reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) (02/06/88)
[Actual date is
Date: 11 Dec 87 16:06:11 GMT
-ds (moderator)]
Has anyone heard anything about or seen the Sony NWS line of
workstations? I have seen the article in the August, 1987 issue of
UNIX/WORLD and nothing more on these products. Has Sony decided upon
it's pricing strategy for the US Market? Are these machines available
in the US? If so, where? And has anyone had any experience using
these machines?
Any and all comments are welcome. The UNIX/WORLD article was
quite interesting and if nothing else the entry of this machine in the
US market could start pricing wars that will drive down the cost of
the low end engineering workstation products offered by the US
companies.
--
George W. Leach Paradyne Corporation
{gatech,rutgers,attmail}!codas!pdn!reggie Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-2376 P.O. Box 2826
Largo, FL 34649-2826bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (02/08/88)
> Any and all comments are welcome. The UNIX/WORLD article was >quite interesting and if nothing else the entry of this machine in >the US market could start pricing wars that will drive down the cost >of the low end engineering workstation products offered by the US >companies. >-- >George W. Leach Paradyne Corporation The impression I got (I don't remember the details but I had one of their brochures with some prices and saw the UW article) was that the machine was not particularly inexpensive. About $12K for a fairly pedestrian setup, I remember a back of the envelope calculation showint it to be slightly more than I would pay for a roughly equivalent Sun or Mac-II with a disk etc., the Sun would be more comparable in this case. Were my impressions grossly inaccurate? -Barry Shein, Boston University
crgabb@sdrc.UUCP (Rob Gabbard) (02/08/88)
In article <1890@pdn.UUCP>, reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes: > Has anyone heard anything about or seen the Sony NWS line of > workstations? I read in a recent issue of BYTE that SONY was having problems with import tariffs on the News so they are going to build a US factory to produce the machines.
jec@IUVAX.CS.INDIANA.EDU (02/09/88)
There was a short blurb about the new Sony workstations in INFOWORLD (Feb 1, 1988 page 3, "AT DEADLINE"). ...Internally called the "Sun Killer," the NWS-841 will sport two 16-MHz 68020 microprocessors, a 68881 math coprocessor, 8M of RAM, a 286- MB floppy drive, six I/O ports, including an EtherNET interface, one rep. said. The machine will sell for about $19,900. Supported software will include BSD4.2, NFS, and X. The NWS-711 model is a diskless workstation that will sell for $3,995. Both systems will ship in March. (paraphrased from Tom Moran's article)
shand@cad.jmrc.eecs.unsw.OZ.AU (Mark Shand) (02/10/88)
Prof. Richard Newton's group at Berkeley has a Sony NWS. I saw it there last July. I believe he had it specially imported.
cs661s02@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.EDU (Cs661s02) (02/10/88)
In article <1890@pdn.UUCP> reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) writes: > Has anyone heard anything about or seen the Sony NWS line of >workstations? I have seen the article in the August, 1987 issue of >UNIX/WORLD and nothing more on these products. Has Sony decided upon >it's pricing strategy for the US Market? Are these machines >available in the US? If so, where? And has anyone had any >experience using these machines? > > Any and all comments are welcome. The UNIX/WORLD article was >quite interesting and if nothing else the entry of this machine in >the US market could start pricing wars that will drive down the cost >of the low end engineering workstation products offered by the US >companies. I saw Sony NEWS machines in Japan last year in certain firm that was writing software for that machine. It was running X window V10.4(I think). The machine itself is quite attractive and occupies less footspace than SUN. It uses two 68020 running 16MHz. First 68020 acts as main cpu and second do all the I/O handling. They claim that this design reduces amount of hardware as well as increasing throughoutput of the system. There are two models of NEWS(at lease in Japan) one with b/w and other with 256 colors The SONY itself has ported quite of software including most compilers as well as most of unix utilities. I think the problem with Sony NEWS is not with it's technical aspect but marketing expertise of Sony. It will be interesting how Sony who is mainly known for cosumer eletronics will be fare in engineering workstation market. -- Sehyo Chang (Smalltalk Hacker) ARPA: uhmanoa!sec@nosc.MIL Software Engineering Research Lab INTER: sec@uhmanoa.ICS.HAWAII.EDU UH/ICS Dept, 2565 The Mall Disclaimer: What opinions ? Honolulu Hi, 96822 (808) 948-6938