Poor Sun timings, as competition...

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Fri, 27 Jul 90 11:20:44 PDT
    From: jrs@atc.boeing.com (Ross Stenstrom)

    Now my question or comment, we are periodically asked why we don't just
    run Lucid on a Sun or KCL which is FREE.  Obviously this treats Suns
    as a free resource which has its own implications (there are also Sun
    managers who don't/won't/can't do Symbolic's who would seem to have an
    interest in dropping the Symbolics, particularly where I used to work...).
    Has anyone (else) read this study?  Does anyone with deep Sun knowledge
    support the conclusions?  Can we use this as a major refutation of the
    "just use a Sun, they're faster and cheaper anyway" mentality?

Even with those bugs, Suns are still significantly faster than 36xx
systems.  We can build our software (loading about 1000 files and saving
the world to disk) on a time-shared Sun 4/330 in about 45 minutes, while
it takes at least two hours on a 3640.  Sun's NFS client software is
about an order of magnitude faster than Symbolics's.

                                                barmar