Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: ESIX Networks and X
Keywords: ESIX X
Message-ID: <1869@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 6 Dec 89 14:03:46 GMT
References: <10855@megatest.UUCP> <9315@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <257cf554:235.4comp.unix.i386;1@nstar.UUCP>
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 50
Reply-exos:@crdgw1:To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)

In article <257cf554:235.4comp.unix.i386;1@nstar.UUCP> akcs.larry@nstar.UUCP (Larry Snyder) writes:

| Are you referencing Open Desktop from SCO?   If so it is to the best of my
| knowledge much more than ESIX.  

  ESIX is $825 and Open Desktop will be <$1k ($975 was the price I
heard). That's about the $100 the original poster mentioned.

|                                 The retail price for the ESIX multiuser
| package is $825 ($611 quant 1-2) and that includes everything except
| for NFS.

  Desktop includes NFS.

| Revision D of ESIX is due in the spring with the new fast file system which
| is going to be faster than the Interactive file system (according to their
| sales information and technical support). 

  SCO UNIX has FFS, too. I don't know if the Desktop version has the
security features. If it does it's a plus, but you have to turn them off
for best performance.

|                                            ESIX support is FREE forever.

  SCO support cost forever. Worse than that there is no upgrade policy.
I was going to go Xenix=>UNIX, but the support can't be upgraded and I
don't have any money in the support pocket. Result: stay with Xenix.

| Major upgrades are $99, and minor ones are $25 per license (not per product).
| ESIX is distributed with many drivers (unlike ISC) and supports most of the

  The posting was truncated at this point here, but I don't think anyone
has more drivers than SCO. And the X in Desktop is supposed to be the
good one from ix/386 (someone might confirm this).

  You didn't mention DOS under UNIX, Desktop uses DOSmerge rather than
vp/ix. This is a marketing decision.

Summary: 

  the choice is not as one sided as you might think. There are good
reasons to use both. Hopefully this clarifies the features of Desktop.
SCO has NOT made the info as available as they might, but they are
supposedly not shipping until 1Q90.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon