Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!udel!sbcs!ameristar!rick
From: rick@ameristar (Rick Spanbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A3000
Message-ID: <1990May6.211909.17563@ameristar>
Date: 6 May 90 21:19:09 GMT
References: <157@next.com> <11391@cbmvax.commodore.com> <8988@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Organization: Ameristar Technology, Inc
Lines: 30

In article <8988@hydra.gatech.EDU> gt5784a@prism.gatech.EDU (Walter G. Reynolds (JJ)) writes:
>  Also, why have networking products when anything you buy is going to
>be a full-fledged machine in it's own right?  I always thought that
>aside from sharing data among several computers, networks were
>supposed to SAVE the business money by not forcing companies to
>buy a hard drive for EVERY machine...  I agree.  Commodore should offer

	No, this is not always the case.  People, at least in large
	Unix networks, are coming to find that it is false economy
	to trade in all your local disk for a network (eg paging/swapping
	can amount to 50%+ of traffic on larger networks) card.  Networks
	are big wins in many situations, however - in educational
	networks where machines with local disk can be infected by
	viruses or there is a need to present a uniform environment, in 
	multi-person development situations where there are several 
	people operating on sources, in certain database operations, 
	etc.  The "saves money" argument is leftover marketspeak from 
	the days of $15K SMD disk drives, IMHO.
	
	Also, in the Amiga market there are no network cards (to the
	best of my knowledge) that autoboot so there must always be
	at least a floppy on the networked machine.  Ameristar did some
	prototyping of autoboot over ethernet (enough to see that the
	ideas were indeed feasible), but we never released it as a product.
	
>uucp: ...!{allegra,amd,hplabs,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!prism!gt5784a
>ARPA: gt5784a@prism.gatech.edu

				Rick Spanbauer
				Ameristar Technology