Re: Yes, they are special, but...

[Barry Margolin <barmar@Think.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 12 Jun 89 10:10 EDT
    From: SWM@sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com (Scott McKay)

    Every time I have read a Sun price-list, I have wondered why people buy
    Suns instead of Symbolics machines.  In truth, a Sun-3 which is
    configured to have performance competitive with a Symbolics 3620 for
    developing Lisp systems appears to be more expensive than the 3620.
    Sun's heavy discounting probably tilts the scales in their favor.

We can get a Sun Sparcstation-1 with 16MB of memory and a SCSI paging
disk for $12.5K.  We're still benchmarking the performance, though.
However, we're benchmarking it against time sharing on a Sun 4/260, not
against Lispms; we already know that unless we overload the machine, the
4/260 beats the pants off a 36xx.

Assuming the XL400 has comparable performance (probably an invalid
assumption, but I don't know what the actual numbers are), that's
one-fifth the price/performance ratio.

                                                barmar