How to choose a new 386 UNIX PC...

Steve Dyer dyer at spdcc.COM
Fri Sep 22 01:30:24 AEST 1989


In article <648 at visdc.UUCP> jiii at visdc.UUCP (John E Van Deusen III) writes:
>I would like to
>suggest that you people at Interactive (or SCO or Bell/Intel) put
>together a stand-alone X terminal software package to run on low-end
>386s.  You have all the software, including drivers, sitting there; it's
>simply a matter of bundling it and putting it on the price list.  The
>package could easily sell for $500 a pop; since it would solve the
>problem of poor X server performance on 386 machines running UNIX, and
>there is nothing like it yet on the market.

First, X runs fine under AIX PS/2 using an 8514 display adapter and screen,
whether in monochrome (using the 19" mono screen whose model # I forget) or
in full color (the 8514 16" screen.)  It's quite snappy; I've never had to
stop and kvetch about poor performance on a 20mhz 386 PS/2 with 6 meg of memory.
I suspect that the problem is trying to use X on VGA displays on machines which
don't have enough memory to begin with.

IBM sells "X Windows for DOS" and Locus sells what I believe to be the
same product, PC/Xsight.  I have no experience with either of these products.
I believe you are limited to what you can do in 640K, but I could be wrong.
 
-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer at ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer
dyer at arktouros.mit.edu, dyer at hstbme.mit.edu



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