Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!ibmchs!auschs!d75!woan.austin.ibm.com!ron From: ron@woan.austin.ibm.com (Ronald S. Woan/2113674) Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops Subject: Re: Unix laptops Keywords: Dream machine. Does it exist? Well sort of... Message-ID: <2944@d75.UUCP> Date: 15 Jan 90 15:01:12 GMT References: Sender: news@d75.UUCP Reply-To: @cs.utexas.edu:ibmchs!auschs!woan.austin.ibm.com!ron Followup-To: comp.sys.laptops Distribution: comp Organization: IBM-Austin, AWD Lines: 76 In article , pedz@pedz.austin (Perry Smith) writes: |>If we totally disrequard price, is there a laptop which runs Unix in a |>true multi-process environment? What we're looking for is basically a laptop '386 or '68030 then... Well, there's an ad for the NEC laptop '386 in this week's Business Week magazine. If I remember correctly, it's pretty large of a laptop, but it can house 8meg of RAM and a 100M hardfile. They also mentioned some kind of power station dock (I guess for hardware expansion as a desktop machine). Toshiba also has a laptop '386(?) |>I'd like to have BSD Unix (or mach). Let's see now, BSD for the '386... Well the SUNOS shipped with the SUN '386i most closely fits the bill, but do they sell it seperately from the '386i system? I don't think so. Anyway, Interactive (or was it Intel) announced the first Sys V.4 implementation for the '386 recently which would be the next best thing as OSF/1 isn't coming out anytime soon, it seems. I assume that it can run minimally with 100M hardfile and 8M of RAM as most PC-UNIXES seem to now. |>I'd like to be battery powered although I could live with being |>severly hampered in battery mode if I could have all the power I |>needed once I got to a place where I could plug it in. Battery powered machines without CMOS cpus/RAM and with floppy or hard drives tend not to be able to function long between chargings these days (<3 hours). I know the Toshibas have battery options, but does the NEC '386 (I'll have to call just to get the brochure)? |>As far as power, of course I'd like to have as much as possible. I |>think 5 mips would be plenty though. That's about a 20MHz '386(Compaq '386/20 was rated at >5MIPS), right? |>I'd also like to have an expandable disk system where I could have a |>limited amount of disk in battery mode and a huge amount of disk |>when I finally got back home. I guess a SCSI port would be nice then and a couple 330M Wren's... |>I don't expect all the disk to be housed in the laptop. Not with today's disk technology; though the Sparcstation uses 3.5" 110M drives.. |>Unix by itself is big plus I like to use emacs and TeX and some |>other huge packages so I need quite a bit of disk space. Plenty of PC-UNIXES out there with GNU EMACS and TeX running. Heck, I have a full TeX running under PCDOS and FREEMACS/MICROEMACS are both pretty good EMACS clones. No ELISP though... |>Oh, while I'm blowing smoke rings -- I'd like eventually to be able |>to run some sort of X windows or similar package. Well the NEC has full monochrome VGA with its built-in monitor, and Interactive has an awefully nice X-Window implementation with their Unix that supports VGA very nicely. |>Has the technology even approached such a beast? If so, who makes |>it and how much is it going to set me back? Well, I guess a summary would be that such a beast does (mostly) exist today but not as a package offered by manufacturers. It will also cost mega bucks (all UNIX machines cost a lot). Maybe in a few years, battery technology, etc.. will develop to a point where this dream machine (plus 10 MIPS more for me) will become an affordable reality. Ron +-----All Views Expressed Are My Own And Are Not Necessarily Shared By------+ +------------------------------My Employer----------------------------------+ + Ronald S. Woan (IBM VNET)WOAN AT AUSTIN, (AUSTIN)ron@woan.austin.ibm.com + + outside of IBM @cs.utexas.edu:ibmchs!auschs!woan.austin.ibm.com!ron +