What OS should we use? What hardware? 286/386... (*LONG*)

[Lenny Tropiano]

The company I work for (American LP Systems, Inc., an AT&T VAR) is in a slight 
bind these days.  We are caught between the a couple of decisions as far
as where we are headed in the selling market.

With the recent discontinuation of the AT&T 3B1/UNIX pc (our major selling
line prior to this), we are forced to move with the current trend of 386
UNIX machines.  AT&T has released the 6386 WGS, their 80386 box.  Unfortunately
not all the pieces are ready and available to the general public.  Two
major components being serial port boards (w/UNIX drivers) and internal
or external tape backup units.  We cannot sell these machines (at their
prices) to people as single-user (one terminal), floppy backup UNIX systems.
It's just a waste of resources...

We have a couple of options we can take, and we are tossing around in the
office.   We would prefer to stay with UNIX System V release 3.0 or better
just because it's the up-and-coming standard for UNIX AT&T is proposing.
We want to have the ability to support our customers with a 386 machine
in the office running AT&T UNIX (preferably 6386 and AT&T UNIX System V r.3)
using some sort of binary compatibility on other UNIX boxes.   (ie.
we can compile on our machine and send to another 386 machine [possible
different vendors for hardware and OS] without recompiling there)  Is
this currently possible or is it just in the future?

o    Is Microport UNIX System V/386 the answer?  Do they have drivers that will
     support 3rd party serial port boards (4-6 ports using the RJ-45 modular
     scheme?)    

o    Is Interactive's 386/ix the answer?   Do they have drivers...?


o    Is SCO Xenix the answer?  Will be have compatibility between UNIX-and-
     Xenix? :-)   Do they have drivers...?

o    What hardware is suggested?   386 box, tape units, port boards, vendors?


o    Can we support 80286 machines (IBM AT's) running Microport UNIX System V
     with the 386 machine, if we can compile with the 286 instruction set?
     Is this possible?  Or do we need a IBM AT/286 machine?

Any help would be extremely appreciated.  Email is preferred... I will
summarize and post results to any interested party.  


				Thanks,
				Lenny Tropiano
				(Confused in a sea of 386 options...)

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