The well-flagged under-$5,000 Sun Microsystems Inc colour workstation that materialised in November as the $4,300 SparcClassic is being talked down in some quarters as no more than a stalking horse for the more expensive $8,000 Sparcstation LX. Granted 90% of all Classics will go into distributed environments, but the box was still touted at its introduction as a personal computer killer. So it would be reasonable to assume that the thing could run stand-alone. The problem here is that as a $4,300 box it’s fitted with only 207Mb external disk and 16Mb internal memory, barely enough to handle the Solaris 2.1 operating system, which eats up 200Mb of disk space and prefers 24Mb minimum main memory. Even if you go to a 424Mb disk for $4,800 – GBP4,060 – you still have stump up for more dynamics. A competitor like Hewlett-Packard Co, which earlier last year took some heat for offering configurations that were only come-ons for more expensive configurations, says the machine is neither fish nor fowl, describing it as too severely compromised to be a workstation and dismissing it as no better than a 50MHz 80486 box. Hewlett-Packard reckons that Sun tried its damnedest to come up with a full-featured workstation for under $5,000 but when it looked at the margins, pulled bits out to create the Classic. Hewlett-Packrad would know something about the exercise since it’s trying to do the same thing, and the best it has been able to come up with is the diskless 16Mb 715/33 for $5,700 or the 525Mb 715/33 for $7,400. It reckons that it will be a year from now before the industry is at $4,000. In the meantime it faults the Classic on floating point performance, no graphics acceleration, 8-bit audio and a low-quality monitor as well as on lack of memory. In addition it warns Sun that it is alienating its customers by not letting them apply their corporate discounts to the Classic and by letting them perceive Sun as turning its back on its established technical clientele to pursue the commercial market.
