---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash Sun News Summary SunFLASH Vol 23 #25 November 1990 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the text from a newsletter that will be mailed to US customers. It's a nice summary of some of Sun's recent announcements. However, it contains material of a frank and explict nature (read 'marketing') that may not be suitable for all readers ! -johnj ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SPARCstation IPC Puts Color on Your Desktop NFS Accelerator Eases Your Heavy Load OpenWindows For Free Simplify Your Databases Supercomputer Visualization At Your Deskside CD Technology Is Standard Equipment New Developments Shorts SPARCstation IPC Puts Color on Your Desktop Sun has got the perfect machine for anyone who wants an inexpensive yet powerful color workstation. We've put the processing power and ease of use of our desktop SPARC(R) workstations in a compact, fully configurable color desktop system--available for less than $10,000. The SPARCstation(TM) IPC gives you the power, disk capacity, and expansion capability of high-performance workstations at a price lower than many high-end PCs. "The day has arrived. A full-function color workstation is underselling high-end PCs--and delivering much more on the desktop for those countless corporate users who want an open, low-cost color system," says Wayne Rosing, vice president of Sun's Desktop Systems and Graphics Group. The SPARCstation IPC comes with a variety of standard features that would have to be purchased separately for a PC. Smaller and lighter than any computer of its kind, the SPARCstation IPC offers up to 24 MB of RAM, a DOS compatible floppy disk drive, a large, high-resolution color monitor, and both internal and external disk capacity. Every diskfull SPARCstation IPC system includes the intuitive OPEN LOOK(R) Graphical User Interface and DeskSet(TM) productivity tools, which make the power of the UNIX(R) operating system and network a snap to use. With built-in networking capabilities and more than 2100 available SPARCware(TM) products--including the industry's most popular spreadsheet, desktop publishing, word-processing, and database packages--the 15.8-MIPS SPARCstation IPC is ideal for workgroup productivity. It is also an excellent midrange workstation for technical applications that require low-cost color, expansion slots, and internal mass storage. NFS Accelerator Eases Your Heavy Load Sun is pleased to announce a new hardware product that significantly increases disk throughput and NFS(R) responsiveness of heavily loaded SPARCserver(TM) 470 and SPARCserver 490 systems. Prestoserve(TM), the first NFS accelerator board, increases the number of workstation clients that can be supported by SPARCserver systems and improves NFS responsiveness by up to 75 percent. Prestoserve provides transparent performance improvement without application modification or client rebooting. Sun Prestoserve consists of a 9U VMEbus board with 1 MB of non-volatile cache memory, a UNIX device driver, and utility programs. Prestoserve is supported on the SPARCserver 470 and SPARCserver 490 with SunOS(TM) 4.1 PSR A or later. Installation of Prestoserve takes only twenty minutes using an interactive script. NFS, part of Sun's ONC(TM) technology, has become the de facto standard for filesharing in multivendor networks. So Prestoserve makes sense for any business in which frequent writes and saves to the disk are common, such as ECAD, MCAD, electronic publishing, and many more. OpenWindows For Free Sun's new release of the OpenWindows(TM) application environment features the OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface in 3-D and a new X11/NeWS(TM) window system that is five times faster than its predecessor. OpenWindows Version 2 is now included in all diskfull desktop SPARCstations at no additional cost. By optimizing X11/NeWS performance, Sun has made tasks such as window creation, resizing, moving, opening, and closing much faster. You get a fully portable, network-based window system that works as quickly as a simple kernel-based system. X11/NeWS is compliant with the most recent version of the X Window System, R4, and offers integrated PostScript(R) capability. We've also included new DeskSet tools that help make the network and the UNIX operating system more accessible to nontechnical users. These new tools, which include Calendar Manager, Calculator, Print Tool, and Tape Tool, greatly improve personal productivity. DeskSet tools support the OPEN LOOK drag-and-drop specification, which extends across the network, providing integration among tools with the direct manipulation of icons--a click of the mouse replaces complex UNIX commands. OpenWindows Version 2 features OpenFonts(TM) technology for displaying high-quality scalable outline fonts. Simplify Your Databases It's simple: a single, easy-to-use interface to different databases makes life easier. The Sun Simplify(TM) SQL tool brings the intuitive OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface to a variety of the leading database management systems (DBMS). With the Sun Simplify SQL interface, novices and experts alike can create a database, perform queries, and interactively customize database reports--all with a simple point and click. Productivity improves dramatically because anyone can quickly and easily access data without having to memorize or type in complicated query and report generation languages. For users who also purchase the Sun Database Excelerator, Sun Simplify dramatically increases system throughput and reduces response times--particularly under heavy system loads. You can get more transactions per second and more users on the network without adding any hardware. A consistent look and feel to several systems, including INGRES(TM), ORACLE(R), and SYBASE(R), lets users interact the same way with different database products. So you can share information between databases and other applications such as spreadsheets and text processors. Sun Simplify SQL helps DBMS administrators reduce the demands placed on them because the users they support can easily access and manipulate databases. With Sun Simplify SQL, you can take advantage of Sun's heterogeneous networking capabilities by accessing data locally or from remote database servers in a multivendor environment. Supercomputer Visualization At Your Deskside Get ready for visualization capabilities on your SPARCstation that you thought were only possible on supercomputers. Sun's VX and MVX accelerators combine advanced technology with a multiprocessor architecture to provide high-speed computing across the full range of visualization techniques, including image processing, volume rendering, 3-D graphics, and high-quality rendering. The VX is a single-board accelerator with a high-performance processor and an innovative dual frame buffer design. The MVX is a multiprocessor accelerator with four parallel processing nodes that connect to the VX over high-speed buses. Delivering 40 to 160 peak MIPS and 80 to 320 peak single-precision MFLOPS performance, these accelerators offer the speed and functional robustness that are critical for applications such as medical imaging, earth resources, scientific visualization, remote sensing, pharmaceutical/chemistry, GIS, and MCAD. The VX and MVX accelerators enhance the performance of the Sun Vision(TM) software libraries and tools, allowing applications developed with SunVision to run many times faster than on unaccelerated workstations. Developers can also take advantage of the comprehensive set of C programming tools included with the VX and MVX accelerators to extend the capabilities of the SunVision libraries and tools or to develop new visualization software. CD Technology Is Standard Equipment We've made our SunCD drive a standard feature of our SPARCserver and SPARCstation 370 and 470 systems, so you get the benefits of CD-ROM technology at no extra cost. Sun is committed to CD-ROM technology because it is inexpensive, easy to use, reliable, and compact. In fact, we will be making CD-ROM our exclusive software distribution medium in 1991. The SunCD storage device can store up to 644 MB of data and is ideal for the distribution of SunOS, popular databases, application software, and system documentation requiring great amounts of disk space. Sun made CD technology affordable months ago when we cut prices on SunCD drives by 30 percent. We also made shopping for software easier with the introduction of our Catalyst CDware(TM), a self-contained software information and demonstration package on CD. The CDware menu-driven overview uses the intuitive OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface to make software demos and programs easy to try. So join the CD revolution. For easy ordering--and to find out about our upgrade program, which provides SunCD drives for our installed base of systems--please call Sun telemarketing at 1-800-USA-4SUN, and press 6. New Developments Sun has introduced Sun Common Lisp 4.0, a new version of our popular language for the artificial intelligence market. We also have a new version of the Symbolic Programming Environment (SPE), a set of integrated tools for developing applications in Sun Common Lisp. Sun Common Lisp benefits from the addition of a new window interface, LispView, that makes it easier for Lisp programmers to create applications that use the OPEN LOOK Graphical User Interface. LispView contains a translator that converts windows created with Sun's OpenWindows Developer's Guide into Lisp code. Developers can create prototypes designed the way they want their user interface to look, with the underlying code imported into their Lisp programs automatically. Also included with Sun Common Lisp is a Delivery Tool Kit, which makes end-user applications more efficient and compact. Containing performance analysis tools, the Delivery Tool Kit helps programmers identify critical sections of the program where additional development may improve performance. The Delivery Tool Kit's Reorganizer can improve application performance by rearranging code and data to share the same portion of memory during program execution. Sun Common Lisp 4.0 supports the standard Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) for object-oriented programming. SPE 1.2 is a Lisp programming environment that provides the same interactive programming style familiar to users of dedicated Lisp machines. SPE dramatically accelerates the software development cycle and is composed of window-based, integrated visual tools such as editors, debuggers, and program analyzers. In Short * Sun's 6-MB/sec IPI disk drive is the industry's highest-performance standard disk drive. Available on the SPARCserver 490, the drive performs at double the previously available sequential transfer rate--with no additional cost. Such transfer rates are critical in imaging and other applications with large data files. And it's priced as low as a 3-MB/sec drive. * The new 128-MB memory board from Sun greatly enhances the SPARCserver product line. Your SPARCserver can now support up to 672 MB of ECC memory--more than four times the previous maximum and more than double that of any competitive system. * We've cut the price of our 32-MB memory board for SPARCsystem(TM) 470 and SPARCsystem 490 by more than 30%. * XGL, Sun's new high-performance, full-function 2-D/3-D interface for the OpenWindows environment, is now shipping. XGL provides transparent accelerations on all Sun GX and color framebuffers as well as future accelerators. XGL runtime libraries are bundled with OpenWindows Version 2, giving you high-performance 2-D and 3-D graphics for technical applications. * OpenWindows Developer's Guide 1.1 is now available for OpenWindows Version 2, which supports 3-D OPEN LOOK and provides additional code generators for C++ and ANSI-C. * To place an order or get additional information on products mentioned in this newsletter, please call Sun Telemarketing at 1-800-USA-4SUN, pressing 6. Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, and NFS are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. DeskSet, Prestoserve, ONC, SunOS, OpenWindows, X11/NeWS, OpenFonts, Simplify, Vision, Catalyst CDware, Sun Common Lisp, SPE, and LispView are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc. SPARCstation, SPARCware, SPARCserver, and SPARCsystem are trademarks of SPARC International, Inc., licensed exclusively to Sun Microsystems, Inc. Products bearing the SPARC trademark are based on an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX and OPEN LOOK are registered trademarks of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe also owns copyrights to the PostScript language and the PostScript interpreter. The trademark PostScript is only used herein to refer to material supplied by Adobe or to programs written in the PostScript language as defined by Adobe. X Window System is a product of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All other products or services mentioned herein are identified by the trademarks, service marks, or product names as designated by the companies who market those products. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sunflash is an electronic mail news service from Sun Microsystems, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. It is targeted at Sun Users and Customers. For additional information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@sunvice.East.Sun.COM SunFlash is distributed via a hierarchy of aliases. Try to address change requests to the owner of the alias that you belong to. If you want to be added to the SunFlash alias, please contact the systems engineers at your local Sun office and/or send mail to sunflash-request@sunvice.East.Sun.COM. All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. Please contact your local Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in your region. Descriptions of, or references to products or publications within SunFlash does not imply an endorsement of that product or publication by Sun Microsystems. Address comments to the SunFlash editor (John McLaughlin) at sun!sunvice!flash or flash@sunvice.East.Sun.COM. (305) 776-7770.