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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!csri.toronto.edu!mart
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer
From: mart@csri.toronto.edu (Mart Molle)
Subject: Re: mac emulation
Message-ID: <1990Mar10.151440.5043@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Summary: stand alone SUNs are not such a good deal after all
Keywords: disks, backup
Organization: University of Toronto, CSRI
References: <14122@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> <39182@apple.Apple.COM> <1990Mar6.071906.4235@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <1990Mar6.160205.21005@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Distribution: usa
Date: 10 Mar 90 20:14:40 GMT
Lines: 48

In article <1990Mar6.160205.21005@caen.engin.umich.edu> billkatt@mondo.engin.umich.edu (billkatt) writes:
>
>Hmmm..  Maybe everyone at Apple thinks a Sun 3/60 costs $25,000.  Maybe they
>think their machines are cheap.
>>> 
>>> The current list for a 3/80 4MB 17" mono machine (diskless) is 6K.  Do
>>> you still think a IIci is all that much cheaper?  A sparcstation I, 8MB
>>> 17" mono is 9K.
>
>Sure, but everyone who DOESN'T work at AT&T has to buy a Unix license.  How
>much is that?  Last I remember, SunOS/UNIX cost ~$1500.

There's more to setting up a SUN you can run as a standalone system
than just buying your own UNIX license.  Any Mac can run Mac OS via
floppies.  Furthermore, a 40-80 Meg hard disk is "ample" for holding
the OS and leaving plenty of room for user files, applications, silly
inits and sounds, etc.  It is also possible to back up a 40-80 Meg
hard disk to 1.44Meg floppies...

A SUN 3/xx or SparcStation, on the other hand, needs about 300Meg of 
disk to fit All Those Standard Unix Things (like grep, cat, the online
manual, some fonts so you can run a windowing package, etc.), and it
is not reasonable to try backing *that* up to floppies.  Everyone here
who has a standalone SUN has either one humungus disk and a streaming
tape drive, or two humungus disks (one a backup copy of the other).

Also, if you plan to run your SUN *diskless*, then you need to add on
in the cost of about 1/6 of a file server (probably costing about $60K,
near as I can tell extrapolating from "foreign" prices...).  So diskless
SUNs are not that cheap either.  (And, yes, I know something about SUNs,
since I'm typing this on the SUN 3/60 that sits on my desk at the 
university, and I'm the one who signed the P.O. that paid for All Those
Servers down the hall...)

I recently bought a Mac IIci to run at home, stand alone.  I considered
a SUN 3/80 and SparcStation I, too, but decided on the Mac because the
minimal functional standalone price was *much* cheaper.  The comparison
was between a Mac IIci 4/80 running Mac OS versus a SUN 3/80 or SparcStation I
with 2 160Meg disks and tape backup running Sun OS and X windows.  A year
ago, I tried pricing a NeXT cube too, and it was even more than the SUNs...

All prices included comparable educational discounts.

Mart L. Molle
Computer Systems Research Institute
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
(416)978-4928