Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: AMIX?
Message-ID: <3916@killer.UUCP>
Date: 24 Apr 88 06:56:08 GMT
References: <396@brambo.UUCP>
Organization: Bayou Telecommunications
Lines: 25

in article <396@brambo.UUCP>, morgan@brambo.UUCP (Morgan W. Jones) says:
> In article <49800@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes:
>>IF IT WAS 
>>POSSIBLE TO MAKE A DISKFULL UNIX WORKSTATION FOR < $8K TODAY WE WOULD! 
> 
> For under $4000 (this is accurate as far as I know) you could run a
> 386 clone with full SysV.  Thus, for less than the cost of upgrading

A '386 clone costs around $4000 for a Unix system, true. But I suspect that
what drives the price of the Sun, etc., upward, is GRAPHICS support, and
NETWORKING support. Networking's a bit cheaper nowdays than it used to be. But
hi-res monitors still are dear. Not to mention that the Sun has faster i/o
than the '386 clone machine does (16 bit bus, blah!).

Add in $2,000 for a professional graphics display, and you're up to $6,000 --
Sun country. And the Ethernet board won't be cheap, either.

But it's an exercise in absurdity. You don't buy a '386 for graphics. People
who run Unix on a'386 are generally doing it so that they don't have to use an
overloaded Vax-780 with 20 simultaneous users running Emacs and Common Lisp.
Quite a different market, compared to the graphics workstation market.

--
    Eric Lee Green  elg@usl.CSNET    Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191        
    ihnp4!killer!elg                 Lafayette, LA 70509              
"Is a dream a lie that don't come true, or is it something worse?"