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From: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Ethan V. Munson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Boycott Apple Again -- Now about Suns
Message-ID: <26115@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 16 Sep 88 15:28:34 GMT
References: <358@island.uu.net> <626@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <406@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> <621@hscfvax.harvard.edu>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Ethan V. Munson)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 49

I think that this discussion has gone quite astray.  Suns and Macs are,
for 99.5% of the computing world, oranges and apples.  

A Macintosh is designed to be a standalone personal computer that will 
basically run correctly from the moment it is turned on.  It is designed
around the assumption that the user is not very sophisticated about
computing.

Suns are diskless workstations, which can be given local disks to allow 
them to run in standalone mode.  A Sun can only be used easily when
there is a sophisticated system manager available who will work out the
kinks in issues like swap space, disk partitions, etc..  If you are such
a person or are part of an organization that already has such a person,
a Sun may be a good choice.  There is lots of free software that runs on
Suns and is useful.  For much of it, though, you may need to run make,
extract shell archives, and run dbx from time to time.  However, I
don't think you can find a $150 WYSIWIG word processor for the Sun that
will print on a $500 dot matrix printer.

In my experience, the only time that Suns and Macs become comparable is
when you talk about the bottom of Sun's line (3/50 with a 70meg SCSI
disk) and the top of Apple's (Mac II with 80Meg disk, A/UX, 5+Meg of
RAM).

Network based Sun systems do appear to be more fragile than Macintosh
systems (which do not depend on the network for critical resources, like
virtual memory).  Some of the fault lies with Sun's decision to
trade-off reliability for speed and simplicity in the Network File
System.  But much of the time, any problems arise from the decisions
made by the administrators of the local system to spend $5000 on a new
3/50 instead of another 4 Meg of memory for the file server.  A Sun is a
good machine if you are a programmer or can afford to hire one.  A Mac
is a good machine no matter who you are, but is not as good as a Sun for
computer science research and some other technical pursuits.

Pardon my little harangue,

Ethan Munson
munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU
...ucbvax!renoir!munson


-----------------

	"I don't know if they scare the enemy,
		but they certainly scare me."

			--Wellington, speaking of the moral character
				      of his troops