davison@menudo.uh.edu (Dan Davison) (10/08/90)
Sun has just deleted all the Sun-3 hardware from the latest price book; I guess they're not interested in the existing hw either. Background: Sun-3/80 with floppy disk drive. Recently upgraded to SOS 4.1. When formatting disks in the drive with the command "fdformat" I got an error at the end, when "verifying" the disk and writing the magic SOS hoojoo on the disk. "fdformat -v" fails immediately. This happens with lots of different disks. So, I call Sun support. A very nice tech support person informs me that (1) it is a known bug in 4.1 on the 3/80; (2) they are "working on it"; (3) there is no intention to (or mechanism for) informing 3/80 owners when the fix is available; (4) you should NOT use the disks that pass the format (they just don't verify) and newfs successfully because data could be lost. Gee. If I wanted to get ******** on hardware, I would have bought DEC. It's sad to see what has happened to Sun. I estimate about an 8 year lag between the decay vis a vis their customers and DEC's similar decay. Except that it took DEC a LOT longer to get as nasty (on all fronts: salescritters, support, hw, sw) as Sun has become. Anybody know of a friendly workstation vendor? dan davison davison@uh.edu DAVISON@UHOU (BITNET)