alfred@mcc.com (Alfred Hartmann) (06/16/89)
Here at MCC we have been evaluating a demonstration copy of Mathematica on our Sun 3's, 4's, and 386i's. [The following are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of MCC.] We had originally contacted Wolfram Research Inc. (WRI) who told us they sold Macintosh versions for $499, but for Sun versions we needed to go through Sun. We obtained a demonstration copy from Sun, and after deciding to purchase the product we put an order in with Sun. But, Sun didn't have the pricing and, after a flurry of confusion, finally told us to deal directly with WRI. Well, hold onto your checkbooks, gang, but WRI quoted us a price for the Sun of $2400, which according to my Mathematica demo copy is In[6]:= N[2400/499] Out[6]= 4.80962 times the Mac price! So, perceiving the Sun user community to be an elite group of suckers, we get to pay 4.8X the going price. Now, mind you, the Mac version has a better front-end than the Sun version (which just runs in a cmdtool window). Quoting from the manual, "The Mathematica front end on the Macintosh takes advantage of the Macintosh's graphical capabilities. On the Macintosh, for example, the Mathematica front end lets you use graphical tools to manipulate your input and output, and to insert extra text. . . . [supporting] 'notebooks', which contain a mixture of text, graphics and Mathematica definitions. There is a growing library of Mathematica notebooks which serve as 'live textbooks' on a variety of different topics. You can read the text in a notebook to learn about a topic, and then use the Mathematica definitions in the notebook to do calculations." So, for 4.80962X the Mac price, you can run a less functional version right on your very own Sun. Wow, what a deal! Well, to make it less painful there is a discount possibility. Since Sun users tend to run in herds (like sheep), ten orders from the same herd entitles one to a whopping 5% discount, which brings the total premium down to only In[7]:= 0.95 2400/499 Out[7]= 4.56914 times the Mac price. Baaaa-aa-aaaa, say the fleeced. Well, the story continues. One of the groups here at MCC is currently running Sun 3's, but has an order in for SparcStation 1's (you know, the PC-priced Sun that still runs the workstation-priced $$$oftware). Can we buy Sun 3 copies now and upgrade to Sun 4 copies when the SparcStations come in? Sure, no problem--upgrades are a mere $2400! Compare this to the poor Mac user, upgrading from say a small Mac to a Mac II, who paid $499 originally, and still runs the same version on the much faster Mac models. At this point, the Sun upgrader has paid In[8]:= 2. 2400/499 Out[8]= 9.61924 times the price paid by the Mac upgrader. 'Nuff said. --alfred@mcc.com Dr. A.C. Hartmann Voice: (512) 338-3423 Member, Technical Staff FAX: (512) 338-3600 Advanced Computing Technologies Program Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) Austin, Texas