| Would someone care to give me an idea of how fast a SPARCstation 10 
| with dual Ross 150 MHz processors and 128 MB RAM is compared to a DEC 
| 3000/400 Alpha with 96 MB RAM, please?

Well, unfortunately SPEC 89 is no longer available on the SPEC website.

The closest match I found was the 3000 500, which gets 2.15 SPEC INT95
and 3.65 SPEC FP95.  The Sun SPARCstation 20 model 151 which has one
150MHz HyperSPARC processor gets 4.02 SPEC INT95 and 4.71 SPEC FP95.
Assuming the DEC 3000/400 gets the same results as a 3000 500, the
SPARC is almost twice as fast.

| What are Ross processors anyway--presumably they're manufactured by 
| Sun and the name is an acronym dreamt up by it?

They were manufactured by the former Ross Systems.

| Is it possible to configure the SS10 so console messages 
| automatically go to an external console connected to the serial port 
| while the main monitor is used for X?  (Sorry, I don't have a manual.)

Yes.  `setenv input-device ttya' and `setenv output-device ttya' at the 
`ok' prompt should do that for you.

| This machine has a second frame buffer installed.  Can that be used 
| for console messages or another X display, in which case there'd be 
| one large "desktop" spread across the two monitors?

That should work as well.

Eduardo