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Aucbvax.6287 fa.works utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Wed Feb 24 22:16:40 1982 Wicat Graphics >From Jeffrey@OFFICE Wed Feb 24 22:12:25 1982

I recently visited Wicat at their home office in Orem Utah. They are located in A beautiful area about an hour's drive south of Salt Lake City - directly beneath what appears to be skier's heaven.

They are currently reworking the 150-WS (~$10000) workstation which is 68000 based. The renovations include a transition from Motorola's bus (Versabus?) to multibus, more dense memory (boards), incorporation of memory management (to truly be able to support multiple processes), and development of a "native" unix. Currently, Wicat "unix" is simply some utilities which run under MCS, the Wicat operating system. MCS looks a little like VAX VMS and a little like unix (very little).

The system 100 (~$20000) is in pretty good hardware shape. I believe Wicat is working on a DMA disk controller to replace the current bufferred controller. Software-wise, Wicat is progressing the system 100 from a few unix utilities to a lot of unix utilities to a true native unix. Wicat hopes native unix will run before summer.

One interesting thing is that Wicat thinks OEM'ers will like to develop applications under unix, but these applications might run under MCS therebye avoiding unix licensing charges for end users who don't care about unix. I'm not really sure how much this would save giving the falling cost of unix licenses.

Now, about graphics. Wicat offers a $900 board which may be added (post-purchase) to any Wicat VDT. The board adds medium resolution graphics. I don't remember the exact resolution - something like 300x400. At any rate, the demo was very impressive. Wicat graphics are for real.

I recently saw the graphics offered by Forward Systems whose 68000 workstation is patterned after the Stanford SUN workstation. The Forward graphics (1000x1000 and full of real time) were lovely. The Wicat graphics weren't nearly that fine, but for $900 they were very satisfying.

Jeffrey Stone

Menlo Park, Ca.

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