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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!amdahl!pyramid!leadsv!laic!nova!darin
From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec,comp.arch
Subject: Re: DECstation 3100 info.
Keywords: 3100, Advantedge 2000
Message-ID: <414@laic.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 89 17:24:17 GMT
References: <979@isieng.UUCP>
Sender: news@laic.UUCP
Lines: 39

In article <979@isieng.UUCP>, seenu@isieng.UUCP (Seenu Banda) writes:
> 
> I have seen the DEC 3100 announcement today.

We were beta testing some of the workstations (and still are to some
extent).  It took me some time to realize that DECstations 3100 referred
to the MIPS machine we had, rather than some other VAX (the name
plate was missing and I missed the announcement).  We called it a
PMIPS (as opposed to PVAX).

I was quite surprised at how well it ran.  It runs a bit faster than
our Sun 4/260, but sits comfortably on your desk - similar in size to
a Sun 3/60 or 3/50.  We wanted to benchmark some LISP also, but didn't
have one for the 3100.  They also include a small disk hidden in the box
that can be used to boot the machine, with NFS used for everything else
(we haven't used it, we boot it off a VMS machine - gack).  I think this
is a nice advantage over a workstation that is completely diskless, or
having to buy a boot disk that is larger than you need.

Also, DEC has apparently ported Ultrix rather faster than I thought they
would, and even has most of the "ifdef VAX" type stuff in place.  (I
read a article earlier implying that DEC had actually tried porting
VMS, but gave up quickly)  The DECwindows is interesting, but not
exactly to my liking (I haven't read the manual enough to know if I can
change a lot of it).  Their terminal window client has plenty of
bells and whistles (too many for me), but won't work on non-DEC
workstations without appropriate fonts, etc.  This is something we
wanted to be able to do, but at least xterm works (I had suspected
earlier that DECwindows would be unusable from non-DEC servers -
DEC likes to pervert standards just enough to lock people in).

It has a nice price from what I hear.  Still, if DEC could come out
with a cheaper (less memory, slower, etc.) model in the $5000 range,
they could grab a lot of business.  Since DEC appears to be turning
towards DECwindows as its major interface, it makes sense to have
an inexpensive X server.  (oh well, just dreamin')

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	"You can't fight in here! This is the war room.."