Please fill me in....

["Mr. Spock" <Spock%samson.cadr.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

Maybe I'm mistaken about the general tone of this Symbolic vs.
"Conventional" machines in the area of price/performance/environment but
it sounds to me like some of these unix machines are now viable
alternatives to 36xx's.

Is this really true????

We tried a SUN 3/260 (I think) running Lucid, packed to the gills with
memory, and an extra disk (380 mb, I think) for gobs of paging area and
our 3600 *still* ran circles around it (even when running Fortran!).
And the SUN wound up costing us the same $ as our 3600!

Are the newer SUNs (or whatever) really that much faster?  How much
memory/disk do you realistically need?  I.e. what do these machines
*really* cost in order to run lisp effectively?

Can you buy a $5-10k workstation that will run lisp effectively?