Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ucla-cs!cit-vax!elroy!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!uvaarpa!hudson!biochsn!wrp
From: wrp@biochsn.acc.virginia.edu (William R. Pearson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: A Few Good Rumors...
Keywords: A/UX Unix
Message-ID: <253@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: 19 Feb 88 15:02:13 GMT
References: <1406@csib.csi.UUCP> <1575@uhccux.UUCP> <250@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> <1685@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Sender: news@hudson.acc.virginia.edu
Reply-To: wrp@biochsn.acc.Virginia.EDU (William R. Pearson)
Organization: University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Lines: 28


	I am reading this article on a SUN3/50 with a 71 Mbyte disk,
60 Mbyte tape cartridge, and 4 Meg of memory that costs (list) about
$10000.  I think that it is great for unix software development, reading
news, and ftp'ing stuff across the country.

	At home I have a MacII, and I suppose that if I bought it this
week with A/UX, and then added a tape drive, (which A/UX does not
currently support I read) it would cost a little more than $10,000.

	I don't have A/UX, but I love my Mac.  Before I got the machine,
I had no idea how much I needed programs that saved pictures in a common
format (PICT), and editors that could combine documents with this format.
Writing programs for the Mac is an incredible pain, but once they work,
and then use PICT windows or text windows that can be copied to other
places, they are great.

	I can't do anything like that with my sun.

	So an earlier observation is certainly correct, a sun makes a poor
MacII and a MacII makes a poor sun.  But I am happy with my MacII, and would
buy it over the sun, because it will take a lot less to get the MacII
to become a (albeit 80%) sun than it will to get the sun to become a MacII.
(And it is not at all clear how useful my Sun would be without the $200,000
of University network support).

Bill Pearson
wrp@virginia