mni@techops.cray.com (Michael Nittmann) (01/28/91)
I asked on the list about Sony NEWS_WS. I had one some days on my desk for evaluation . My impressions: Keyboard: that was a bad joke. I am not shure if that was the keyboard that is going normally with the NEWS station. The layout is absolutely weird, there is a "key" that sits at the normal slash position that does not work at all (my right pinky smashed against it every what so often). That needs some time for getting used. Screen: flat screen with what seems a convex image surface. slight noise (probably due to long cable) good resolution. Performance: about 7600 integer and 7900 floating dhrystones. That is very very good. Software (X,...): I saw no problems but did not do special tcp/ip things (like own sockets , raw, nfs tests). I did not test the kernel for the pipe type file in mounted FS bug. (most kernels will crash if you request a pipe type file in a mounted FS , and that in a loop so that error messages are blocked out). Following are replies on my query from the list (summarized as is, headers taken out onl). Thanks a lot for all that replied. I personally consider that WS as a good deal, although in Europe the price is probably much higher than in the US which does not make it a price performance killer over here. Michael ------------ follows summary of replies ------------------ In article <9101211627.AA01428@techops.cray.com> you write: >Hi netfolks, > >does anybody have interoperability experiences >(good, flames, rubbish) for a > > Sony NEWS Workstation? > >Please, mail to me to keep the list free, I promise I shall >summary to the list end of next week. > >michael I played with the Sony for a couple of weeks. I was impressed by it. It had all the trappings of a really good piece of Sony consumer audio/video equipment. We had a unit with only 4 MB of memory, so it was sluggish at times while it paged stuff, but it was clear that more memory would make the problem go away. It does a very faithful implementation of 4.3 BSD which was nice to see. The NFS implementation looked like Sun's. The Japanese language support was fun to play with as well. It doesn't look there's much commercial software out there for it, but if you're writing your own, it should work on Suns and VAXen without too much trouble.. We purchased two for AppleShare <-> NFS gateways. They work pretty well. -Jim We have a couple of them on the network here. They are not the worst offenders, but they do have a couple of out-of-date features from what I've observed. I don't really have much recent experience (there're only 2 out of hundreds of hosts, I usually don't pay much attention to their activities), but if you really need some hard data, I could try checking up on them. It's also quite possible that the ones here are running old versions of the software that have just not been upgraded (they belong to the FSF as donations and I don't think the FSF really has the volunteer manpower to really keep everything upgraded). __ /| /| /| \ Michael A. Patton, Network Manager / | / | /_|__/ Laboratory for Computer Science / |/ |/ |atton Massachusetts Institute of Technology Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are a figment of the phosphor on your screen and do not represent the views of MIT, LCS, or MAP. :-) Please feel free to include summary information from the above, if you want to quote me verbatim I would rather spend some time looking through records rather than quoting off the top of my head. In reference to your posting in comp.protocols.tcp-ip: I have a Sony NeWS 1750, monochrome, 8M ram, 286M disk, .25" tape drive, and 3.5" diskette. The machine works great and is about 60% faster than a comparable Sun 3/80. I get about 7K dhrystones... Anyways, I do have some minor complaints. There are a few Japan-oriented problems; specifically with the timezones, man pages, and fonts, but these are easily fixed. My biggest complaint is that the libc.a is missing some juicy functions, but they are added easily. Most notable is the lack of quality resolver routines; currently they only use YP. Of course, BIND 4.8.3 is free and obtainable - I just haven't gottena round to it. Other than that, I think the machine is a price/performance killer! I strongly reccommend it. Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions. -- Bradley C. Spatz Internet: bcs@ufl.edu Computer and Information Sciences UUCP: uunet!uflorida!bcs College of Engineering University of Florida "School IS hell" -- Matt Groening Yes, we do use several SONY workstations in our group. In general, we are very happy with each model, but I'll give you some tips... We didn't have any serious problem with NFS or X11 they have in their OS. They have a newer OS called 4.0. So, you should try to use 4.0, if you're planning to use a system. 1. We have two NEWS-1750 (MC68030 model with a tape, etc.) with color monitors for last 2 years. About 1.2 years later, 2 out of 4 disks becames sick and couldn't use it...It was CDC Wren IV disk... They said, they are not using these any more! 2. We have four NEWS-1720 (MC68030) model (US version) as our test target for ARTS1.0 and Real-Time Mach3.0. All of them came with a very nice big B/W display. It has a Hitachi disk and we do not have any problem so far. (for 1.5 years) 3. We had one beta test machine of RISC-NEWS (R3000 with one I/O processor, MC68030) with a color monitor. It was VERY nice and we named it as "computeman"..... After one year of testing, we sent it back to SONY and they did decided to sell only ONE CPU (R3000) model in US. 4. We just received two NEWS-3710 (US Model) from SMSC with 19inch B/W display. We are waiting for Rel. 4.0 SONY OS tape... (I did use Rel. 4.0 in Japan and it was much nicer than the previous version.) 5. We have two SONY NEWS-Laptop (MC68030) as our demo target. We did give a demo of RT-Mach at USENIX Mach workshop using this one. The screen has to be improved a lot... The 200MB internal disk is very nice... I used the Laptop at home a lot too. But, it is too heavy to carry all the time. In US, I think, they will not sell this model. Well, they will sell you R3000 version for US customers. -- Hide Tokuda