Possible Phoenix Story of 3B1

[Bill Mayhew]

Actually, the 3B1 may be dead in body but it is not dead in spirit.
>From my understanding the Commodore-Amiga 3000/UX is a descendant
of the 3B1.  I've been told that the Amiga Unix was proted from the
3B1's "Unix version 3.51".  Curious is that according to press
releases, the Amiga 3000 comes with Sys Vr4.  Also on the 3000, you
get X and Openlook.  The 3000 has a 25 MHz 68030 and can be
popualted with up to 17 meg of RAM.  C-A has educational pricing
programs that make the 3000 system cost approximately somewhere
between $2500 and $3000 (US $).  This is a lot of computing bang
for the buck, and is potentially faster and definitely cheaper than
similar offerings from Apple.  This isn't as cheap as the "fire sale"
close-out prices on the 3b1, but it's getting close.  I paid about
$2100 for my 2x67 3B1 and $400 for Unix+devtools in October 1987.
AT the time, I thought I was getting a nearly unbelievalbe deal.
The C-A 3000 is a lot of machine, and costs less than 1/2 the
original price of the 7300 Safari with its measly 512K and 10meg
hard disk.

One thing that I can say for the 3B1 is that it is pretty rugged.
I had a few minor problems with a bad solder joint in the keyboard,
a 68010 that literally jumped out of the socket and a motherboard
replacement under warranty, that actually turned out to be a bug in
uucico, but overall uptime is well over 99%.  Total shutdown in 3
years and 3 months has been about 14 hours, and most of that time
was when the machine was in transit to the AT&T depot for
replacement of the motherboard.  Only our HP 9000/835 at work has
done better, with zero downtime in its first 12 months of
operation.  Hadly in the same league, dollarwise, though.

The upshot is that there are some very affordable unix
configurations out there.  The C-A 3000 bears looking at.  Also the
Apple Macintosh SI, once the A/UX 2.1 release supporting the LC
becomes available, is a possiblity.


==Bill==
-- 
Bill Mayhew      NEOUCOM Computer Services Department
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    phone: 216-325-2511
wtm at uhura.neoucom.edu   ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm
via internet: (140.220.001.001)