Performance of 80486 based machines running Unix

[Rich Braun]

bill at unixland.natick.ma.us (Bill Heiser) writes:
>This is ABSURD!!!!  What does DEC have to gain by making their drives
>unusable by "the rest of the world?"

Ah, you have it backwards:  DEC has a lot to gain by forcing The DEC
Installed Base to buy DEC drives, rather than letting them mail-order
drives from whomever.

Another company which has long done things this way is Tandy.  The Tandy
1000 computer, for example, didn't have DMA logic on the motherboard;
they put it into their add-on hard disk controller card.  So you had to
buy their hard-drive kit instead of someone else's.  I long ago gave
up on Tandy's "cheap" home computers for this reason.

I note with some bemusement (and a little shock!) that DEC has given
up on the O/S business by handing Ultrix over to SCO.  What a sad day
in Maynard...  VAX/VMS is a rapidly decaying dinosaur (with a huge
installed base, just like TOPS-10 did in 1982...), so I'm not sure where
DEC will go next.

-rich