Altos 5000

[Tom Neff]

I'll say this much in Altos's defense.  It can be a major annoyance to
run an OS like UNIX on hardware that still, at some fundamental level,
thinks it's a desktop PC designed to run Space Invaders.  When something
weird happens you often have to take it down and boot DOS before you get
any meaningful diagnostic answers.  When you call vendors you have to
have the patience of Job as you peel away layers of half-smart
babysitters who keep asking you why you didn't just put a MODE.EXE call
in your AUTOEXEC.BAT, or what ROM BIOS routine to call, or what the
Norton FAT Zapper says about your files.

On the whole if you know you're going to be running UNIX on a box, it's
a nice luxury to have the box designed and optimized for the purpose.
It's comforting to a certain business mindset to know this is so, as it
is to know that one company is behind both hardware and software.

The question is, how much more is the luxury worth it.  I paid a small
premium for an AT&T WGS 6386 network because my experience tells me the
one-vendor advantage ends up mattering when your work is important and
they pay you to do something besides tinker with your system all the
time.  But the machines are still PCs and come with diskettes, BIOS
documentation etc (and a copy of Windows) despite all the work AT&T has
done to make them work as UNIX platforms.  I can do things with the
video and other hardware under "real" DOS/BIOS control that the UNIX
drivers still don't support.

Still, paying twice or three times as much for the comfort of knowing my
box was developed as a dedicated UNIX super-micro is not worth it to me.
Of course, I don't fall in whatever specialized vertical niche it is
where you need to support 200 terminals on a single CPU.  My guess is
that anyone in that niche should shop around for a system that meets
those special needs, pay what it costs even it's more than a PS/2 costs,
and count himself lucky -- the heck with what the rest of us think.

Just make sure that's REALLY what you need...
-- 
"We plan absentee ownership.  I'll stick to       `o'   Tom Neff
 building ships." -- George Steinbrenner, 1973    o"o   tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM