montnaro@sprite.uucp (Skip Montanaro) (02/05/88)
In article <3a15b3ba.c82a@apollo.uucp> ganek@apollo.uucp (Dan Ganek) writes: > >I probably shouldn't do this -- but every once in awhile I get a little >upset at the Apollo bashing. >... >I'm am a physicists by training and as such believe in the principle >of causality, i.e the future can't affect the past. > >Apollo chose the BEST TECHNOLOGIES OF THE TIME (1980), improved >many of them (like UNIX). Nobody is perfect. Apollo is the ONLY >major worksation company left from its era. (What happened to all >those UNIX based workstation companies of 1980??) Johnny-come-lately's >(like SUN) will of course take advantage of newer technologies and >mistakes of predecessors. Apollo did - there's nothing wrong with that. >I certainly don't complain about SUN learning from our mistakes. You are absolutely correct about Apollo's position in the early 80's. You can't fault them for the decisions they made at that time. Another thing you didn't mention is Apollo's pioneering (commercial) effort in diskless workstation technology. Sun is still catching up in that arena, at least regarding system administration. However, I think you can (and many potential customers probably did) fault them for not changing their stance about UNIX and ethernet sooner than they did. On a somewhat brighter note, from what I've seen of NCA/NCS, I think Apollo has a winner, both technically speaking, and from a marketing standpoint. Deciding to support it on a variety of competitors' machines may prove to be what gets it accepted as a de facto standard. I think Sun should have adopted a similar strategy for NeWS. They've got a technically very exciting product, they've done a couple "proof-of-existence" ports, and have licensed NeWS to a number of folks, but I don't think that any of the companies that have picked it up will have the impact that Sun might have had if they had announced a NeWS server early on for VaxStations, Apollos, or MS-DOS (for instance). Another marketing strategy might have been to team up with a graphics terminal vendor and announce an ethernet- or RS-232-based NeWS server terminal when they announced the Sun-4. (Maybe they'll put out a new set of ROM chips for the 3/50 that will promote it from third-class diskless workstation to first-class NeWS server. Don't throw 'em out yet!) The original subject of this message was "NeWS on non-Sun hardware". How about a summary (preferably from someone at Sun) about just what is commercially available now, or has been announced. The client software is extremely portable, so that's no big deal. What about servers? If there's nothing really out there yet, let's kill the discussion on this topic for a couple of months (or until the next new reader in this newsgroup asks :-). Skip (montanaro@ge-crd.arpa, uunet!steinmetz!sprite!montanaro)