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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17447)	2/13/1998 1:28:00 PM
From: damniseedemons	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Dan, I was careful to say "NT-based systems." So in all, standard PC hardware is generally a lot less expensive than a Solaris/Sparc-based system. And it appears that a big selling point for Wintel is that they offer superb price/performance. Hydra has been in beta for quite some time.

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (17447)	2/15/1998 12:53:00 PM
From: K. M. Strickler	Respond to of 24154

Dan, Good post! One observation that I make is that as the 'bus' widens, the reported 'ram' goes wacko! In the days of the 8 bit machine, a 'byte' was a 'word', and since the computer generally addresses memory by the word, the interchange was really transparent. Now as the the 'word' increased from 8 bits to 16 bit ( 2 bytes ), a 'meg' of ram was all of a sudden 512K words! (remember that when addressing, all of the space that is used for the address portion, while pointing to the address, is 'functionally' wasted, or shall I say doesn't perform an operation!) Next we jump to the 32 bit format, and all of a sudden, our 1 'meg' ram is 256K words. As the migration is made to the new 64 bit format, our 1 'meg' is now only 128K words! So actually, just increasing the bus width from 8 to 64 bits, without any other functionality, the 1 'meg' of ram now has to be 8 'meg'! ( 1 meg - 8 bit 'words' changes to 1 meg - 64 bit 'words' ) Once that 'word' size is taken into account, a program that requires 64 meg storage space, depending on the 'word' size used may only be 8 meg 'words' long? ( That means that the 8.4G hard disk that I bought is really only 1.05G at 64 bits wide! Data, on the other hand, is stored in the byte to character range - or better depending on compression - since data 'means nothing' to the computer! ) Thoughts? Ken