home unix on the cheap

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

In article <34345 at srcsip.UUCP>, jkimball at SRC.Honeywell.COM (John Kimball) writes:
|  I've started to think about acquiring a home Unix machine, to replace my
|  CP/M machine.
|  
|  The main purposes would be
|      o email and news
|      o ability to run most of the freely-redistributable software we use
|        at work (mainly GNU stuff)

  If you really only want what you describe, buy a used unix-pc. It's
slow and somewhat limited, but it will do what you want and should be
<$1000 for the machine and software.

  If you want more performance buy a cheap 386 and cheap UNIX. The
unmodified SysV versions like ix/386 and ESIX have the AT&T compiler,
Xenix has it's own, more ANSI features, cross compiles to DOS, costs
more. Having used both I find about the same number of bugs in each, but
diferent bugs. If you don't need ANSI or DOS go with the regular SysV
or SCO UNIX, has both compilers and does OS/2 (whoopee?).

  If you want cheap BSD look for a refurbished Sun-2. A friend of mine
got one with mono and color for about $2k. They are advertised in the
magazines from time to time.

Repair
======

  unix-pc - good luck. There are places which do it.
  386 - warantee, lots of places repair.
  Sun-2 - ask locally, it varies. Usually not cheap.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon