🚀 go-pugleaf

pdcst@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Patrick Champion) writes:

>For a complete unix
>system with ftp, uucp, cc, the standard utilities, mail, a primitive stop gap
>substititue for Motif, and of course the AIX kernal, you pay an enourmous 
>amount:
>	Price: $7000.00  
>	Size: approx 60 Megabytes
>	Ram:  Not sure, but the Model 70 was loaded with 8 Meg.
>	In the face of these requirements, OS/2 has my vote anyday.

What does it cost for an OS/2 system with all of the capabilities of
the comparable UNIX system?  In other words, what would it cost you to
have an OS/2 with ftp, uucp, cc, comparable utilities, mail, and PM?
I work it out to be at *least* $3000 and that's being cheap on the LAN
software and not counting any other applications.

Let's see what AIX offers that OS/2 doesn't for all that money:

TCF connectibility to mainframes.  This will probably show up under
OS/2 someday.

Heavy-duty networking support *standard*.  Not just remote filesystem
access.

Paging VM (yes boys and girls, you too can run 16Mb of stuff on your
8Mb system and still have it be usable).

Multiple users.

File protection.

Multiple filesystem support.

Now, let's think about other vendor's UNIX's.  If you can put up with
the loss of TCF, you have Xenix, 386/ix, ESIX, AT&T UNIX, Bell
Technologies UNIX, and a couple of others, which give most of the
value that AIX does at a fraction of the cost.  A full UNIX system,
including the text-processing package, will cost under $3,000.
Without the full text-processing package it's $2,000 and resellers
will give them to you for about $1,600 average (Xenix is somewhat
higher).

This is about the cost of OS/2 PM with MSC and developer documentation
and has all the standard UNIX utilities along with MS-DOS support,
NFS, networking, X11R3, and the rest.

You *are* getting value for your money.  Please, if you're going to do
cost and hardware requirements comparisons, compare similar systems.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@std.com