leland@DRAGONFLY.WRI.COM (11/06/90)
Shortly after HP bought Apollo, they told us all (at the ADUS meeting) that
foremost on their mind is "protection of investment." Now we all know that
this is not to be. Old Apollo shipped /sau1 directories for 9 OS revisions
before they stopped. When did DEC stop supporting PDP-11s by the way? How about
IBMs support of 360 series machines?
HP, its not too late. Save face now, support OSF on all 68020 machines and above.
See, you can make an OS compatible, and its great when it works, but more often
tiny issues creep in and make running a network unnecessarily complicated. Any
Apollo customer who lived through the 9.2 to 9.5 transition, or more recently
the 9.7 to 10.x knows the true meaning of compatibility. Try explaining to
300 student users who've never seen a workstation before why they get "A control
character was found where it was not expected" when they try to run a
program on some workstations.
Believe me, HP, this decision will seriously hurt your company. By forcing your
customers to run hetrogeneous networks, you will convince many customers and
even more potential customers to look at other vendor's hardware. Instead of
400's, they'll buy Sparc SLCs (50% the speed of a 68040, but at 50% of the
cost). Instead of DN10000s or HP/PAs, they will buy RS/6000s (About the speed of
a 10000 at about 15% of the price).
At the same time, you could do something for those who still run pre-68020
systems. Publish some of your legendary hardware manuals, completely describing
their design and providing troubleshooting information. Make the custom
chips available. Release the rights to the masses. Although you won't make
any money off the deal (yes, I know what an effort is involved in producing
documentation), you will greatly please the people who've bought old used
equipment, and you won't hurt your company one bit. Better still, third parties
may very well take over the support of these systems.
HP, you've got a darn good machine with the 400. But a darn good machine isn't
worth a whole lot if nobody buys it. You know how to change that.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leland Ray
In[1] := N[Sqrt[3],10000] Systems Administrator --
Unix Platforms
WRI, Inc.
(217) 398-0700