needed to recover from lost transmissions and hardware
failures of various types.

Because of budget constraints, I could not automate this process
without these cheap clones. Operation and control of these business
is unthinkable without this automation.

Well, thats my two cents worth on the death of the 8088.

Mike Anderson
..!uunet!sean!mka