On Wed, 13 Sep 1995, George Stachnik wrote:
 
> Well, to be fair, those costs (which came from a slideset which I helped put
> together), you can buy a 64 license HPUX box for about $10,000.  The extra
> costs that you're quoting represent additional software required to bring the
> UNIX box up to a level of functionality roughly on a par with what you get for
> $56K with an MPE box.  In a high school environment, you may not need that.
> What you get with UNIX (even LINUX) may be enough.  If so - more power to you.
 
  I understand, since I don't gear my HP stuff (which, due to age, I'm
praying holds together) to heavy duty, mission critical apps, that I may
be biased in some ways.  However, there are many nice things about UNIX,
such as it's open system design (which MPE is moving to), and it's
networking that make it a first rate platform, which, unfortunately, MPE
has a long way to go to meet.  I intern at a company that deals with huge
databases (one around 4 Terabytes I believe), and they use Convex for
connectivity.  MPE is cool, but for NFS, RPC, etc, there is still some
work to be done.  One problem with MPE is that it isn't UNIX.
Unfortunately, in the environment I work in, where people know VMS and
UNIX, and can program accordingly in C/C++, shell scripts, awk, perl,
etc., and know those OS's, no one has even heard of MPE.  MPE platforms
replacing UNIX systems, or migrating into a UNIX environment, will
require some master planning or training costs.  One would have to have a
seemless interface, which takes up system resources, or one will have to
train employees to MPE, or one will have to port their apps from UNIX to
MPE.  Judging by POSIX on VMS, I would suppose MPE POSIX is just as slow
or bulky, but I could be wrong.  (MPE has VMS blown away by miles,
IMHO).  I would love to see interconnectivity and true open design, but I
feel that it's still a ways off.
 
> tend to be large corporations running mission critical applications, that are
> willing to spend a lot of extra money to get MPE reliability.  Once again, to
> each his own....
 
  Yes, I know there are.  But, there are just as many institutions that
have a hodge-podge, and cater to employees who prefer one brand/system
over another (ie Sun over HP, or HP over Sun, etc) and still maintain MPE
systems at the core.  Of course, there are those pesky things some call
PC's... :)
 
> unfair.  You'll find that virtually every technology that we are going to
> talk about on next week's broadcast works just as well with low-end Sun
> workstations as it does with HP-UX.
 
  Well, it depends, like many other things.  Of course, I don't know the
topics off hand, but after modifying a few apps to work with System V as
opposed to a BSD environment, there will always be some tweaking between
the AT&T System V based HP UX, and the multitude of BSD's out there.
 
> I wouldn't disagree with you.  It would be interesting to see how much it would
> cost you to upgrade your MPE/V box to an MPE/iX box - which would get you the
> connectivity you need, a lot more power, potentially lower support costs (in
> some cases, low enough to pay for the upgrade), and open the doors to a lot
> more functionality.  Just a thought.
 
  Hmm... something I've been pondering, if we have the money.  I need
UNIX systems at the present time more so than MPE systems.  Of course,
any Series 9xx would be such a wonderful upgrade.  I'd even want to go
into 5.5 beta testing!  But, I need Internet hosts and UNIX class computers.
My 3000's right now will service up to 60 people (tight) so they aren't
on the top of the agenda for replacement, unless the price is VERY right.
 
Daniel Kosack -= LinuxMan =-
 
               A clock cycle is a terrible thing to waste.  -- me.