Risc System/6000 (120MB disk feasibility)

[Arthur Stine]

>From article <1596 at awdprime.UUCP>, by marc at stingray..austin.ibm.com (Marc J. Stephenson/140000;1C-22):
> One thing that people might wish to consider is that the UNIX market is no
> longer limited to scientific/engineering; it is growing quite a bit in the
> commercial sector.  Whereas a minimal system might not work so well for someone
> developing an application, it might work just great for someone who is running
> the application.  Why should they have to pay for a lot of disk and memory if
> all that they are doing is running terminals at a video checkout counter?
> Whether a customer needs more performance and disk space will largely be
> controlled by what they are going to use the systems for.
> 
Is this to say that IBM thinks that people who need terminals at video
checkout counters are going to buy RS/6000's? Come on, lets be real. If
you want to be in that market, then fine. But if you want to be in the
tech workstation market, then package the systems for it. The price/performance
of the RS/6000 is nice, but the configuration is not. Throw away the ESDI and
put together a system with a couple of fast SCSI channels (read: SYNC scsi)
and make a package that is along the same lines as Sun and DEC. But remember,
even if the machine has spectacular performance, if it doesn't come down to
the right price for a usable system, it doesn't matter how much faster
it is. If the buyer just doesn't have the extra $$, then the extra performance
doesn't matter. Hence, Sun/DEC still have a good advantahe by having diskless
machines under $8K. And at least with these systems, you can add on a
cheap ($) scsi disk, since the controller is included.

The techie market is different than the commercial market. Techies aren't as
worried about support as they are about flexibility and lowest bottom line.


-- 
Art Stine
Sr Network Engineer
Clarkson U
ABStine at CLVMS.Clarkson.Edu