dnewton@carroll1.UUCP (David Newton) (02/09/89)
I'm looking for a dn3500, but don't want to buy thru Apollo becaue of cost, so I was wondering if anyone out there can give me some leads as to where to go for them...... thanks in advance dln
shull@SCROLLS.WHARTON.UPENN.EDU (Christopher E. Shull) (02/10/89)
If you are at Carroll College-Waukesha, WI, as your Organization: line inticates, then you should qualify for extremely attractive educational discounts from Apollo. We recently (albeit before the price increases) bought a DN3500 with 155 MB disk, 15" color monitor, and 4 MB RAM for less than $10,000. -Chris Christopher E. Shull Decision Sciences Department The Wharton School shull@wharton.upenn.edu University of Pennsylvania shull@scrolls.wharton.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104-6366 215/898-5930 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" Admiral Farragut, USN, 1801-1870 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
geof@apolling (Geof Cooper) (02/10/89)
In article <209@carroll1.UUCP> dnewton@carroll1.UUCP (David Newton) writes: >I'm looking for a dn3500, but don't want to buy thru Apollo becaue of cost, >so I was wondering if anyone out there can give me some leads as to where >to go for them...... [The following is fictional. Any similarities to existing companies is purely accidental. This work is the personal production of the author, and does not represent the views of IMAGEN Corporation or QMS, Inc.] Since you are interested in a clone, you should check with ShadeyYama Enterprises of Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Malaysia. They have recently introduced a new low cost clone, the SY/DN3499. (I'm not quite clear on whether that is the model number or the price). It provides for all the significant features of the DN3000, including broken DMA interfaces and the like. For example, the optional parallel port has not quite been demonstrated to work, and the PC compatibility option resets randomly after running it for a while. 1/2 MB of memory is standard, and memory upgrade options are available for $5000/MB. The operating system requires 4MB to run effectively, although for marketing reasons they have pegged the minimum memory configuration at 512KB. Under that configuration, it takes 4.3 days to boot. For a small added price, each system can be equipped with a hard disk that holds more than 73% of the provided system software. The system software is also cloned, and is marketed under the name of DEMON/IX (rhymes with "mnemonics"). It comes complete with 10,000 pages of documentation, conveniently packaged as looseleaf sheets with shrink wrap around every half-ream. An attractive metal filing cabinet is provided to hold the documentation. So far as we can tell, the documentation is very complete. All pertinent information about the system is presented in clear, precise form and sprinkled throughout the documentation. Our SysAdmin is currently on page 4,971 and has just found out about not using the ACL command with system device files on alternate full-moon tuesdays. Good that we've got that one out of the way now. Version 9.7.1.3.2 is the latest and greatest (they haven't developed ISR10 emulation, yet, but we have verbal guarantees that when available it will indeed make half the installed base of hardware unusable). It fixes a bug in version 9.7.1.3.1 under which the ACL cache refused to be corrupted any more often than once a week. This compatibility problem has now been fixed, and ACL cache corruption is guaranteed to occurs at least once every 48 hours. More often on the older SY/DN299 nodes. Running the /etc/fudge_cache program has been known to cause 1/2 of the UNIX-compatible processes on the system to continue to be usuable. We have complained that this number is excessive and not apollo-compatible, but they responded that all engineers have been re-assigned to work on version 9.99999... and aren't really interested in 9.7 users any more. They did reference us to a 10MB bug fix tape that we can look through for interesting patches. The operating system is distributed on standard cartridge tape. The system comes with 9-track tape units and floppy disks, standard. Customer service is available by dialing 1-800-UPY-RANS between 9 and 5PM KST (Korean Standard Time). As you can see, we admire their products, but have been a little disappointed with the number of bugs and the problems in dealing with them. There has been some improvement over the years, but we're still not quite happy. I guess that that is the price of dealing with a "fly-by-night" operation. We'll stick to go ol' Apollo Computer from now on.