Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The base model 7300 shipped with 1MB RAM and a 20MB drive, but I believe a 40MB drive was an option.
The 3B1 I got shipped with 2MB RAM and a 72MB drive. A client of the systems house I worked for had a 3B1 like that supporting a user on teh console and four dumb terminals and a printer, running a specialized distribution management application. Performance was acceptable.
The drives were MFM drives, which pre-dated IDE. Performance was surprisingly good. Among other things, there was a compiler option you could set to compile code that could be paged directly off the drive for faster access. I had lots of fun figuring out how to get an 18.X version of Gnu Emacs to successfully compile that way. (The trick turned out to be in the order of the arguments to the ld command that linked the compiled object modules into an executable the system could run.)
Another friend was a big fan of them, and I believe he still has something like five working 7300s and 3B1s.
I was tickled by a machine that would boot and run AT&T Unix System V Release 2, a full multi-user, multitasking OS, and do useful work with adequate performance in one [b]megabyte[/i] of RAM. I added expansion cards to bring mine to 3.5MB RAM. It flew.
I looked at my 10mhz 3B1 running full multi-user, multitask Unix System V R2. Then I looked at my 33mhz 386 box with [b]8[/8]MB RAM struggling to run Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a multitasking shell on top of a single user, single tasking OS, gazed in the direction of Redmond, WA, and said "What are you doing?" I still say that. 
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Dennis |
I hate to argue, but I was doing tech support for GBS (General Business Systems) right after the first divestiture, and the 7300 came with half height 10MB and 20MB hard drives and 512K or 1M RAM(an early base model had a 5MB drive, but it was useless and never released). The 3B1 came with a full height 40MB or 67MB drives and 1M RAM. There were a few odd variants that were being tested just before the line was discontinued, and you could run even larger capacity hard drives if you replaced the WD controller chip, but I'm sure those were the only models AT&T sold.
Documentation is sparse on the web these days, but I did find this:
http://www.oldcomputers.net/att-unix-pc.html
Note that the image they include is a 3B1, with the monitor pedestal to accommodate a full height drive.