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From: nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.followup,net.micro
Subject: Re: ATT and the 3B
Message-ID: <310@utastro.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 20-May-84 21:19:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: utastro.310
Posted: Sun May 20 21:19:30 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 25-May-84 00:46:48 EDT
References: <2043@tekig.UUCP>
Organization: UTexas Astronomy Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 47

[]
I played with an ATT 3B2 a couple of days ago, running system V Unix,
so I guess the secret is out.  A "back door" copy was sent to an OEM
who has signed up a a local dealer, apparently one of the first in the
US, and plans to provide business applications software for it and its
larger brothers.  He got a 3b2 with 1 MB of memory, ~30 MB disk, and
the WE 32000 chip(s) -- it's several separate chips on a common carrier.

The hardware is spectacular.  You can hold the 1MB card in the palm of
your hand.  Most of the room is taken up by the two disks -- a 5-1/4"
floppy and a (CDC) hard disk with the same size footprint -- and the power
supply.  The computer is almost an afterthought.  The basic motherboard
is less than 1/2 the size of an IBM PC's, with 4 I/O slots hovering
above it (only one was used on the machine I saw, 3 were empty) and it
used modular plugs (what else?) to connect terminals.  The Unit I saw,
with an external terminal added, would run about $15,000 list. (Is there
a net price?  Does AT&T have educational discounts?  Hello?)

The only benchmark I had time to run was the "sieve" from Byte Magazine,
which ran 100 iterations in 36 seconds, or 3.6 seconds for 10.  Our Vax
11/780 runs the same benchmark in 1.3 seconds if the variables are
declared "register" and in 2.5 seconds if they are declared "int", for
10 iterations.  This places the 3b2 [for integer operations only!] at
about 0.5 Vaces.  I didn't have access to the source code for the bench-
mark so I don't know how the variables were declared. 

While I was very impressed with the hardware, I was very unimpressed with
the software.  They *did* have "vi" but termcaps were not yet set, they
didn't have "more" or "pg" and the "ls" command ran things off the screen
(fast) in a single column display (!).  Apparently someone at AT&T decided
to chop Unix up into clumps of a few programs each, and sell them separately.
You can get the "C" compiler in one package -- but the assembler and loader
are in a different one!  [If you use "C" you don't *need* assembler, right,
guys?]  Nroff was conspicuous by its absence, as was troff and any other
word-processing software.

This may all be growing pains at AT&T, who never had to sell anything ever,
and they just don't know how people use their computers.  I hope their
learning curve is very steep.

But that little chunk of harware is a *honey*!   I want one.

-- 

                                       Ed Nather
                                       ihnp4!{ut-sally,kpno}!utastro!nather
                                       Astronomy Dept., U. of Texas, Austin