Some Questions about 4.2 BSD Availability

[donn at sdchema.UUCP]

The UCSD Chemistry Dept. Research Resource Computer Facility is going
to be putting together a 68K-based 'Molecular' workstation.  NIH
willing, we will produce these in quantity and sell them heavily
discounted to academic biochemistry facilities across the US with
hardware and software support.  They will feature an integral array
processor, very fancy graphics and all our sophisticated chemistry
software for molecular modeling and refinement, gel electrophoresis,
X-ray crystallography, etc.  We want to run Unix on the workstation,
not just because we know and love Unix but because we have lots of
software that either runs on it already or that we can port to it
easily and of course Unix is THE portable operating system.

Since Unix is an important feature of the workstation, it would be
nice to have the fastest, most advanced version running on it, namely
Berkeley 4.2.  We are concerned about how we are going to get it.
Questions:

	a) Is Berkeley going to produce a 68K-flavor 4.2?
	b) If not, will some other academic/public institution do it?
	c) Will someone sell 4.2 commercially?  Who?  Note that we
		ideally want it unbundled from hardware.

If you know the answers to any of these questions, please send me
mail.  I will summarize on the net if there is much interest.  If
this was all worked over long ago and I missed it, my apologies...

Donn Seeley  UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF  ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn
             (619) 452-4016             sdamos!donn at nprdc