26 Jan
2002
26 Jan
'02
12:04 p.m.
--- John Allain <allain(a)panix.com> wrote:
- - - -point
Just compare the cost and features of the
PC/AT clones sold in, say, '87-88 with a similarly equipped microVAX-II.
The PC/AT would typically cost about $800 bucks, while a similarly
equipped uVaxII cost nearly $100K...
$100K? An 11/750 in 1982 cost that. In 1986, when they were first
out, a uVAX-II was about $30K for a standard system - 9MB of RAM and
a 73MB MFM drive. Yes the drives from DEC were expensive. They always
were poor at a price/capacity ratio, especially compared to third-parties.
That $800 AT may have had a larger disk, but it sure didn't have much
RAM. 41256 RAM chips in the tube (not assembled into boards) shot from
$3.50 each to $17.50 *each* in 1987 due to the U.S. Dept of Commerce
imposing dumping fees on Korean DRAM vendors. I was trying to populate
a Spirit Inboard (1.5MB) on my Amiga - 1MB x 9bits (parity) was going
for literally $630 per megabyte.
Also, the AT was old tech in 1987 and the uVAX-II was a year old. That
AT was $5K a couple years earlier when _it_ first came out - with 1Mb of
RAM and a 40Mb ST-251 drive.
Inside a year, the power cost alone exceeded the
PC/AT...
8A max draw for a BA-23 is 880 watts. At $0.08 / KWH (our rates in
Columbus), that's $0.07/hour in electricity, or $1.68/day or $613/year...
less than the cost of 1MB of RAM chips.
yet folks LOVED
the microVax and hated the PC/AT clone, that ran half-again as fast.
How many terminals could you put on that stock PC/AT clone? The regular
complement on a uVAX-II was 5 - console plus 4 DZV11 ports. How many
people could use the PC/AT clone at the same time? 1? Don't forget
that a *big* chunk of the price from DEC was the software license. If
you needed VMS, you *needed* VMS. The uVAX was near the *bottom* end of a
line of expensive machines and could nearly match integer (not I/O)
performance of an 11/780 that cost 10 times as much ($300K new in 1978 vs
$30K new in 1986).
That's another point - how fast could you pump bytes through a PC? The
ISA bus was 8MHz - and that doesn't mean 8 million 16-bit words per second.
The Qbus in a uVAX can pump over 1MB/sec, but I don't have the numbers
here in front of me.
Apples and oranges. Comparing a PC-AT and a uVAX-II - Yes... the PC clone
can add numbers faster, but there's lots of things it couldn't do, things
people with MicroVAXen *wanted* to do (1 machine for e-mail for the entire
department, as a personal example).
-ethan
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