Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!rpi!bu.edu!polygen!jerry
From: jerry@polygen.uucp (Jerry Sheckel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: NeXT >> 386SX
Message-ID: <1002@stewart.UUCP>
Date: 11 Mar 91 18:42:20 GMT
Reply-To: jerry@stewart.UUCP (Jerry Shekhel)
Organization: Polygen Corporation, Waltham, MA
Lines: 33

peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>> You're going to need at
>> least a 25MHz 486 to even be in the ballpark.
>
>For what? What are you getting the machine for? As a personal UNIX box the
>NeXTstation is short of the mark: it just doesn't have the disk space for
>its Mach: it requires something like 30M of virtual memory right out of the
>box for NeXTstep, plus the operating system executables and all the bitmaps
>and there's not damn much left of that 100M disk.
>

Quite true.  About processor speed:  I'm running UNIX with X and Motif and
all that stuff on a supercheap (REALLY CHEAP) 16 MHz 386SX with 8MB RAM.  I
find that the processor is plenty fast enough.  It seems that for UNIX,
especially for a personal UNIX box, the disk performance is much more of a
limiting factor than processor speed.

About disk space: 100MB is simply not going to cut it for a modern UNIX
workstation, especially if you plan on doing any software development for a
GUI subsystem.  My UNIX/X/Motif/DevSys installation consumes about 60MB, and
when you add 20MB for swap space, you can see that 100MB is going to be a bit
tight.  If you want to run any useful software, like a desktop publishing or
spreadsheet package, you WILL need a bigger disk.
--
+-------------------+----------------------+---------------------------------+
| JERRY J. SHEKHEL  | POLYGEN CORPORATION  | When I was young, I had to walk |
| Drummers do it... | Waltham, MA USA      | to school and back every day -- |
|    ... In rhythm! | (617) 890-2175       | 20 miles, uphill both ways.     |
+-------------------+----------------------+---------------------------------+
|           ...! [ princeton mit-eddie bu sunne ] !polygen!jerry             |
|                            jerry@polygen.com                               |
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