Another uvax question

[Craig Partridge]

    I don't have a MicroVAX II but have some notes from a detailed
technical presentation made in the Boston area yesterday.  My initial
reaction is that it looks very nice, and is competitively priced.

    The disks are surprisingly slow -- average seek times mentioned were
49ms on the RD52 (31 MB) and 30ms on the RD53 (71MB).  I think the moral
of the story is get lots of memory (you can get up to 9MB)-- swapping out
pages will hurt.  They will eventually (in few months or so) have a
rackmountable uVAX II with a KDA-50 board (Q-bus version of UDA-50) so
you can attach RA-81's.

    Yes there is TCP/IP, using a DEQNA board.  DEC is supporting
configurable binary kernels on the uVAX II (I gather they didn't on
the uVAX I) and you can put TCP/IP in or leave it out as you wish.

    One should also note that Ultrix-32M has some minor peices missing
because the disks were too small to comfortably fit all of UNIX.  They
didn't provide a complete list, but here's a partial one.  No news,
games, or user contributed software.  Also, no troff (just nroff) and
no eqn.  These latter deletions because they say they hadn't found a
device to support troff for yet (??!).  Oh yes, it comes on 31 floppies,  or
one cartridge tape (DEC has developed another cartridge tape system).

    I may have gotten something wrong -- I'm working from notes scribbled as
they were throwing information at us.  If so, I hope the DEC guys reading
this will send out a correction.

Craig Partridge
craig at bbn-loki (ARPA)
craig%loki.arpa at csnet-relay (CSNET)
{decvax,ihnp4,wjh12}!bbncca!craig (USENET)