Hardware Platforms

[Gary D. Duzan]

In Message <2c4caf97.davgar@davgar.arlington.va.us> ,
   David Garfield <david@davgar.arlington.va.us> wrote:

=>On Fri, 16 Jul 93, Gary D. Duzan wrote:
=>
=>>    On another note, what is the group's opinion of Ada? Rumor has
=>> it that GNU Ada is around the corner, so it might be another option
=>> for implementation language.
=>
=>Ada?!?  A language designed by government committee that couldn't even
=>fulfill it's design goal?  Lets not use it, even if GNU Ada does
=>exist.
=>
   True, this is the natural reaction to anything handed down from the
government. However, though I haven't looked at it in a while, the
language has a number of nice features that make it a possibility.
Ever looked at military specs for electronic equipment? Ada is designed
to build software to similarly high standards of reliability.  Most of
the negative things I have heard about it are related to the complexity
of compiler construction, but if we get a compiler from GNU, then that
isn't an issue. I'd rather look at the language from its merits. I'll
be looking over my Ada programming manual again to formulate my own
opinion.

=>I too have been thinking of upgrading to an Alpha, and wouldn't mind
=>seeing it as an initial Moose platform.  Gary, do you have
=>information, likes, dislikes, or information sources (email addresses,
=>snail mail addresses, or phone numbers for inquiries) about the Alpha
=>(or other modern RISC architectures) you would like to share?
=>
   I have DEC Systems & Hardware catalogs, as well as the Alpha
Architecture Reference Manual. What do you want to know? A reasonably
configured low-end standalone Alpha 3000/300L (100Mhz (85.0 SPECmark),
32MB RAM, 425MB Hard Drive, 2.8MB Floppy, CD-ROM Drive, 17" Grey Scale
Monitor, 1024x768 8 plane graphics, OSF/1 Unix) is about $7716. A new,
low cost version of the Alpha is due out by the end of the year with an
EISA architecture and Windows NT. (And it might even have a little left
over RAM and disk, too.) OSF/1 is also in the works for the DECpc AXP.

                                        Gary Duzan
                                        Time  Lord
                                    Third Regeneration
                         Humble Practitioner of the Computer Arts