phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (12/12/88)
All the messages in this issue are about the SUG conference last week. I wanted to get these out while the activities were still fresh in everyones' minds. Although there is more that I want to say about the conference, I will just briefly touch on one of the "hot topics" of the conference: memory for the 3/50. Both Helios and Clearpoint were there showing off their add ons. The Clearpoint add on looks much easier to put in and even possible to remove. The Helios one requires soldering on this flexible harness at many, many points. This looks very irreversible. When someone asked Scott McNealy about Sun's position on maintaining a 3/50 with any type of third party add on, he was most emphatic. Basically, he said "Sun can't get in the position of supporting third-party hardware. We just wouldn't survive as a business if we started doing that. It's a bad precedent." What I want to know (and I should have asked him---oh well) is if Sun is willing to continue to support their hardware (the CPU board) even after a temporary or permanent memory add on has been made. I'm not asking them to support the add on memory itself, just to continue supporting their part of the hardware. Apparently, McNealy's sentiment is not shared by the rest of the company. Although I was not there, I understand that the next morning Joe Roebeck said that the issue is still being discussed (debated, fought over?) within Sun. The way I see it, they're going to have to compromise some here. There are just too many 3/50's out there to ignore. Running version 4 on them is practically impossible without a memory upgrade. But if Sun isn't going to market their own upgrade nor continue to support a machine upgraded in such a manner, customers will be forced to take their support business elsewhere. And they may just decide that it's easier to have one support contract than two different ones and take *all* their support business elsewhere. Don't take this as a threat, but instead take it as an observation of reality. McNealy promised wonderful things for the future of Sun 3's. He said something about putting out the best possible upgrade path in the current market (or some such non-commital comment). But 3/50 owners don't want the best hardware upgrade in one or two years. They want to continue using their machines today. And in order to do so, they either have to stick with 3.5 (or lower) or get a memory upgrade and sacrifice their Sun support. Facts of life. Sun did have a pamphlet at their booth describing how one might tailor a 3/50 to improve performance, theoretically making 4.0 usable. We will be trying that out, but it remains to be seen (and I remain skeptical). More on the conference at a later date. Your moderator, William LeFebvre