Academic workstations

[Liudvikas Bukys]

In article <197 at dg.dg.com> uunet!dg!rec (Robert Cousins) writes:
>
>Having watched this thread for a while now, I felt that I just COULDN'T
>watch any more.  First of all, when you want an academic workstation, 
>you sould go for a standard which allows you to buy compatible hardware
>from multiple vendors and still run the same binaries. Secondly, any
>vendor which will not sell the source code for their operating system
>must have something to hide.  The DG/UX sources are licensable and have
>been licensed by several third parties and currently is being offered
>for resale on their hardware.  
>
>When I was in school, the real issue with budgets was to get the most
>bang on very few bucks.  I recommend that you check into some of the 
>new 88K products (from a number of companies aside from my own).  These
>are faster than the machines discussed in this thread earlier AND cost
>much less.  In some cases under $500/MIPS ready to run.
>
>To avoid turning this into a commercial for my product, I will close
>here.  If anyone is interested in 88K based products, just let me know.
>
>Robert Cousins
>Dept. Mgr, Workstation Dev't.
>Data General Corp.

Speaking as someone who has just been through a long complicated
workstation purchase decision, I have the following things to say:

We took competitive bids from all the major workstation vendors, and I
must say that there were only two companies (and neither of them is DG)
with serious bids from the price/performance point of view.  BTW,
competition is wonderful!

A number of people here had high hopes for the DG product, but all
these fast and loose $/MIPS figures that look so good are for seriously
underconfigured machines.  Add in appropriate amounts of memory and
maybe a local paging disk, and things don't look so good any more.
(The design/win beta prices looked better, but those aren't the current
prices.)

DG needs to realize that it is a relative unknown in this field, and
will need to prove itself in the next year or two.  Let me tell you how
this all sounds to a customer (who gave DG's product serious thought
but clearly made the right decision buying something else):

DG says: "DG/UX is great, new reliable filesystem, multi-processor support."
Customer thinks: "DG has no reputation as a Unix vendor yet.  And just what we
	needed, another vaguely incompatible Unix clone with underlying system
	stuff that may or may not work well, and probably with a whole new
	incompatible set of sys admin tools to support it."

DG says: "$/MIP."
Customer thinks:  "We're trying to get rid of our 4-MB machines and this vendor
	thinks we should buy more.  And their memory is on these 4MB cards that
	nobody else makes yet, so I pay through the nose for more, if I decide
	I want a real machine."

DG says: "ABI"
Customer thinks: "AT&T and SUN thought of it first and I can buy Suns and Solbournes
	(both machines that I might want) now.  And there's a whole heck of a lot
	more software for SUNs that I can buy right now.  Also, there is a sizable
	user community for SUNs.  Who the heck owns DGs yet?"

DG says "88K"
Customer thinks: "I don't know who's going to win in the end; the vendors will be
	leapfrogging each other for quite a while and whatever I buy won't be
	`the best' for very long so I'd better not lose any sleep over it."

DG says "Available now."
DG salesman says "Can you delay your purchasing decision for a month?"
Customer says "Product not ripe.  Also, Motorola tends to pre-announce A LOT,
	and they haven't announced anything (other than DG's ECL implementation)"

My point is that a relative unknown like DG is breaking into a market where they
have not had a product before, and in which they have no reputation.  From my
point of view, they need to do as little pre-announcing as possible, and just
deliver the product so people can try it out.  Also, they should minimize the
touting of benefits that are really only theoretical right now, like the 88K ABI.