Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!SCROLLS.WHARTON.UPENN.EDU!shull From: shull@SCROLLS.WHARTON.UPENN.EDU Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: Academic workstations Message-ID: <8906101932.AA06247@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu> Date: 10 Jun 89 19:32:55 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 47 I strongly recommend Apollo workstations! They are extremely price / performance competitive with the machines you mentioned, and as of the last time I compared (last December), even more than competitive. That is Apple, Dec, HP, IBM, and Sun weren't even close. We got a DN3500 with 68030 at 25 Mhz, with 68882 math chip, 155 MB disk, 15" color monitor and 4 MB of RAM, Ethernet card, and an array of useful software licenses for about $9K. This machine is generally considered to perform at about 4 MicroVAX Units of Performance (as DEC says), or 4 MIPS, or 10 of what Sun calls MIPS (which seems to be related to the phases of the moon, and inversely proportional to the number of days since the product was introduced, ie. gets performance decreases over time. :-( ) All of this naturally depends on exactly who is going to be using the workstations and for what. Are we talking Assembly programming? :-( Or UNIX hacking? CAD, ECAD? Circuit simulation? A.I.? Expert Systems? X-Windows and User Interface Management Systems (UIMS)? All of the above can bve done on Apollos, although their competition may tell you that they don't run "Real UNIX". Well, we just ported some major chunks of code from "other" UNIX systems, and it seemed painless to me! Further- more, Bill Joy of Sun has recently made several comments about how Sun's OS is going to become more proprietary! (Solbourne must be giving Sun prickly heat! :-) ) With respect to reliability and quality of hardware and software, Apollos are excellent on both counts. Again, comparing with Sun, Apollo's beta releases of software tend to be better than Sun's general releases. With respect to performance, one of the PhD Candidates here, who runs many benchmarks on many different types of systems commented that Apollos always run faster than equivalently priced computers from the competition! If you would like to pick my brain about anything else, like the fantastic Apollo DOMAIN Users Society, special Educational/University relations with Apollo (for source code and very inexpensive maintenance), please feel free to write or call. -Chris Christopher E. Shull Decision Sciences Department The Wharton School shull@wharton.upenn.edu University of Pennsylvania shull@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104-6366 215/898-5930 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" Admiral Farragut, USN, 1801-1870 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------