Thinking about buying UNIX for home, be careful w/ Dell

[John C. Archambeau]

seth at gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Madison MadMan Miles) writes:
>First of all, I want to thank all the people who helped me with my
>decision about which UNIX to buy. However, I found out a couple of
>things the hard way the no one told me.
>Anyway, to make a long story short, instead of getting a great
>operating system for $995, like they advertise, I'm having to pay
>$1800. Don't get me wrong, but I think that what I'm getting from
>Dell seems like a great version of UNIX, but I was mislead in what
>I had to pay for what I got. No where  in the information that I was
>given was I ever told what system I need. I was expecting 50 disks in
>the mail and instead I just got 1 tape.
>If you have 8 megs RAM minimum
>150 megs hard drive space
>150 meg tape drive and VGA

If you bought Dell's SysV/386 R4, I'm not the least bit surprised that you got
it on tape.  If you were to buy it on disks, you would end up with a wooden
pallet full of disks.  There's a reason that SysV R4 isn't distributed on
disks, and that's because it is huge.  The only vendor to my knowledge that
is distributing their SysV R4 on disk is UHC and you get a lot of disks, on
the order of 50 if I'm not mistaken for the complete system.

It is just cheaper for the Unix vendor to distribute the OS on tape than
disks.  This is also the reason why very soon you'll only be able to buy Sun
software (OS and various software products that Sun puts out) on CD ROM.  It's
cheaper to mass produce CD ROM disks than it is to have tapes cut at the
factory.
 
You could have returned Dell Unix and gotten ISC or another flavor that is
available on disk since Dell did give you that option.  I personally think you
have nothing to complain about.

     // JCA

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