6000 pricing

[Dick Dunn]

drake at sd2.almaden.ibm.com (Sam Drake) writes:
> The $12,995 system includes the 120MB drive and an Ethernet card.
> This system should be self-sufficient in a networked (NFS) environment,
> but I'll grant you that more disk would probably be essential in a
> stand-alone configuration.

I can parse this statement, but it gets a little confused in the semantic
analyzer.  How is it that "self-sufficient" is contrasted with "stand-
alone"??  I.e., if you need more disk somewhere to support you, you don't
seem very self-sufficient.

Sam, I'm not so much wondering about your conjecture (which I fully under-
stand is not an official position) as what IBM's view is.  Is the $13 K
configuration a standalone?  If so, why does it have Ethernet bundled in?
If it's not standalone, we should be comparing prices and performance of
these machines to other network-y workstations (including diskless)...but
in that case, 120 Mb of local storage is a fair bit.  OK, it's a fast
machine, so maybe it deserves 120 Mb in a networked setup with the rest of
its disk on a server...but then we're back to not looking at this machine
(and its price) in isolation...we have to add on a fraction of a server's
cost to get a real price per station.

Can someone explain the positioning of this low-end machine?  At the
moment, Sam's statement has left me not so much skeptical as confused.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com    uucp: {ncar,nbires}!ico!rcd     (303)449-2870
   ...Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.