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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: IIcx vs. IIci
Message-ID: <135600013@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 90 22:00:00 GMT
References: <3892@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Lines: 23
Nf-ID: #R:mace.cc.purdue.edu:3892:p.cs.uiuc.edu:135600013:000:1034
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jan 22 16:00:00 1990


There is supposed to be a workstation mac released this spring, see
MacWeek.  You might wait to make a decision.

My opinion is that a IIci is a poor design because it is unbalanced.
It's got this blazing CPU, but the disk I/O and NuBus are no faster,
and the primitive 640*480*8 bit display card slows down the CPU (must
be that Apple graphics card sales are waning...), and for all this, you
get to pay a lot of extra money (and even more later, when cache cards
get popular).

For the money, you could get a IIcx and 32-bit graphics (supermac),
and have the option of adding a quickdraw graphics accelerator later.

The IIci *should* have heralded a new generation of macintoshes, with
disk DMA interface at the very least, or perhaps a 20Mhz Nubus, or a
56000 signal processor, or a QuickDraw accelerator, or just about
*anything* but what they released.


Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies