Using a PC as a Sun 'Shoebox'

[Christer Olsson]

In article <9959 at brazos.Rice.edu>, whna at ciba-geigy.ch (Heinz Naef) writes:
> 
> The question came up because two collegues and I own PC's for home usage,
> equipped with a large (unfortunately MFM) harddisk (130MB) and a Sun-
> compatible streamer tape drive. We are thinking about buying a real
> workstation but do not want to throw away what we have now.
> 
> One could imagine a package containing a SCSI host adapter for the PC bus
> and a special DOS device driver or PC-bootable mini-operating system which
> could emulate the 'intelligence' of the 'shoebox'.
> 
> Does anyone know about such a beast; or is it really a bad idea?  Thanks
> in advance for any comments (consider the limited bandwith of the News
> system).  This question has nothing to do with any design ideas my
> employer may have.

I think it's better to use a MFM -> SCSI-controller (Adeptec 4000A or
other).  Use the PC-case as a shoebox and dedicate the disk to only using
with the workstation. It gives better perfomance than using emulation and
the PC-bus. 

Advantages: You don't need a new case or power.
            You can equip the PC with a small disk for dos.
            Maybe, you can share the tape streamer with the PC and workstation.
            You can run PC-programs.

Disadvantages: You can't power off the PC when you need rebooting the PC.
               Attaching the tape maybe need restarting the box.
               You can't share the big disk with sun and pc.