Get a Wyse 80386 box w/SCO Xenix?

[Barnacle Wes]

In article <768 at bigtex.uu.net>, james at bigtex.uu.net (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
> The drawbacks I see are mainly expensive RAM and potential coming changes.
> RAM costs $500/megabyte.  This isn't so bad up to three or four megabytes,
> as most other systems require you buy another board at some point, but still..

Remember that Unix systems are memory hogs.  I have been running my
286 system with MicroPort System V/AT for over a year now, the system
was unacceptably slow until I upped the memory from 1 meg to 3 meg.
Now that I have Usenet News running background jobs almost continually
:-) I am looking at sticking another 3 meg in the system, for a total
of 6.  This will, of course, require re-building the disk to create a
larger swap partition.

A good guideline that has been suggested in the BIX microport
conferences is 2 meg for the system, and 1 meg per user.  If you are
planning on running Usenet News, add another 1 meg for 'compress'.
This will keep your system from having to swap too much, and believe
me, no matter how fast your 386 is, an ST506 disk is going to make the
system sluggish if you spend a lot of time swapping/paging.  This
would require 4 meg for a (mostly) single-user system with a news
feed, and that's the MINIMUM I would recommend.  Of course, you may be
more willing than I to wait for the computer to catch up to you.

Static-RAM systems are the fastest 386 boxes out right now, but if you
don't ABSOLUTELY need that speed, you might want to look at one of the
static-RAM cache systems, the manufacturers claim an 80% hit rate, which
gives you 80% zero wait-states, and 20% 3 wait-states.  A reasonable
trade-off for $125/meg RAM, especially when you are buying 5-6 megs!

I have heard really good things about PC's Ltd.  I have also had good
experiences with AST.  I you want to get a 'name brand', buy Unisys.
My Sperry PC/IT has been flawless, and even lived through a power
spike that Killed my Oki laserprinter (to the tune of $300).  As far
as the O.S. goes, why not buy REAL Unix from MicroPort (or perhaps
Interactive Systems) and save yourself a grundle of money?  Unless you
have a specific application that runs on Xenix and not System V, get
System V.

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