Sperry 5000/Arete' 1200 Unix Mini

On 10/14/11 9:46 AM, Al Kossow wrote: Byte Aug 1986 PROGRESS ON BIX BIX now (mid~June) has more than 6000 users and continues to grow rapidly. Growth was slowing system performance until we put four 68020s into the Arete 1200 in place of the three 68000s that were serving as processors. We also in~ . creased RAM from 4 megabytes to 8. To- gether with the twelve 68000s that han- dIe i/o. the four 68020s have made the Arete run with blazing speed again. We are considering the use of mUltiplexers, to increase the capacity of each port. and Sun's Network File System, to go beyond the capacity of one Arete 1200. David Betz, BIX senior editor and author of XLISP. has made a number of enhance~ ments to the BIX code since joining us. His new cyclic redundancy check routines have made downloads through packet nets (Tymnet) quite reliable and accurate. Other enhancements will make BIX easier to use. Programmers in New York are at work on direct~debit billing and corporate billing options to make BIX accessible to those who prefer not to use MasterCard or Visa. . McGraw-Hill has decided to send out re- quests for quote to provide the hardware for the next generation of BIX. The Arete machines are very much in the running. as are a number of other supermicros and some superminis. One large timesharing service wants to host BIX on Cyber main~ frames. -Phil Lemmons Editor in Chief