Risc System/6000

[Edward Vielmetti]

I stared at the complete price list that I have and have some
questions.

First of all the base 320 box comes with 8MB of memory and a 120MB
ESDI drive, nothing else, for $7475.  List for the 2nd 120MB ESDI
in a system is $1950, list for the 8MB is roughly $4500 -- if you
can subtract like I can subtract they're selling the box for 
about $1000 and making their money on the bundled peripherals.

I suppose the disk earns its keep for having the OS preloaded,
that's a win, though at 27ms access it's way too slow & behind
the times in drive technology.  A builtin SCSI would have made
more sense than builtin ESDI in my opinion.

The memory is completely unfair of course -- no one can order a
memoryless workstation no matter how hard you try -- the other way to
look at it is that memory is currently costing $100/MB in commodity
SIMM parts, or 2-3x that in semi-proprietary designs, figure $1200 for
the card carrier to hold the simms and the memory is overpriced by a
factor of two.

Can you add PS/2 memory to the 8MB card in 1MB increments?  I
would hope that you could get it for less than the $495/MB list
they have for it.  How much memory fits on one memory card ?
Will the same memory card hold 4MB SIMM units or do you have
to have the other memory card for that (list $20K for 32MB btw).

--Ed