Seeking a Development Environment (Sun?)

[giebelhaus at umn-cs.arpa]

My experience is that Apollo is much better for professional software
development and Sun is better for hacking.  I haven't had enough experience
with any other UNIX workstations to say anything about the others.

I find Suns are much harder to maintain than the Apollos (I have a five 
page report on it if you are interested).  If you have a bunch of cheap
labor (like at a university) this may not be a problem, but it is a real
problem for me.  I find that Apollo's beta releases are better than 
Sun's standard release's.  Other things such as much of the network hanging
when a server node goes down until you edit fstab and reboot really bothers
me.  You can get NFS for the Apollo, but I don't believe that Apollo wants
to release it because of some reliability problems like the one just
mentioned and the lack of file locking.  Apollo is putting their resources
in RFS instead.

I have a hard time getting software support from Sun.  I am not a great
UNIX wizard, yet, and I surly don't understand the internals of UNIX.
If I really got into the guts of the stuff, Sun might be easier since
the lower layers of SunOS are closer to bsd than DOMAIN/IX.  Still, every
modual of the SunOS has been modified.  From Sunwindows to Yellow pages,
the operating system is different than bsd.  

Both Apollo and Sun are coming out with some real high power nodes that
will support many users.  I wouldn't want to try to sell a VAX 750 after
they do.

Prices of the two systems are about the same.  With Apollo, you don't
need the server (I run every other node diskless with very good results).
When you take the cost of the server into account, it really makes a 
difference.  

Another thing that makes me worry about buying Sun is that they don't
seem interested in "Open Systems" like they used to be.  The UNIX source
was free and relatively easy to get from Apollo.  I understand the SunOS
source costs a bundle and even then they don't like to give it out 
(havn't checked it out, though).  Much of the SunOS is getting propietary
so I don't know about it becoming a standard.  Also, they haven't let
the IEEE committee for UNIX look at their stuff.  To me, Apollo looks
much more open.

We find it a hard and somewhat religous choice between the two.  If you
have any questions, I would be happy to help.  I wouldn't want anyone
to go through the problems I did.