Inexpensive Unix box?

[Snoopy]

In article <279 at geowhiz.UUCP> larry at geowhiz.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
>I have a friend (who won't be a friend anymore if Pnews chokes again)
>who bought an AT&T Unix PC.  He's happy with the performance but not
>with the hard disk.  The controller is the WD1010xx (which I think
>causes all the problems).  The problem appears to be that the disk gets
>randomly corrupted, leading to disk errors.  This poor guy has been
>restoring his 40M disk from floppies about once a day...  He has not
>been able to get the problem fixed despite intensive (?) efforts by
>AT&T (his service contract has no penalty clause).  So, two questions:
>
>1) Does anyone know how to fix the problem?  Want some quick $$$?

We had a similar problem with the 6130, which uses the WD2010.
The 2010 (and I suspect, the 1010) has a "misfeature", which
bites you if you try and get too fancy with the disk driver.
There's an easy fix, but you need source for the disk driver,
which I am assuming you don't have.

>2) Given that we expect minimal response to (1), he's looking for a 
>   different system.  Desired features:
>
>   o  32 architecture (at least internally, a 16bit bus is acceptable).
>   o  Unix, preferably 4.2, but SysV is better than MS-DOS :-)
>   o  At least 4 serial ports, 6 would be better.
>   o  1 or more parallel ports (laser printer).
>   o  Either a reliable supplier f peripherals or a well known bus 
>      (multi, VME, etc).
>   o  Availibilty of solid service highly desirable (no brand X).
>   o  Price tag of less than $15,000 (it is almost christmas :-)
>
>   Systems we've heard of (sort of) and want info on:
>
>   o  Altos
>   o  Symetrics
>   o  Integrated {Solutions | Systems}
>   o  Opus (320xx, SysV in a PC slot)
>   o  DSI-32 (Unix ready for this yet?)
>   o  Sun (Out of reach price wise?)
>   o  uVaxII (also expensive?)

Add the Tek 6130.  The base system includes: NS 32016 running at 10MHz,
1 MB RAM, floating point unit, 20MB wini, 2 rs232 ports, ethernet, GPIB.
It runs Utek, which is an enhanced version of 4.2, with some sys V things
added, and a distributed file system.  A system with 2 additional rs232
ports and 2 parallel printer ports is under $11k.

I'll be posting an announcement to net.announce.newprod soon
about the 'S' systems, which are bundled turnkey systems,
and release 2.2, which includes shared memory and user configurable
kernel.

Snoopy
tektronix!tekecs!doghouse.TEK!snoopy