Limiting logons to licensed number: how?

[Larry Campbell]

> > The competition with MS-DOS is also the reason for the "unbundling" of UNIX
> > into a basic part plus additional packages.  If you look at the way IBM PC
> > sales work, the base operating system is essentially zip (8 programs?!) and
> > the user/owner buys additional packages (spreadsheet, dbms, ...) to do
> > what she wants.  AT&T can't afford to give away a whole set of programs...
> 
> But it's not selling. It still costs $1000 to get UNIX for your PC. MS-DOS
> comes with the machine.

Be realistic.  With MS-DOS you get a wimpy filesystem, no multitasking,
and essentially no utilities.  Forget about multitasking, mountable file
systems, etc., let's just see what you'd have to add to MS-DOS to make
it even close to a typical PC Unix.  I'm using very rough rule-of-thumb
prices based on retail prices for comparable products:

	C compiler		$ 300
	lint			  500
	as			  100
	vi, ex, ed		  600
	plot, graph, spline	  200
	make			  100
	adb			  300
	nroff, tbl, neqn	  500
	spell			  100
	TOTAL			$2600

All of the utilities I've listed (and lots more) come with VENIX/86, which
sells for $800.  I think it's a bargain.  (Note that I didn't even list all
the stuff you just can't get for MS-DOS:  awk, bc, dc, sh, csh, uucp, m4,
tar, time, lex, yacc...)

> > Rich Hammond (Bellcore,not part of AT&T) ihnp4|ucbvax !bellcore!hammond
> 
> Peter da Silva, UNIX fan.

Larry Campbell, UNIX and VENIX fan.