Help for new 3B1 owner

[Ben Scott]

  Greetings to all.  I am about to swap one of my Amigas for an AT&T 3B1,
but don't know that much about them.  In fact I've never even seen one in
the plastic.  I'm quite familiar with the Amiga, and have heard the two
machines compared many times, so I have decided that this would be a good
way to get a Unix box in my home cheaply, to help me learn some Unix.

  I do know some basics about the machine - monochrome graphics, 3-button
mouse, 68010 @10Mhz, variable RAM amounts, 3 slots, ST-506 hard drives,
GUI and CLI standard, runs Unix SysV v3.2 or so, vintage around 1985, no
longer built or supported by the company, designed by Convergent, comes
with 1 serial and 1 parallel port, and various other basic things.  If I'm
wrong in any of the above, unless it's something major, don't bother to 
mention it as I'll learn.

  I also know "conversational" Unix; that is, I get by.  Even without help
or manuals, if I just think of it as the Amiga CLI with most of the vowels
taken out, I can get a lot done (i.e. "copy" becomes "cp"...).  I understand
most of the basics of pipes, file redirection, and multitasking from my
Amiga experience.  I also know C though I haven't done a whole heckofalot
with it yet.

  What I want to learn is just some general stuff about the machine to get
me going.  I'll be getting the Software Development kit and manuals, and
OS version 3.51, and a 40 meg HD and 1 meg of RAM.  A decent starter system,
from what I have read here and what the current owner tells me.  For a while
when I first wanted to find out more about the machine, I read this newsgroup
(comp.sys.att; I can't yet get any unix-pc group here) until time pressures
forced me to drop it.  While I was here I learned a lot of interesting things
most of which I've forgotten the important parts of.  So, I would like updates
and refreshers on some of the following half-remembered topics:

Some kind of chip upgrade to allow it to use more than one drive, or drives
with more than X number of heads, or RLL drives, I can't remember which.
(also, what's the biggest half-height ST-506 drive I'm likely to be able
to find new?  I forget if I'm getting the 7300 or the 3B1, I'm told the
only important difference is the case height, but plan for worst-case and
assume half-height drives required)

Also, this "Voice Power" card - I remember it being some kind of digitizer,
voice mail gadget, modem, speech synthesizer and maybe even speech recognizer.
But I'm probably wrong in a few points.  Anyway, someone please outline the
capabilities of it for me.

Any other chip upgrades from the user community - I seem to remember something
having to do with the graphics.

Is it likely that an accelerator designed for the 68000/68010 in an Amiga
could be fitted to the 3B1?  I seriously doubt this, because most Amiga
products take advantage of the rather unusual bus archetecture, but it's
something I'd like to investigate.  

Since it can run with such a tiny HD (I've heard of systems with 10 meggers!)
how much could it possibly have in the way of man pages or other docs?

Please drop me a list of FTP sites and "must-have" PD programs.  I'll be
running a UUCP node with it since running it from my Amiga only worked
for about two weeks.   Also, is it difficult to hook up a 3.5" drive to
it?  If so, I could use the Amiga to write files to a 3.5" floppy in 
MS-DOS format and use something I've heard of recently called mtools or
some such to read it into the 3B1.  For when the serial ports on either
machine are otherwise occupied.

For those who are familiar with the Amiga - will DNet compile on it?

  Please mail me these responses (hopefully there will be at least two...)
since our news feed is blocked up at uunet right now.  

.                            <<<<Infinite K>>>>
 
-- 
|Ben Scott, professional goof-off and consultant at The Raster Image, Denver|
|FIDO point address 1:104/421.2, bscott at isis.cs.du.edu, or BBS (303)424-9831| 
|"Spent 4 hours burying the cat!"  "Four || The Raster Image IS responsible |
| hours?!?"  "It wouldn't keep still..." || for everything I say! | *Amiga* |