Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-sally!utastro!anita
From: anita@utastro.UUCP (Anita Cochran)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Sun 386i vs. Sun 3
Keywords: Byte review, comparison wanted
Message-ID: <2833@utastro.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jun 88 17:26:59 GMT
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 24

The latest issue of Byte magazine has a review of the Sun 386i, which
is their 80386 machine with UNIX and DOS running in a window.  I read
the review and it was all oriented towards what the machine can do as
a DOS machine.  The final paragraph was something like "Oh incidentally,
this machine runs UNIX too but it takes a guru to set it up".  This
seems like a backwards approach to the machine since Sun's forte is
UNIX and isn't it nice you can occasionally run a piece of DOS software
(for certain applications such as database and spreadsheets, there are 
more and better programs for DOS).

Now, I am not a UNIX guru but I am a system administrator so I doubt
that I couldn't set things up and run efficiently unless Sun has
done something really strange.  Have they?  How good a box is the
Sun 386i?  Ignoring the DOS aspects, how does the 386i compare
to the standard Sun 3 running on the 68020?  The price for the 386i
quoted in Byte looked quite high -- ~$18K for the more capable machine.
Can't you do better, price-wise, with a Sun 3/60?  Is the 3/60 as
good a machine?

-- 
 Anita Cochran  uucp:  {noao, ut-sally, ut-emx}!utastro!anita
                arpa:  anita@astro.as.utexas.edu  
                snail: Astronomy Dept., The Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX, 78712
                at&t:  (512) 471-1471