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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David W. Taylor who wrote (6814)	1/15/1998 5:16:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Respond to of 64865

It is entirely possible to develop GUI-based applications on a Sun, and some of the units that they now have for sale are would be very powerful for this application. If your application can be kept "Pure Java", then the development software costs probably will not be high. To the extent that you need to bang out some C++ code, you can use the GNU compilers, but be aware that they are largely command-line based. Unix was designed and extended by software developers. Once you get the hang of it (not a trivial feat, but if it is a hobby thing and you like to learn new stuff, it can be a ball), it can be hard to imagine how you ever got along with the NT. But it's not for everyone, and at the cost of the real Sun devices, it can be a pretty high risk to dump everything and go that way. If you can afford two systems, the risk is clearly lower, but still.... To get something that won't immediately be frustrating will probably cost around $7K, net of the monitor; this is the cost of the Ultra 10 with 128MB of memory and single-buffered Creator 3 graphics. All this Darwin stuff is "Discount Category H", which I'm still trying to get a handle on. Sun has different margins for different product lines, and the discount categories reflect this. The usual catagory for systems (like the Ultra 2, for example) is A, which usually works out to somewhere between 20 and 30%, depending on your contract. One of the best discounts is available to agencies qualified for NASA's Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement contract (SEWP). You can find the SEWP prices by going to Sun's website and entering "SEWP" in the search field. It usually takes a while for stuff to show up on this contract. Open market discounts are usually maybe 5-10% less than SEWP, so add a bit on top of those prices as a starting point for estimating. You could probably use some of your PC parts in a Sun, but they are only going to sell you a package that would already include a lot of the parts that you could carry over. Keep in mind that Sun systems use a boot PROM that is coded in the Forth programming language (the "Open Boot Prom"). In this scheme, any device that is needed for the system to boot has to have a driver available either in the boot PROM itself, or in a ROM on the device. Thus, most graphics cards won't work, even if there is a Solaris driver for it... you need a Forth driver. Adaptec and a few other card vendors do supply open-boot-equipped cards for use in Suns and other systems manufacturers that use the OBP. There is an HCL on Sun's website. Still, if I were you I'd proceed cautiously. For someone steeped in VB & VC++, Unix can be a pretty big shock. To lower your risk, you might start with a used Sun. Used SPARC 5s are reasonably priced and can provide a good introduction. Alternatively, you can get a copy of Solaris X86 to try on a PC. Or, as a low cost option, you might build yourself a Linux system. Linux is very similar to Solaris, and Solaris can be made more similar to Linux by installing the GNU software. Linux is a wonderful, low cost/low risk way to learn about Unix. I have several Linux systems set up at work and we are using them in a parallel processing project; they tend to be very stable and responsive. --Bob Drzyzgula