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From: Goeke@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Who has an NEC APC III?
Message-ID: <9401@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 21-Mar-85 09:32:14 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.9401
Posted: Thu Mar 21 09:32:14 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Mar-85 03:08:03 EST
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          Let me set the stage:  We need to do a fair amount of serious
drafting, especially mechanical but some electrical -- including simple
PC boards.  We looked at the grand market and found many
$100K/workstation things and two <$10K/workstation things:  VeraCad and
AutoCad.  They both run on IBM PCs and close equivalents (you need an
8087, >384K memory, color, a $200 mouse, and an $800 plotter for B
sheets -- which, non-intuitively, is adequate for almost anything we
do).  The software itself is only $2000; many copies have been sold
(>10K for AutoCad) which means it has been well tested, both in
operation and documentation.  We chose AutoCad, but it was a close call.
At first we ran it on a borrowed Baby Blue PC, but now its time to buy
three stations of our own.

          Drafting programs work best if you have a maximally fast
machine for redrawing on the machine (a typical redraw on our Blue take
40 s).  It is /necessary/ for production work to have at least 640 X 400
pixels with 8 colors (the colors are used for "windowing" different
layers of a drawing).  AutoCad only runs on MS-DOS machines, but a lot
of them.  What we found best was an NEC APC III:  wonderful color on a
640 X 400 bit-mapped screen running an 8 MHz 8086 and selling for $3K
including a 10MB hard disk built-in.  The drawbacks:  neither their bus
nor their BIOS is a Blue clone.  Vanilla MS-DOS programs on Blue 5"
disks load and run, at least.  Since we're buying these machines for a
single usage station, we think speed and display outweigh the drawbacks.
(We'll also probably buy some for dedicated word processing, but those
stations will be single usage, too; the tilt-and-swivel display was a
big plus with my secretary.)

          Does anyone out there have one of these things, or maybe even
a predecessor.  We are interested in comments about reliability,
support, and questions we forgot to ask.  Please reply to me direct.  I
can summarize to the net in a couple of weeks.

                                        Bob Goeke
                                          [ Goeke @ MIT-Multics.ARPA ]
                                        MIT Center for Space Research
                                        Cambridge, MA  02139
                                        617-253-1910