UNIX Competition
10 messages in this thread
Steve, remember the Sun/ATT and 386/SCO UNIX competition? Sun/ATT won on
both price and performance. Performance sure, you say, but price?
Do you know the Sun line? For our basic machine, we settled on the Sun IPC,
a 25 MHz SPARC workstation with 8 MB RAM, 207 MB Hard Drive, 1.44MB floppy,
and 16" color (1152*900, 8-bit color) monitor with Open Windows, AutoCad,
and Ingres as the starter software. Sun's price was about $7700 a station.
I could not duplicate the setup on a name brand 386 for less than $9500. A
386 server was cheaper than a Sun 330 server by about $8000, but I broke
even on the fifth workstation. (Our initial order is for the 330 server, 2
SPARC 1+'s, and 6 IPC's). The SPARC 1+'s will be mini-servers for future
IPC clusters, so they figured in differently ($4,000 cheaper than a 386
server).
The price comparison was based on ISA and EISA machines with 386/387 chips
running at least 20 Mhz and other features comparable to the Suns from
Compaq, Unisys, and H-P.
Since we were working with loaner equipment; I was able to avoid actually
buying any of the 386's. As a result of other performance anomalies
relating to specific 386 boxes, we also cancelled all pending and future
orders for MSDOS machines.
Just thought you'd like to know, Rob.
Rob, I thought the IPC was priced at around $10,000. How did you get it for
$7,700? It does look like a great machine.
Dan, I think the list price IS something like $9,999, but not even Sun
sells at list. The price quote was from Sun's San Francisco office; with a
smaller hard drive, the price was right around $7,000 flat. I have to
confess a weakness for the SLC – the Mazda Miata of computers?
Rob, the problem with the SLC is that it doesn't come with a hard drive.
If you have an ethernet network and room on the system drives for your
files, then it's just NFS to the rescue no problem. But not everyone has
such a large fileserver.
I was always wondering: is there room internally for a hard drive if you
wanted one? You need an external hard drive, right?
— Ethan
Ethan,
This really isn't the place for it, but I guess if Tryg can ask Mac
questions, I can answer Sun questions. :-).
There is no room internally for a hard drive in an SLC, and the power
supply would not handle it anyway. You can indeed add on an external HD.
-larry
I don't see why we can't talk about other machines here, as long as it
doesn't come to dominate the discussions. Enough people here are interested
in computers in general that it would seem important. No reason to insulate
ourselves from the rest of the world just because we know we have the best
computer ever made! 8^)
On another note, the Viking Moniterm monitor is 4 gray-scale, but is the
Commodore Hedley monitor 4 g-s or monochrome?
— Ethan
Really don't know Ethan. I was under the impression it was the same as the
Viking Moniterm, but I could be wrong.
-larry
Commodore describes it as a monochrome monitor, that's why I was
wondering.
— Ethan
Larry, I agree with Ethan; a little Sun talk shouldn't hurt, especially
since UNIX and networking are just around the corner for the Amiga. Plus
Commodore DID choose OpenLook compatibility, no?
Why….they're practically the same machine. 🙂 Rob.
Ethan, You're right; there's no room inside the SLC, but you can hang boxes
externally – there's a SCSI port and a serial port I think. Doesn't bother
me to run totally off the server – ours is starting small at 669 MB but
will grow. And it really is a Slick Little Computer. Rob.