looking for Sun/RT comparison

[Nicholas J. Simicich]

franklin at turing.cs.rpi.edu (W. Randolph Franklin WRF) writes:
>Don't forget to check the absolute capabilities, as well as speeds.
>
>1. AIX has no job control, i.e. no foregrounding a background job.

This is true.

>2. The smaller RTs have small max memories, and (used to?) have no
>serial ports.

This statement is only partially true.  The desktop machines have just as
much memory capacity as the floor model machines do.  Or perhaps the
desktop I use really doesn't have 16 meg in it. :-)  It is true that the
desktop doesn't have the two planar serial ports.  It also doesn't have as
many of the AT/XT slots and it doesn't have internal space to plug in
three hard drives.  I find that I can just plug in the 'blazer card modem
into the AT bus, and use it, so the serial port is not really a
requirement on my home machine.  Additionally, the AT serial/parallel card
works, if you want to hook up an external modem, and there are also 4 and
8 port cards available.  I use a 3rd party 16 port card on a work machine.

>3. There are many 3rd party hw and sw suppliers for Sun.

There are many 3rd party hw and sw suppliers for the RT.  Remembering that
the RT has an AT style bus, many of the different cards will work.  Your
mileage may vary, but a recent posting in comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt spoke well of
getting cards that just worked.  The problem is driving the cards but
there is a /dev/bus protocol that allows access to the AT bus.  And, of
course, the PC emulator can drive many of the cards directly.  At least
some of the 3rd party folks will provide drivers.

As for software, I walked around Unix Expo, and not only were there lots
of 3rd party software people in the IBM booth, but many of the people with
their own booths were advertising support for the RT.  It seems that more
packages are ported every day.
>.....
-- 
Nick Simicich --- uunet!bywater!scifi!njs --- njs at ibm.com (Internet)