jezebel@ut-emx.UUCP (Jim Delaney) (01/22/88)
We are planning to buy a sun or apollo workstation. Would the readers please MAIL me their experiences with these systems. ALL TYPES of information is welcome, i.e. software availability, speed of computation, costs, limitations, graphics capabilities, etc.. Thanks, Jim
dhirsch@CC5.BBN.COM (01/23/88)
Jim, Your question is about as vague as "I want a car; please tell me everything about Ford and GM." Since I have both, I'll try anyway to conjure up answer for you. I like my suns in general and though I've spent many more hours with apollo, I don't have the same warm feeling about them. My suns work with my vaxen right out of the box. My apollos don't. My apollos are easier to administer because they asssume they are just connected to other apollos, so their network is nicely homogeneous. For that, the suns are a pain. What you are trying to do with these machines greatly effects the answer to your question of which company. Sun builds unix boxes which integrate well with other unix boxes. Apollo builds workstations that operate their own operating system well and unix poorly; they've been promising better unix for years, but I've stopped waiting. If you do not need unix, apollo solves many problems with their operating system that unix has yet to solve: their network shows up to each user as a unified file heirarchy, groups and user permission issues are addressable with far greater resolution, there is no inter-vendor finger-pointing--they own their own operating system and it has been fairly well debugged if you're willing to use it. Apollo's unix is not. I ran into a problem with cabling: my company has decided to provide ethernet to each office. Apollos, up until recently did not intercommunicate with ethernet. I had major political battles to get my apollo cables installed. Every time there was an office move, I had to fight the battle over again because they weren't willing to wire the whole building with another set of wires that couldn't be shared with other systems. Given my experience with my apollo ethernet gateway, I have little confidence apollo will get ethernet right in the near future. Sun uses ethernet right out of the box, and always has. Apollo's service has been less than satisfactory; note that we are a small apollo customer and have equipment that is somewhat obsolete. Sun's service has been fairly good, but note that we are one of the largest sun customers in the region. I am about to set up a turnkey system in my lab and I am going to use my apollos to run it; I'm confident it will work because apollo's operating system will conveniently support all the tasks involved, and I won't need to call on apollo's unix. The cabling won't be a problem because all the machines will be together in one room. I still have a battle justifying the exorbitant (but annoyingly necessary) apollo service contract, but I'm about to transfer some of that heat to my apollo salesman. For these apollos (a bunch of old DN300s), it's either this lab system or storage and financial embarrassment. Good luck with your decision. If you'd like my opinions more tailored to your application, give me a call late some afternoon. I'm not on info-micro; your message was forwarded to me. You can correspond directly with me if you wish. Doug Hirsch BBN Communications 617/873-2608 dhirsch@bbn.com