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Aucbvax.1696 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!LYNCH@USC-ISIB Sat Jun 13 04:15:33 1981 Personal computer traits One quality that a personal computer has to have is that is has to tackle non baby problems. Two examples: WE have an IBM 5120 system to do some internal financial expenditure tasks. The software from IBM is rather reasonable for this task. (The 5120 is a small business system that costs around $20K.) Well, we have had to contort the heck out of the software to accomodate the size of the transaction file we need to use. Result -- the system runs incredibly slowly due to "overlays". Second example: We also have an Apple. I run Visicalc to do financial forecasting/modelling/budgeting. Visicalc is incredibly simple to use and to get results from in minutes. But don't try to run anything other than a toy problem on it. It is memory bound (both in real and virtual address space) as implemented on the Apple. Conclusion: PCs have to have a "daddy" machine to toss the problems to when the PC cannot handle the size of the data (either in address space or in quantity of processing). The "daddy" machine must execute the application packages with no modification. The "daddy" machine must be trivially accessible to the PC machine (on a common network).

The PCs that are on the current horizon are all "unique" products. They are not part of larger product lines from standard computer manufacturers. (There must be a message in there somewhere about "revolution"!) somewhere about "revolution!\!"!) Are we walking into a trapwalking into a trap?

Dan -------

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