Re: Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs

[spar!malcolm@decwrl.dec.com]

	From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
	Subject: Symbolics & Sun-3 + Lucid Dev Envs
	To: slug%r20.utexas.edu@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU

	A minimum-reasonable Symbolics configuration these days costs $35,900.
	What do you consider a minimum-reasonable (for Lisp) Sun configuration?
	If your configuration is diskless, please include the configuration of
	the paging server and how many such diskless configurations it 
	supports.
Wasn't this a recent price change?  I seem to remember Symbolics prices
were much higher in the recent past.

Sun needs to work on their price structure (and also large memory boards.)
If you price out a 16M system using all Sun components you have to get a
pretty large system and yes it does cost approximately 35K.  The system
doesn't come cheap because you can only put one 4M memory board in a
small desk top system.

On the other hand if you take a bottom of the line Sun 3 and stick a third 
party 12M memory board into it you probably could do it for much LESS than
$15k.  If you add the cost of a server in you need to add a few thousand.
With 16M of memory you do almost zero paging so you can easily split the 
server cost over a relatively large number of clients.

What I would really like to see is TIs (and Symbolics?) pricing for their
single chip Lisp Machines........

								Malcolm