Recommendations for workstations and CASE tools

[John C Schultz]

Sun vs Apollo vs HP vs DEC

hmmm!

We use a mixture of SUN 3's and HP 300 series.  I have used an Apollo
a long time ago.  DEC has a high performance system running UNIX but I
understand that the low price is because all the software is
unbundled.

I personally would chose a "standard" operating system - which leaves
Apollo out.

SunOS is mostly BSD4.2 and HP UX is mostly System V.  SunOS is by
several accounts much more robust than HP UX.  Specifically I had
asked the net about connecting HPs and SUNs via SUNs Network File
System (NFS).  The net consensus was that it would work but because of
the flexibility of SunOS not HP UX.

HP requires you to use preformatted 1/4 inch tapes (which we make :-))
and I would rather use garden variety 1/4 inch tapes (which we also
make).  Perhaps the biggest immediate advantages of HP over SUN is
that HP supports X windows with reasonable performance and has 68030
machines immediately available.

SUN will announce 68030 machines in early april as well as SPARC
implementations.  Version 4.1 of SunOS (4.0.1 is a looser) is also
supposed to support X windows.

My bottom line
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I will continue to buy SUNs since the price performance (after April)
is reasonable and they are very popular so most public domain software
(GNU in paticular) easily compiles on SUNs.  I also like the BSD
interprocess communications better than the SYS V whatever it is
called.

-- 
 john c. schultz   schultz at 3M.Com   ..!uiucuxc!mmm!schultz  (612) 733-4047
           3M Center, Bldg 518-1-1, St. Paul, MN 55144-1000
  The opinions expressed herein are, as always, my own and not 3M's.