UX400S: a decent machine

["Donald H. Mitchell" <dmitchell%backus.trc.amoco.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 19:19 PST
    From: Jack Greenbaum <jackg%cogsci@ucsd.edu>

     >From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)
     >Reply-To: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com
     >Subject: UX400S: a decent machine
     >To: slug@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
     >Message-Id: <19900116200158.2.DON@SKEPTIC.trc.amoco.com>
     >
     >  It's cheap (approx $20K for a development system).  

    How much does an entire system cost (including Sun hardware etc)? We are
    spending a total of $32k (including Mac IIx, monitor, disk etc) on a MacIvory,
    and we're wondering what a complete UX400S system would cost. Our local
    Symbolics sales people have never been able to answer this question.

I was only advocating the UX for sites already having Suns.  If you have
Suns of the correct type and 200-300MByte extra disk space directly
attached to the Sun, there are no other hardware/software requirements.
If you don't have these, buy the XL.  In my opinion, the MacIvory is too
slow.

    Also, What type of load does the UX400S present to other users of the Sun
    system? I guess I'm asking if it is reasonable to put one into a deparmental
    machine.

The only load is for paging and file access.  During these operations,
the machines will fight for time; however, a dept machine is used to
hosts asking for disk time.  The only other operation that requires the
host is X window communications, but that only requires the X
client/server not the embedded host.  (OK, it does require access to the
embedded host's ethernet port, but that seems minimal in my experience.)

     >  Many users can access it at the same time.  The board has no
     >preferred host; it merely supports X with full Genera windowing.  If
     >your applications are polite, the users won't even step on each others
     >toes.  My delivery architecture for one of my applications is to put
     >one UX400 on the network for every 4 potentially simultaneous users
     >(approx. 20 real users).

    Can more than one user be logged in at once, or is it that your application
    can support more than one user at a time?

You're correct: only one user can log in at a time.  Others must share
that user's login name.  I guess I'm willing to live with an application
login name.  I'm not advocating multi-developer simultaneous access.

    Thanks for the time

    Jack Greenbaum
    jackg@cogsi.ucsd.edu

Once again, I AM NOT a Symbolics guru and these opinions are my own.