olson@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu (01/14/89)
(I'm posting this here for a coworker at ANL since our outgoing news feed at ANL isn't working right now -- bob) I have had a machine now for about a week and here are some of my impressions. Display: Working on the NeXT monitor is like looking at a high res black and white photograph all day. Just Great. Speed: From a number of benchmarks I see anywhere from 5.12 MIPS to just faster than the speed of a Sun 3/60. (3.5 MIPS) Optimization in C makes a lot of difference. Networking: We have three NeXT machines on a ethernet configured in with about 60 Suns and seem to have not had many problems. YP works fine. And I have all of my 8 GB of Sun filesystems NFS mounted and it works great. Optical Disk: I have run the following speed tests on the OD. Copying a 3.9 Megabyte file From To Time od od 80 seconds NFS NFS 102 seconds NFS sd 28 seconds sd sd 29 seconds Sun* Sun 34 seconds (SMD disk on the server) *copied the file on the server to the server. >From just hacking around the OD is generally fast enough, it feels like you are on a LAN. Sun Binaries: Many Sun-3 binaries seem to run with out change. Many users here are excited about that. Means software development is not starting from scratch. People are also running NeWS client code on the NeXTs. We hope that this is a *feature* and not a Bug. Mach/NeXT OS 0.8: It is much more stable than I expected and I think that it is solid enough to do software developement on. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Rick Stevens Internet: stevens@mcs.anl.gov | | Mathematics and Computer Science UUCP: {sequent,rogue}!anlams!stevens | | Argonne National Laboratory Phone: (312) 972-3378 | | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw