[3848] in Central_America
Re: New quotes for Sun Nov 24
bjaspan@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (bjaspan@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Nov 24 14:33:47 1991
it extends so that by 1990 each student can be provided with a
workstation at a total system cost of about 10% of M.I.T tuition.
Well, let's see. In 1991, 10% of MIT tuition is around $1,700. For
that, you can easily get a 386 box with a few meg of RAM, a VGA or
better monitor, a 40 to 80 meg hard disk, a 2400 baud modem, and an
ethernet card. If the machine you buy is made by IBM or a growing
list of clone manufacturers (AST, Compaq, etc.) it will come with OS/2
2.0 which, in a couple months (ie: when I'm done hacking on it) will
run all of the Athena software.
That's just what I know about. You could probably also get a
Macintosh for a similar quantity of money, although I don't know the
state of Athena software for the Mac. I think that NeXT machines
still cost over $2k.
So it appears that goal was met, albeit a year or so late (which is
not very surprising). Now, if MIT ever gets around to networking all
dorms and ILGs, we'll be all set. :-)
