Opinions on Solbourne Computers wanted

Thu Jun 22 04:19:23 AEST 1989

A few weeks ago, I posted the following message to comp.sys.misc and
comp.sys.sun:

>From: rclaeson at erbe.se (Robert Claeson)
>Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
>Subject: Opinions on Solbourne computers wanted
>Reply-To: rclaeson at erbe.se (Robert Claeson)

>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...

>I haven't heard much about these quite new machines. Is there anyone
>out there who uses them? If so, I'd like to hear your opinions on
>the machines and the company Solbourne. Please reply via e-mail.
>I'll summarize to the net if I receive enough replies of interest.

*****

Well, there apparently is enough interest, since I received more "me too"
messages than real opinions. And now the messages has stopped dropping in,
so I felt that it was time to compile that summary and post it.

The rest of this article contains the replies I got, slightly edited (I
left out most of the headers and deleted a small part of one message).

Enjoy!

Robert

*****

>Date: 23 May 89 19:09:56 PDT (Tue)
>From: donegan at zardoz.uucp (Steve Donegan - Owner)

I beleive zardoz! is a Solbourne, and I have read some good things about
the performance expansion from 1 to 4(?) SPARC boards and multi-processor
SUN 4.0 OS compatability. Prices I've heard are in the >20k$ for a 1
processor box.

---
Steven P. Donegan                 These opinions are given on MY time, not
Area Telecommunications Engineer  Western Digital's - They wouldn't agree!
Western Digital Corp.
stanton!donegan || donegan at stanton.UUCP || donegan%stanton at UUCP

*****

>Date: Mon, 5 Jun 89 23:31:16 EDT
>From: pjg at urth.cc.Buffalo.EDU (Paul Graham)

we're expanding our timeshare environment with some sparc equipment.  we
decided on some sun stuff and a 2 processor solbourne.  we had one here
for a week and it worked just fine (we stuck a 4.0.3beta automounter on it
and it worked fine). they have asymetric multi's so i'm not sure how it
will work out with all the system calls/i-o going through a single XX
MIPS* processor.  while it was here it was the fastest unix box we had for
the few things we could do with it.

*XX mips is some value beyond 20.

--
  paul

*****

>Date:  Tue, 6 Jun 89 07:36:49 EDT
>From: lamson at sierra.crd.ge.com (Scott Lamson)

I had a solbourne 2 cpu color system for evaluation.  it was
subsequently bought here by another group as a group file/compute
server.  after some initial problems (during beta period), it ran
well.  network IO seemed slow to me, but they say they remedied that.
Compatibility was excellant.  Hardware support was great; software
support (as they rely on sun) was not much better than sun except that
they have much better X window support.  We may yet buy one as a group
compute server for X window terminals.  No reservations about company
or compatibility.  everything else no worse than sun.

        Scott|  ARPA:      lamson at crd.ge.com
       Lamson|  UUCP:      uunet!steinmetz!sierra!lamson
(518)387-5795|  UUCP:      uunet!steinmetz!lamson!crd

*****

>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 89 08:31:04 EDT
>From: david at pyr.gatech.edu (David Brown)

Hi, Robert.  I, too, have found the recent Solbourne announcements
interesting.  I'm test-driving a Solbourne 4/602 for the next week or so.
I'm pretty impressed.  It looks well built, and has a lot of bang for the
bucks.  If you can get your hands on this month's UNIX REVIEW, there is a
very good article on Solbourne.  They tested on against Sun-4, MIPS, HP
and a couple of others.  It faired pretty well.

Good luck,
  David

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Brown                       Armstrong State College, Savannah, Georgia
uucp: ...!gatech!gitpyr!david     ARPA: david at pyr.gatech.edu

*****

>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 89 10:33:17 EDT
>From: jim at applix.com (Jim Morton)

We have experience with their machines because we did a verification test
of our Sun-4 port of our Alis office software on it. I was very impressed.
They seemed like a very ruggedly built machine. Of course we only had a few
hundred hours of experience with it, but my impression was that they really
wanted to overcome the QA failings of Sun's hardware - monitors, video
boards, memory failures, etc. As for software compatibility, we hit 100%
except for an ioctl() to the type-4 keyboard, which as soon as we pointed
out to them they fixed. Overall I give them high marks. If Suns have a
clone market, Solbourne is the COMPAQ of the market.

--
Jim Morton, APPLiX Inc., Westboro, MA
...uunet!applix!jim
jim at applix.COM

*****

>Date: Thu, 8 Jun 89 11:05:53 CDT
>From: doug%ross at cs.utexas.edu (doug carmean)

I've just caught up on reading comp.sys.sun and noticed your request for
information on Solbourne computers.  We have a Solbourne Series 4/600 that
we have been using for about 3 months now.  We mostly run GDT from Silicon
Compiler Systems and Dracula from Cadence on the thing.  We have had
absolutely no compatibility problems with any of the stuff that we have
thrown at it.  The only problem with it so far has been the keyboard and
the mouse.  The keyboard absolutely flaked out and they (Solbourne) had to
send us a new one.  Now the mouse is starting to get a flakey and we may
have to get a new one of those.  

I ran Dhrystone 2.1 on the Solbourne and compared it to one of our
Sun 4/110:

	Solbourne	16.8k
	Sun 4/110	12.2k

both version were compiled on the respective machines using the -O4
switch, thats why the numbers might seem inflated over some of the
others you see on the net.

-- 
-doug carmean                           ross!doug at cs.utexas.edu
-ROSS Technology, 7748 Hwy 290 West Suite 400, Austin, TX 78736
-Don't let my sarcasm fool you: I have no sense of humor.

*****

>Date: Fri, 9 Jun 89 12:42:26 CDT
>From: dan at rose3.Rosemount.COM (Dan Messinger)

I've played on a Solbourne for a short time.  It was a dual processor
system.  And it was obvious.  We were playing on the system's console and
an X terminal right beside it.   It felt like we were running on two
different systems.   I would give it strong consideration, if I was
looking for a file server or compute server.  But at the moment, I'm
looking for personal workstations.  Solbourne has nothing that can compete
with a Sparcstation 1 right now.

Dan Messinger

-- 
          Robert Claeson      E-mail: rclaeson at erbe.se
	  ERBE DATA AB