velu@umcp-cs.UUCP (11/23/83)
Does anyone out there in net.land have any information, ideas, views, etc...
on the Callan Unistar 100/150/200/300 series? (68k based Un*x workstations -
nice and relatively cheap)
Thanx...
- Velu
--
Velu Sinha
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!velu
CSNet: velu@umcp-cs ARPA: velu.umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay
velu@umd-csd (Use this one!)rej@cornell.UUCP (Ralph Johnson) (11/28/83)
I have used a Unistar 100. It is a nice little machine. A friend of mine is a dealer for them, and has had a lot of success. They seem to have about one fourth the speed of a VAX-780 for long compiles, and maybe half as fast for more computation intensive tasks, though they are not fast at floating point, of course. I would be very happy with one as a replacement for sharing a VAX with a lot of people. C programs port with almost no difficulty, with the only exceptions being the well known "null pointer reference" and "byte order" problems. They are inexpensive ($10,000 for 256K memory and 20M disk) and fairly reliable. They run V7 with "Berkeley enhancements" which do not include paging, but do include vi and the other well known Berkeley programs. The Unistar is one of the many SUN clones, and uses the processor board originally designed at Stanford. Callan was in the business of selling multibuss based systems in a box with a built-in terminal that emulated a VT-100. When the SUN board became available they just had to swap processor boards, buy a Unisoft Unix port, and they were now a manufacturer of Unix machines. Since they did not have great developement cost, they could sell their machines for a low price. They do not seem to do much software developement, but then they don't have to: their machine runs nearly any Unix program. The Unistar has very poor performace if it does not have enough memory. The original machines had only 128K, and were very slow. Each command caused the shell to swap out, and the disk is a typical 5" winchester. Since memory is cheap, buy a lot of it, and you will be rewarded by good performace. The system also comes with either 10 or 20 Meg disks, with a very small price difference between them. The 10 Meg disk fills up too fast, so get the bigger one. Callan makes some bigger systems (Unistar 200) that are specifically described as "multi-user", but the only difference is more memory and ports. The 100 can support 2 people with little problem, but it is harder to add more serial ports. Ralph Johnson