Recommend me a unix box?

[Mark Crimmins]

A byte for your thoughts:

I have been spoiled as a grad student with easy access to Suns, Nexts,
Macs and various HP and Xerox toys.  I've become addicted to emacs,
and latex in particular (nothing terribly fancy, I know).  Now that
I'm moving on -- to Cornell, where humanities faculty seem to have
less easy computer access, what I want to find is a set-up with a
laser printer that will let me use those tools for writing papers,
books and so on, with the kind of customizability, flexibility
(including multitasking) and potential net-ability I'm used to from
unix systems.  I want the flexibility, but I don't want to spend an
enormous amount of time supporting the thing.

So I was wondering whether any of you could recommend a reliable
set-up you've used that would fit the bill for a writer.  I expect
that a used workstation, or maybe a unix 386 box would be nice, but
tell me if you think otherwise.  A NeXT box would be great, but I'm
hoping I can do it for less $.

I need, in particular: 

a system that can run emacs and latex,

a terminal or screen that can handle a long text window for editing,

enough fast storage to keep all the programs, fonts and text that I'll
be working on (I expect 80 megs would do me for a while),

a laser or similar quality printer that wouldn't be *heavily* used
(<100 pages a week), and needn't give publication quality output, but
something reasonably fast, suitable for latex fonts and better than
the usual dot matrix stuff.


I would very much appreciate any suggestions (as would several other
folks I know).  I'll post a summary of responses.  BTW, please tell me
if this query would be more appropriate for a different newsgroup.

Thanks,
Mark
crimmins at csli.stanford.edu