At 11:46 AM 10/25/96, Marcus Daniel wrote:
>What am I supposed to think of Apple Computers ? They only showed me
>their worst side. I have an old 486 Intel running Linux, I plan to buy a
>new and better computer, I want to spend some bucks. Is Apple giving me
>any reason to buy one of their products ? No !
>And I dearly would like to try some new non-Intel system, which does run
>a UNIX and isn't as expensive as a SUN.

What you complain about is stuff most of us have gotten used to, perhaps
because we got our Mac's first to run MacOS.

If you want to use non-Apple peripherals you need to get the support
someplace besides Apple.  Either you buy peripherals that come with full
Macintosh support (HP printers come to mind), or you spend extra money
buying that support (FWB Hard Disk and CD_ROM Toolkits come to mind).  Is
this really so very different from dealing with Compaq or IBM?

If you want to run Unix on cheap hardware then Intel (or AMD or Cyrix) is
probably your best bet.  If you want to avoid PClones, but want something
cheap then a used 68040 Mac is probably your next best bet.  (Make sure you
don't get a machine with a 68LC040.)  I don't know what they cost used, but
I can say that the 840AV I just got makes a very nice Unix machine.  It's
actually well within an order of magnitude of my SPARCstation 5 performance
wise.  Steve Allen speaks highly of his Q610 (but it has the full '040).

If you want a *fast* single-user free-Unix workstation then a DEC alpha is
a good bet.

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