RatFor on the IBM PC/AT

[Dan Messinger]

>>I've a question of my own about Unix/Xenix on the AT.  Benchmarks have 
>>shown only a 2-3 times speed advantage of the AT over the PC.  If you use 
>>a multi-user OS, doesn't the overhead pretty much eat up that advantage, 
>>giving you in effect only PC capability?

Off hand, this may seem obviously true, but in practice, (when MS-DOS is the
single user system), I have discovered the opposite.   I haven't tried any
benchmarks on the AT, but I did do some on a PC running DOS and Venix.  I
was quite surprised to discover the Venix gave me better overall performance
than MS-DOS did.  The difference was not significant in value, just in
direction.  The most significant difference was in system request performance.

Dan Messinger
ihnp4!umn-cs!digi-g!dan