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From: krowitz%richter@UMIX.CC.UMICH.EDU (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  review of _Digital_Review_ review of DN2500
Message-ID: <8912131603.AA17968@richter.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Dec 89 16:03:40 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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No flames whatsoever. The diskless DN2500's we have are 80% the
speed of our DN3500's. The price (for a university) was $2500 for
the 15" screen and $3400 for the 19" screen. Memory can be bought
from Apollo for about $500/MB (same as Sun charges for Sparcstation 1
memory) or from any IBM-PC clone memory manufacturer for about
$100/MB (we paid $115/MB for 1MBx9, 80ns memories from Allegence
Group, Inc). It's well known that the cost of disk drives is now
equal to or greater than the cost of the CPU, memory, and monitor
in a system, so seeing that the fully loaded system is 4X the base
model is not at all surprising. As for the fact that they're not
as fast as a high-end workstation ... what do you expect for a list
price of $3990? 

Well, what I got was a machine which is twice as fast as my
DN330's, DN560's, and DSP90's; three times faster than my
DN460's and DN660's; has higher resolution screens; holds
more RAM (16Mb with 1Mb SIMMS, 64Mb with 4Mb SIMMS) that
can be bought for 1/10th of what I had to pay for DN3000
memory; and that can be bought for a price ($2500) equal
to what I would pay for a 1Mb Mac SE/20 (MIT discount price
for a 1Mb machine with 68000 chip, no floating point, no
ethernet, low resolution screen, no virtual memory, 1 floppy
and 1 20Mb disk). At this price I can finally afford to
unplug the DN3xx/DN4xx/DN5xx/DN6xx machines and replace
them.


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet
(in order of decreasing preference)