Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!mcdchg!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: Death of various 3B things
Message-ID: <1990Jul12.183342.2259@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 12 Jul 90 18:33:42 GMT
References: <1990Jun29.182049.23255@chinet.chi.il.us> <97@raysnec.UUCP> <3977@bone13.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 21

In article <3977@bone13.UUCP> motcid!murphyn@uunet.uu.net writes:
>shwake@raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake) writes:

>: 	workstations for the techies, here was a windowing UNIX box for
>: 	the "rest of us" (no apologies to Apple!) supporting a development
>: 	system in 1 (one!) MB on a 40 MB drive.
>
>You failed to mention that it was the first inexpensive demand-paged virtual
>memory Unix system on the market.

And: the real reason that it didn't sell at the original ~8K price point.
It wasn't just marketing, it was the fact the the box was deliberately
not expandable to useful proportions.  The fact that you *can* do
development on a 40M machine without any available reasonable backup or
networking support doesn't mean that anyone would *want* to.  At the
 ~2K fire sale prices it appealed to people as a personal machine since
386's weren't around yet.  With SCSI and network expansion support from
the start, it might have sold.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us