🚀 go-pugleaf

>From Jeffrey@OFFICE Wed Feb 24 22:12:25 1982

I recently visited Wicat at their home  office in Orem Utah. They are
located in A beautiful area  about an hour's drive south of Salt Lake
City - directly beneath what appears to be skier's heaven. 

They are currently reworking the 150-WS (~$10000)  workstation  which
is 68000 based.  The renovations include a transition from Motorola's
bus   (Versabus?)   to   multibus,   more  dense   memory   (boards),
incorporation  of  memory management (to truly  be  able  to  support
multiple  processes), and development of a "native" unix.  Currently,
Wicat "unix" is simply some utilities which run under MCS, the  Wicat
operating  system.  MCS looks a little like VAX VMS and a little like
unix (very little). 

The system 100 (~$20000) is in pretty good hardware shape.  I believe
Wicat  is  working on a DMA disk controller to  replace  the  current
bufferred controller.  Software-wise, Wicat is progressing the system
100 from a few unix utilities to a lot  of  unix  utilities to a true
native unix.  Wicat hopes native unix will run before summer. 

One  interesting  thing  is  that  Wicat  thinks OEM'ers will like to
develop applications under  unix,  but  these  applications might run
under MCS therebye  avoiding unix licensing charges for end users who
don't care about unix.  I'm  not really sure how much this would save
giving the falling cost of unix licenses. 

Now,  about  graphics.  Wicat offers a $900 board which may be  added
(post-purchase) to  any  Wicat  VDT. The board adds medium resolution
graphics.   I  don't  remember the exact resolution - something  like
300x400. At any  rate,  the demo was very impressive.  Wicat graphics
are for real. 

I  recently  saw  the graphics offered by Forward Systems whose 68000
workstation  is  patterned  after  the Stanford SUN workstation.  The
Forward  graphics (1000x1000 and full of real time) were lovely.  The
Wicat graphics weren't nearly that  fine, but for $900 they were very
satisfying. 

Jeffrey Stone

Menlo Park, Ca.

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