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From: mrl@oddjob.UUCP (Scott R. Anderson)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: MacWorld Show impression
Message-ID: <1467@oddjob.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Sep-86 05:55:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: oddjob.1467
Posted: Fri Sep  5 05:55:44 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Sep-86 23:57:51 EDT
References: <853@wang.UUCP> <1466@oddjob.UUCP> <146@apple.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrl@oddjob.UUCP (Scott R. Anderson)
Distribution: net
Organization: University of Chicago, Department of Physics
Lines: 51

In article <146@apple.UUCP> tecot@apple.UUCP (Ed Tecot) writes:
>In article <1466@oddjob.UUCP> mrl@oddjob.UUCP (Scott R. Anderson) writes:
>>>For the truly extravagant, it's worth noting that the Big Picture is
>>>Prodigy 4 compatible.  Let's see: Prodigy 4 = $6995, Big Picture = $1595
>>>(show price), Mac Plus = $1299 (developer's price).  So, for less than $10K,
>>>you could blow your mind completely.  Oh, but you'd probably want a SCSI disk
>>>or two...
>>How much for a 70MB disk?  A couple thousand, I'd guess.  And a backup
>>tape drive?  Another grand.  Sounds like you're talking $13K-$14K.
>>For that price, you could get a standalone Sun Workstation....
>Yes, but I'd rather have the Prodigy 4 - it can run circles around a Sun.
>(You may think I'm joking, but benchmarks here show the Prodigy 4 as
>being faster than any workstation to date; about 1/3 the MIPS of a Cray 1-S)

Not joking, but a little behind the times, I suspect.  You are probably
talking about a Sun-2, which was a ~0.5 MIPS machine.  Sun doesn't even
make those anymore.  The Sun-3 has the same CPU/coprocessor as the Prodigy
4, a 16MHz 68020/68881, so they are both ~2 MIPS machines.  (Given that
the Cray 1-S is ~80 MIPS, the 1/3 figure is approximately correct).

>Of course I have yet to see UltraRogue for the Mac :-)

As someone else pointed out, this may be the important difference; there
is a huge base of software for UNIX machines, and Suns have one of the
most faithful BSD implementations around.  It will be a long time before
the Mac catches up (unless, of course, it goes UNIX, too :-).  One thing
to consider, though, is that commercial software for Suns is typically
an order of magnitude more expensive than Mac software (the result of
larger budgets, I'm sure; this is known as the IBM-PC syndrome).  It
is also less likely to take advantage of the Sun window system, as it
can lean on the underlying UNIX.

My feeling is that the above Mac configuration would only be worth it
if you already had a heavy investment in Mac software, and really
needed the extra power (although if you needed that power in the first
place, you probably wouldn't have gotten a Macintosh).  This was even
more true before Levco lowered their prices; I laughed when I first
saw them.

Anyway, this whole discussion seems a little premature, given that
we were just comparing Macs and Amigas :-).

-- 

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