wheat@mcnc.org (06/05/91)
From: wheat@aurs01.uucp (Lee Wheat) Newsgroups: Triangle.sun,comp.sys.sun Subject: a pleasant dilemma... Organization: Alcatel Network Systems, Raleigh NC Keywords: Greetings...this is a posting for a friend who does not have access to the wonderful land of news :-(. Please post replies here and I'll relay them. The place where he works is switching their development environment from DOS to Unix (another one bites the dust! :-). Management (in a rare flash of common sense and not a little generosity) has placed a price cap on each workstation setup per engineer at $15000 (they might go as high as $20000 if there is a demonstrable advantage). After looking around at the world at large (and drooling over spec sheets from various vendors), they have decided to outfit the place with Sun workstations. Now the tricky part. Since they want to get the most bang for the buck, what sort of configuration would the wizards of netland (or anybody with an opinion) recommend? I am not familiar with Sun's current pricing and I don't have the performance specs right here. My minimum recommendations were at least a Sparc IPC, 16M of mem, 207M of local disk, and 19" color. Does anyone else have another way to properly use the budget (this is for about 20 engineers initially). They will also need a file server but they think they have it figured out (i think it's a Sun 4/330). Any suggestions here are also welcome. The other problem is their current product base. It uses an in-house built ibm pc (with a few extras) as the basis for the user interface. Since this is a standard pc in most respects, they used turbo-c with a light dusting of assembly language. They want to move the support of this stuff over to the Suns as well. Does anyone know of a C cross-compiler which runs on a Sparc but cranks out DOS code? The only alternative they have at the moment is to run turbo-c under a dos emulator :-(. This is the biggest burr under upper management's saddle at the moment. thanks is advance for the help... _lee