Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!WSL.DEC.COM!kent
From: kent@WSL.DEC.COM
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Taking stock...
Message-ID: <8902170117.AA01004@gnomee.pa.dec.com>
Date: 17 Feb 89 01:17:00 GMT
References: <8902162247.AA28231@multimax.encore.com>
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I dunno. I have a PMAX (DECStation 3100) in my office. I like it a lot,
but it doesn't suffice for all my computing needs. It doesn't have
enough memory, and I'm unwilling to have rotating storage in my office
(too much noise and heat). To be honest, I don't want the CPU box in my
office. I'm constantly amazed at the noise level that people are
willing to tolerate in their work environment.

I gave up and put a paging disk in, because the increase in performance
was enough that I'm willing to put up with the noise. For now. But I
still get most of my cycles from a personal 15 MIPS machine with four
times the memory of my PMAX and a Gigabyte of disk that sits in a
machine room, and I like it that way. I think there's still a place for
mainframe-class I/O performance, but not at today's prices ... except
in environments where traditional timesharing is going to be in effect.

If there was a reasonable X terminal (read 68020-class performance with
no memory problems) I'd probably prefer that to a PMAX in my office. 

(Of course, I work in a hardware-rich research lab. But we're talking ideals here.)

Cheers,
chris