Amiga 3000UX & Sparc

[Michael J. Farren]

alexk at otc.otca.oz.au writes:
>I'm looking for for a solution to this problem:
>
>The cheapest box running a "standard" Unix, X11 (and a good ~1000x900
>display), and capable of compiling Gnu applications without too much
>modification.

I'd go for a 3000UX with the Hedley monitor, myself.

>An Amiga would need an bigger display (expensive) and disk space?

A2024 monitor isn't all THAT expensive.  And disk is getting cheap - how
about 1Gbyte for ~$1500? (Rumor heard this morning - might not be true.)

As for PCs, forget it - the 1K X 1K display requirement kills you, not
to mention the fact that a standard ISA bus machine (the cheapest) sux
rox on I/O speed, both disk and video.

>For Mac A/UX IIsi at least with more memory (expensive by definition).

A/UX = Apple's Unix eXtraquirky.  Don't go A/UX unless you're willing to
live with a very idiosyncratic version of Unix.

>SLC's have SunOS4.x standard and 1100x900 100dpi screen, 8MB (you need more),
>X11; that's about US$6000 (SunOS5.0 probably will be SYSVR4)

Might not be a bad choice - but watch out for gotchas.  For example, just
how easy is it to add disk space (the basic SLC is diskless)?  On the older
Suns, it wasn't hard, but you had to get a "shoebox", not just a disk.
Little price increments sneak up on you fast!

>But it seems that it would be hard to match on these goals.

Depends on your goals.  The Suns are nice little boxes, to be sure - but
for the low end, I think the A3000UX still is a win.  It isn't everything,
but it's nicely balanced.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Michael J. Farren                                      farren at sat.com |
|                        He's moody, but he's cute.                     |
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