Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!VAX1.CC.UAKRON.EDU!mcs.kent.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: 68040 for the Mac? Message-ID: <1991Jan26.031909.10366@NCoast.ORG> Date: 26 Jan 91 03:19:09 GMT References: <5$7Glmf4@cs.psu.edu> <1991Jan24.005516.8300@NCoast.ORG> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.misc Organization: North Coast Public Access Un*x (ncoast) Lines: 70 As quoted from by melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger): +--------------- | In article <1991Jan24.005516.8300@NCoast.ORG> allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes: | Sorry, but there are those of us who have SEs and are scraping to find the | money to upgrade to SE/30s. If you can't show us a NeXT that does at least as | much as the SE/30 for under $1500, you're wasting your time. And yes, this is | | machine. Can you really buy an SE/30 for under $1500? That's not too +--------------- I can turn my SE into an SE/30 for something like $1500. For $600 I can get a Marathon 030 and have similar (although not identical) results. You, however, advocate my throwing all this out and starting over with an expen$ive machine. +--------------- | the machine. The NeXT Station(040, DSP, 8Megs of RAM, 2.88MB floppy, | 105MB hard-drive) only costs around $2500(educational). The $700 +--------------- "Educational". Welcome to the real world, chum --- I post from home, I work in a Unix business environment. I don't *get* educational pricing, and I don't get educational solutions to problems. +--------------- | I didn't realize that you had this problem. I live in a University | environment where it's easy to get data from one machine to another. +--------------- In my home environment, I have: * IBM-compatible laptop * XT-clone with a 386 card * Xenix/386 box (currently on loan, will be replaced by a permanent 386 UNIX box) * Mac SE Getting data between *any* of them is non-trivial, except that the XT-clone's 360K disks can be read by the Xenix box (but it doesn't work the other way around, 1.2MB floppy drives don't do a good job of writing 360K disks and the XT clone is rather particular about disks anyway). No Ethernet. (No slots available in the XT or the laptop, so it wouldn't help anyway.) Not enough serial ports to network *that* way --- and any more serial ports on the XT would be absorbed for another purpose (packet) anyway. And, unlike most people, I don't run many "standard" applications --- I have MacWrite II and FullWrite Pro for word processing, some comm programs, and that's about it. The other programs I use on the Mac are mostly hamware; the XT-clone runs NOS continuously; the laptop generally runs either NOS or a comm program; the Xenix box runs all sorts of custom software I've written for it. Which brings up another point: one NeXT to replace all of this sounds tempting, but it also sounds (on further consideration) to be overkill. (Although the possibility of implementing a high-speed modem using the 56001 is tempting....) An SE/30 would be nice (especially if I could attach more serial ports to it), and is *not* overkill --- I see myself moving to a Unix box for the NOS(-compatible) stuff and the Mac for everything else, and selling or junking the XT and selling the laptop. Even ignoring the rest of the machines and their purposes, though: this is a home environment. A NeXT does little for it; why do you think Apple has the SE/30 as well as all the big Nubus machines? Because not everyone needs a big do-everything computer, just a *small* fast machine. I want the SE/30 upgrade for the speed and the ability to stuff more than 4MB of memory in it, but I don't need a 32MB departmental server. ++Brandon -- Me: Brandon S. Allbery VHF/UHF: KB8JRR on 220, 2m, 440 Internet: allbery@NCoast.ORG Packet: KB8JRR @ WA8BXN America OnLine: KB8JRR AMPR: KB8JRR.AmPR.ORG [44.70.4.88] uunet!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery Delphi: ALLBERY