From: jasonb@cs.uwa.oz.au (Jason S Birch)
Subject: Re: Oh my God! Help my friend not buy an IBM!
Organization: Dept. Computer Science, University of Western Australia.
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 04:47:31 GMT

In <1992Nov13.023820.4322@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au> davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) writes:

>In article <jasonb.721537237@wambenger> jasonb@cs.uwa.oz.au (Jason S Birch) writes:
>>
>>ALRIGHT!!! Let's start a "my-clone-which-I-hate-blows-away-yours-anyday"
>>war! I have a machine here at uni the same as Skip's except it only has
>>one 245M harddrive, and another 33MHz 486 EISA machine with mostly the
>>same except no sound card but with 64Megs of RAM.

>That's all very well, but we don't all waste money on high end PCs.  The
>attitude around here is, if you need 64 megs, you're doing something real, so
>go the whole way and get a workstation!  So, my 486 here is only a DX33, with
>8 megs, an 80 MB HD, and a Tseng SVGA.  But, I'm waiting for an upgrade of a
>SPARCstation 2 to a new SPARC 10 (86 MIPS !) with 64 MB RAM, and two 1.3 GB
>hard drives.  So, I'm not real impressed by these killer 486's of yours...
> :-)

Neither are we :). That's why we don't use them for much... Basically
our problem is that several of us have very computationally-intensive
projects that take in the order of several weeks to run and so our
supervisor is always looking for the cheapest method to get MIPS.
Unfortunately for us, that happens to be PC's :(. (We've even got an
i860 card in one of them somewhere we bought from the US for $US5000.
One of my fellow postgrads tried the Star (I think that's the name) that
the Engineering Dept has, and that was only marginally better than the
SPARC 2). Also unfortunately for us, our supervisor hates UNIX (he feels
that an OS gets in the way and slows the machines down too much :( ) so
I guess we can only dream of a SPARC 10...

>> The only other things they get used for is tetris under
>>DOS and minesweeper under Windows 3.1, and occasionally writing up
>>papers using Word for Windows 2.0. We use the Sun's for pretty much
>>everything else.

>Exactly.  You can get Sun versions of Tetris, ya know...

Well, I was exaggerating a bit :). *Currently* that's all they get used
for because one of my collegues is at a conference in France, one is in
the US, and I'm not doing any programming at the moment. When we do use
them, we tend to develop under Unix, and then port the code to the PC using
GCC. 

>>Please do! My project involves animation, so if you can show the A4000
>>is worthwhile I might be able to convince my supervisor to buy one :). I
>>can dream, can't I?

>Personally, I think that if you lot can blow money on high-end PCs that you
>don't use much, you must be rolling in it, so go with an SGI system!

Actually, the total price of those 2 PC's (we have others, but not so
decked-out) is about $AUS12000, if I remember correctly. You could buy,
umm... say 3 colour X-terminals with that? Half a SPARC-2? I wish we
could afford an SGI system! :) At least I have *some* hope of being able
to convince my supervisor to fork out $5000 for an Amiga (but not
much :( ).

>-- 
>David Meiklejohn (also known as davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au)
> - Regional support guy for PC's, Unix, and networks thereof.
> - But I'd rather be using an AMIGA!  Wouldn't you?
>Find me in Mareeba, Australia (on the pointy bit in the northeast)
-- 
Mr Jason Birch                       _--_|\  Internet: jasonb@cs.uwa.edu.au
Department of Computer Science      /      \ Tel (work): +61 9 380 1840
The University of Western Australia *_.--._/ Fax (work): +61 9 380 1126
Nedlands  W. Australia  6009              v  Tel (home): +61 9 386 8630
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy