Some really easy questions (batteries not included)

[Steve Dyer]

In article <67 at penrij.LS.COM> soup at penrij.LS.COM (John Campbell) writes:
>> 	3) Are the DOS emulators out there reasonably robust?  Also,
>> 	     are they reasonably cheap?
>
>	I hope you're kidding :-)  IBM's AIX is the first with the
>	"dos merge" that seems to do a really decent job.  What do
>	they know that we don't?

IBM's "DOS Merge" is more or less just a repackaging of Locus's
"Merge 386", back a couple of rev levels.  I'd expect that SCO's
Locus offering should be as good, if not better.

>> 	4) Am I going to be sorely dissappointed after working on Sun's all day?
>
>	Well,  X-windows on a PS/2-80 @ 20MHz doesn't impress me, but it
>	_does_ seem to pull even with a Sun 2/120 I once worked with.  Beats
>	me what kind of overhead Motif is gonna impose...

Weird.  A lot of this depends on the server and the display card you're running
on, after taking into account obvious issues like adequate physical memory and
the presence of a math co-processor.  I routinely run X11 under AIX PS/2 on
an 8514A card, both in monochrome (8507) and in color (8514).  Its performance
on a 20mhz PS/2 is fully competitive with any Sun 3/60 or an RT Mod 125.
It didn't even occur to me to think that there was an intrinsic performance
problem.  BTW, Motif is a bit of a memory hog; you'll probably want to add on
a few meg more.

-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer
dyer at arktouros.mit.edu, dyer at hstbme.mit.edu