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From: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Ethan V. Munson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Macintosh II not Macintosh ][
Message-ID: <19615@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 12:02:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19615
Posted: Mon Jul  6 12:02:59 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 7-Jul-87 05:08:52 EDT
References: <1051@apple.UUCP> <336@swanee.OZ> <80@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Ethan V. Munson)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 37
Keywords: Mac II revolution?

In article <80@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu> dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) writes:
>|
>| Mac ][ possibly will be the first affordable supermicro with the consequent
>| next revolution in sight.
>
>A low end Sun 3 is the same class machine as a fully decked out Mac II and I
>can purchase either for about the same price.  (I can't say exactly how much
>difference there is because I haven't seen an official price on Apple's
>version of UNIX.)  I'll bet the difference is under $1000 and I don't know
>which would be cheaper.  The Mac II is roughly a small Sun 3 with the Mac
>ROMS added on.  I see no "revolution" here.

The low-end Sun 3 has no disk, and cannot operate on a stand-alone basis.
It must be connected to either a network disk or a local shoebox drive to
be able to run anything besides its low-level monitor OS.  Color is more
expensive than for the MacII and the Sun has no inherent graphics support
(Quickdraw or Graphics chip).  The Sun does have two different Ethernet
configurations available, comes with a nice, large monitor and is
designed around a good programming environment.  A 3/50 (which I think
you are referring to) is also usually shipped with 4 Meg of memory.

A Mac II would be very useful to a small business given a $1000-$2000
software investment.  A Sun, probably even with a shoebox drive, would
still be very expensive to make useful.  In contrast, here at UC Berkeley,
a Sun 3/50 is only half the price of a Mac II that has enough extras
to be a useful workstation (40Meg+ drive, A/UX, MMU, 4Meg Memory, ...)
and probably integrates better with our existing 4.3bsd system centered
around X.

For the small-to-medium business environment that is typically built around
the medium-tech IBM PC/clone with or without a network, the Mac II with 
vastly more memory, better color, high performance and, most importantly,
a better user interface may really be a revolution.

Ethan Munson
munson@renoir.berkeley.edu
...ucbvax!renoir!munson