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From: jdi@sparky.Franz.COM (John D. Irwin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: Thinking about buying UNIX for home, be careful w/ Dell
Message-ID: <20019@franz.Franz.COM>
Date: 17 Jun 91 19:14:43 GMT
References: <1991Jun10.222841.24729@gn.ecn.purdue.edu> <1991Jun12.035738.24551@csn.org> <1991Jun17.000740.24248@nstar.rn.com>
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In article <1991Jun17.000740.24248@nstar.rn.com> larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:
>Dell's package includes the most for the price - how many of the other
>vendors throw in Merge, Motif, and a good selection of the GNU software
>all compiled and ready to run for 995 (1295 unlimited users)?

(I'm starting to think that Larry has a couple thousand shares of Dell
stock he's worried about... :-)

For another opinion, I've just just bought ESIX SVR4 for about $500.
I did this by buying a friend's copy of ISC 2.0 (comments on the legal-
ity of this -> /dev/null please), then taking advantage of ESIX's
upgrade offer.

If you can provide ESIX with the boot disk from your current Unix of
any flavor (except probably Coherent, etc), you can get SVR4 for $395.
This price includes:
	-- base system, SCSI support, TCP/IP, SLIP, X11, C compiler, 2 user
	   license, complete on line manual pages, all on about 80 (!) floppies
and does not include:
	-- bound documentation (I was able to get the individual books I
	   needed from a local bookstore for a lot less than the $300
	   ESIX wanted for the whole set)  All of the bound documentation 
	   is from AT&T, and most of it is replicated in the on-line pages.
	-- Motif or OpenWindows (I'd rather ftp the XView library from MIT)
	-- precompiled GNU tools (again ftp from the net is simple)

I have never seen DELL Unix, so I cannot compare the two.  I'm sure DELL
is an excellent product, however I didn't have the extra $500 lying around.

	-- John