From: bruce@quisp.ai.mit.edu (Bruce Walton) Newsgroups: alt.sys.sun Subject: Re: wanted: any info on Sun RoadRunner Keywords: Roadrunner Message-ID: <18353@life.ai.mit.edu> Date: 18 Sep 91 12:17:47 GMT References: <1313@apdnm.idca.tds.philips.nl> <1473@shuksan.boeing.com> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 38 In article <1473@shuksan.boeing.com> mikey@shuksan.boeing.com (Mike Fields) writes: >In article <1313@apdnm.idca.tds.philips.nl>, wilko@russia.idca.tds.philips.nl (Wilko Bulte) writes: >> Recently I was offered a Sun Roadrunner box. >> >> Since I don't know anything about this machine, I would welcome all >> knowledgeable info about it. Things like: CPU type & speed, bus type, >> peripheral support, memory, graphics etc are all considered useful. > >If I remember correctly, the roadrunner was the code name for the >sun 386i machine. It was based on the intel 80386 cpu. I _think_ >it used the standard VME bus that the rest of the sun stuff does. >I remember one of the sun people showing me how it could run a >"DOS" (as in the IBM PC world) window. No, there's no VME bus in the 386i. Its motherboard has special slots for memory card and graphics card (color or mono), plus a few standard AT-bus slots! I think the only way to use these AT slots is through the DOS emulation window... These machines came in two flavors the 386i-150, (20Mhz) and 386i-250 (25Mhz). The 150 was expandable to 8MB ram, the 250 to 16MB. A 387 math co-p is standard. There's an internal disk drive (CDC) in 90MB, 150MB, or 327MB sizes, and external scsi shoebox port. Also floppy drive for loading software (must be about 30 floppies to load the whole sunOS). The sunview windowing system runs PAINFULLY slow on this box, I'm suprised sun allowed this to ship with such poor UI performance. I used to have a 250 model with 16MB ram and color, it ran X11R4 very well. If you're thinking of getting one of these, try to get the docs with it. There are some tricky differences from "classic" sunOS in the 386i OS. And don't even think about using the standard sunview windows on this thing. -bruce. Bruce Walton systems administrator bruce@ai.mit.edu MIT artificial intelligence lab 617-253-9667 545 tech sq. cambridge, MA 02139