bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (12/01/88)
In article <2153@kalliope.rice.edu> bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu (David Bernhold) writes: >What we want is "upgradable" hardware - not forced obselesence (sp?). Come on now, we all knew that the 3/50 was unexpandable when we bought it - the only thing that could be done to improve it was to install a MC68881. It has always been sold as the dirt cheap, bottom of the line, minimalist workstation for people who needed to buy workstations by the truckload, on a budget. It is good for filling a room with happy undergrads banging on their programming assignments. If you wanted color or expansion capacity or other such frills, you bought a 3/110 or a 3/160 or something else, and you paid for it. >Apple was very good about this with their Macintosh's, why can't >other people be? Apple hasn't always been "very good" about this. From the Mac's introduction, and persisting for almost a year, their official policy was that if you even opened up the case you voided the warranty. Remember the temerity of the original memory upgrade sellers? The Mac was intended as an appliance - and who adds features or capacity to their toaster oven? It was originally designed not to be internally expandable, because you could get to everything you really needed via the documented interfaces on the back of the box. Market pressures forced Apple to acknowledge that people were going to expand their Macintoshes, and that the customers considered expansion more important than even their warranty. Even if Sun doesn't ever offer a 3/50 memory upgrade (as is likely), several third-party suppliers are getting into the game. If the price is right, we'd like to upgrade all 230 of our 3/50s. So far, the upgrade is just a little dear for our budget, even though it's still cheaper than trading them all in for 3/60s.
taw@sun.com (Tom Wadlow) (12/01/88)
Helios Systems (sometimes called Piceon, for reasons I am unaware of) just came out with a 3/50 memory upgrade, which I just went down to see earlier this week. They patch into the Sun by soldering a flex PC board onto the bottom of the 3/50 CPU. This terminates in a connector that attaches to a board that contains the memory. The memory board clips on to the two stiffener bars that run across the CPU board. The flex board is fairly complex, which leads me to believe that Sun never gave much thought to upgrades, because it sure didn't look like it was easy to do. I have heard elsewhere that Sun had an internal upgrade for the 3/50 that never saw the light of day (as happens to many interesting things in a billion dollar ex-startup). The Helios upgrade comes in 4 or 8 meg flavors (giving you 8 or 12 meg total). Apparently it is important to know whether you have the 15Mhz, 16Mhz, or (a surprise to me) the 12Mhz 68020 in your 3/50. You can find this out by pulling the CPU board, and looking at the 68020 chip. The last two numbers (followed by more characters) are the speed rating. The upgrade costs $2500 for 4 meg and somewhere around $4K for 8meg. We are considering buying some of these, and I would be interested in hearing from anybody with some experience with them. If we do get some, I'll report back on the results. --Tom P.S. I have no connection with Helios other than as an occasional customer.