Sun Microsystems Inc has been somewhat surprised at the level of success achieved by its 386i workstations, and yesterday it announced several enhancements – and cut prices – to keep up the momentum. Key to the enhancements is a 20-fold improvement in the AT bus interrupt response time so that the machine can communicate effectively with networks of personal computers, as well as speeding up the interactive MS-DOS performance, with better keyboard, mouse and screen response on the 80386-based Unix station – MS-DOS is supported under Unix via Locus Computing Corp’s Merge 386 product on the Sun stations. The 386i will now therefore support Novell NetWare and 3Com 3+ local nets, and support for NetWare 2.1 running over Ethernet or Token Ring networks, and 3+ networks running over Ethernet will be included in SunOS 4.0.2, set for release in July. The price cuts are 10% to 15% on complete configurations, which now start at $9,000 for a 4Mb 20MHz CPU, 15 1,024 by 768 mono screen and 91Mb disk: the 386i has as standard Ethernet, SCSI controllers and 80387 floating point chip. A 25MHz 8Mb Sun386i/250, with 16 1,152 by 900 colour VDU and 155Mb drive is cut 12% to $18,500. SunOS, SunView windowing, DOS Windows and ONC/NFS networking software come standard.
