Xenix + DOS in office of friend

[Richard L. Goerwitz]

I have a friend working as the legislative director for a downstate
Illinois congressional representative, and they have been using an
old mini for about fifteen years now.  It's high time they replaced
it, and they are looking for alternatives.  I'm going to offer a
brief resume of their situation here.  If anyone has any ideas to
pass on, I'd like to hear them (especially from anyone in the Wash-
ington area, whom they can call directly).

Basically the situation is this:  There is a < 2 MIPS mini with 1
meg of main memory and a 40 meg fixed disk serving a small office
of about ten people.  They want to upgrade.  The question is to
what?  Do they install a minicomputer (50-100k)?  Too expensive
for them, and they don't have enough users.  They would like to use
popular micro-based word processors (e.g. WordPerfect), but in or-
der to keep everyone connected to their central constituent data-
base, they would need to install a network of some kind.  The worry
there, though, is how seamlessly the networked database will inte-
grate with the separate PC environments.

Would it be better for them simply to go with a Unix CPU, and run
something like WordPerfect off of their existing terminals?  Or
should they go with a bunch of connected DOS machines?  Or should
they mix Unix with DOS using a popular networking system (e.g. No-
vell)?

I'm an academic, and have no idea how the various solutions compare.
Probably the things they are most concerned with are:

1) cost
2) reliability
3) portability
4) ease of use

The reliability issue hinges on how much intervention and system
maintenance will be necessary, and on how likely they are to need
to get help outside the office to solve routine problems.  Porta-
bility is a concern, in that they don't want to have to keep in-
stalling maintenance upgrades, or worse yet, entire system upgrades
and conversions.  The ease of use thing is on their minds because
they don't want to spend a lot on training clerical people.

I figured that if WordPerfect really did run well under Unix, they
could just drop in a Unix CPU in place of their old mini, and then
work off of existing (or cheap replacement) terminals.  WordPerfect,
being an office standard, would be easy to get training for, and the
Unix environment would make the usual DOS print spoolers, schedulers,
and special networking software unnecessary.  Is this a pipe dream?
Has anyone really tried it?

Other ideas?

-Richard (goer at sophist.uchicago.edu)