Unix on WICAT workstations

[hgb at godzilla]

    Date: Monday, 20 May 1985 09:11-EDT
    From: cb at MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA
    
      We're thinking about getting Unix for our WICAT 150 workstations.  Has
    anyone out there had any experiance in using Unix on the WICAT?  A WICAT
    salesman has told us we need at least 1mb of RAM and at least 28mb of disk,
    are these reasonable figures or has experiance shown that Unix requires
    more?  How well will a WICAT running Unix handle emacs, etc.?  Reply to me
    and I'll summerize for the net.
    					Thanks,
    
    					Christopher Byrnes
    					cb at MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA
    
I use Wicat UNIX 2.4 on my 150.  Yes, you need at least 20 Mbytes or more
to really use UNIX.  Yes, you can run UNIX, but you won't be able to
run CCA Emacs without 1 megabyte of memory.

You're really lucky to be doing this now, and not have had to live
through the first several years of Wicat UNIX.  The current system,
2.4 is a version of Version 7 UNIX, and works quite well.  The
Wicat 5 1/4 disk is about 50% faster than the Callan disk, but
still not all that fast (it does not do 1-1 interleaving).  I would
suggest an SMD disk for any real multi-user stuff (the Wicat
160/200).

I replaced the small 5 1/4" disk with a Maxtor 140 megabyte disk,
which works fine, although you can only use 8 out of the 15 heads,
due to the 3 bit head number in the Wicat controller.  Thus, only
about 70 megs out of the 140 are usable.   That done, I increased
the size of the swap space to 16 megabytes, which eliminated
all of the swap full errors that I had been getting.

In order to configure the system to use a new disk, you only have
to change (with ADB) two tables--both the same format.  One of them
is in the boot loader, which needs to know about the disk, and the
other is in UNIX itself, in the disk controller.  The system is set
up to recognize 5 different disks plus the floppy, so you can easily
hack up one of the unused elements of the table to work for your
new disk.

I have had no experience at all with Wicat's new System V, because it
isn't very 4.2-ish.

With 2 megabytes of real memory, I have been able to run Franz
Lisp just fine.