Opinions on Solbourne computers wanted

[Neil Gorsuch]

In article <3402 at kalliope.rice.edu> prc at erbe.se (Robert Claeson) writes:
>I have in front of me a packet of marketing material on Solbourne's
>SPARC-equipped and Sun 4 compatible workstations. They sure look good.
>Being able to run SunOS and all Sun 4 applications and that.  And it has
>performance. But...

zardoz is a single processor Solbourne 4 model 500 with a color 19" screen
(the 12th according to the serial number) and handles the following with
ease: being the file server for 4 sun 3's, 45 uucp connections (26 of
which are news connections using B news), the unix security mailing list
which sends out a digest to ~500 destinations about once a week, a couple
of other smaller local mailing lists, a PC-NFS server, and being used as a
personal workstation by a "power user" that typically runs many things at
the same thing (me).  I can't compare it to a sun 4, since I just ordered
one and it isn't here yet, but it compiles, links, and installs gnu emacs
(including x and sunview support) in about 6 minutes.  It handles suntools
window operations very quickly, but does color x fairly slowly.  I expect
that once someone tweaks the x software, that will be very impressive too.
The present memory boards are 16 Mbytes each, and you need 32 Mbytes if
you don't want to thrash terribly under heavy load.  From what I can see,
it is perfectly compatible with suns.  The support from Solbourne is
excellent.  They have an 800 number in Colorado that is often manned into
the evenings, which is important to me in California.  When I call, I end
up talking to a knowledgeable engineer DURING the call, not when I get a
call back a month later as recently happened with I called a certain
nameless large computer company.  When I complained about the thin wire
ethernet being somewhat weak, they came out and installed a transceiver
free, which is not the usual case with other computer companies that I
have dealt with.  The model 500 is the cheapest way I know of to start
out, while still having the option of adding up to 2 soon to be announced
20 MIPS each cpu boards, and having up to 128 Mbytes of memory when the
new memory board is populated with 4 Mbit chips.  The scsi performance is
excellent, about 1.5 times faster than a sun 3 using the same scsi
shoeboxes with the same disk drives in them.  Take a model 500, put in a
couple of cpu boards, add some 16 mS or even 10.5 mS average access disks
from a friendly shoebox supplier (like me), and you have a VERY fast
server.  Overall, I am very impressed with Solbourne, and the price is
right.

Neil Gorsuch
Uninet
peripherals division of
Custom Product Design, Inc.
(800) 433-6784 outside California
(714) 546-1100 inside California
neil at cpd.com
uunet!zardoz!neil
1209 E. Warner
Santa Ana, CA  92705