Symbolics prices (not only in Europe)

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1991 14:52 EDT
    From: Kalman Reti <Reti@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>

    My point is that you can't compare a workstation where you can't do the types of
    things you can do on a Lispm based only on the things that you can do on both,
    i.e. the lowest common denominator isn't a valid basis of comparison.

One problem that is routinely dismissed is that there are many things
you can do on the cheap workstations that you *can't* do on a Lispm.
Thus, it is often necessary to have both (I spend a good deal of my time
using the Lispm's X server to interact with Unix programs), and it can
frequently be quite difficult to convince a bean-counter that two
workstations are more cost-effective than one.

What can't a Lispm do, you ask?  It can't run the thousands of
commercial and publicly-available programs that are available for Unix
systems, Macs and PC's.  The embedded Lispms solve this problem to some
extent, but there's still a $30K price tag on top of the cost of the
original workstation.  There's quite a bit of value in standard OSes,
even de facto standards.

Also, some of the things it can do, it doesn't do very well.  Genera
includes file system and server software, but I've spent quite a bit of
effort moving as much stuff as I can off my 3650's disks.  LMFS has some
nice features (it's great being able to put the file server process into
the debugger, or to install patches to the LMFS or file server
software), but they don't make up for the robustness and performance of
a Sun, even ones of comparable vintage (we installed some Sun-4/280 file
servers the same year we upgraded our Lispm file server from a 3600 to a
3650).

                                                barmar