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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