wanted: Sun 386 Workstation (Road Runner) info

[Stefan Mochnacki]

Some people are asking "Who will buy the Sun 386i ?" In this moderately-
sized Astronomy Department (about 22 faculty ...) we are likely to buy
THREE right away. We have 3 Sun-3 100-series machines already, and direct
access to several others including a Sun 4. However, many of us have PC's,
particularly portable ones or desktops kept at home, and the 386i provides
a fusion of the PC and SUN / UNIX worlds very nicely, as well as providing
computing power for our students via terminals connected to terminal
servers.

As I've said before on a different newsgroup, the Sun 386i is competitively
priced when compared with other 386 systems because it includes many
features which are necessary in a distributed academic environment but
which have to be bought separately as add-ons to "street-market" PC's.
Furthermore, the UNIX situation for 386 PC's is messy because there are so
many hardware "standards" (sic) which no generic offering of UNIX can
support. << There's a great opportunity for someone to start up a new
software company: a Drivers Galore factory ! There's a fortune to be made
writing drivers for all the display adapters and disk controllers on the
market which generic offerings of UNIX and OS/2 cannot hope to support
...>>.   Another aside : there are discounted marketing channels for Suns
and many organizations can buy Suns with deep discounts.

[ I have no connection with Sun Microsystems. Opinions are my own ]

-- 
Stefan W. Mochnacki          INTERNET - stefan at helios.physics.toronto.edu
Astronomy, U. Toronto        UUCP - {uunet,pyramid}!utai!helios!stefan
+1 (416) 884-9562            BITNET - mochnacki at utorphys.bitnet