james@sparrmsuucp (James Buchanan) (04/26/89)
Why isn't this newsgroup just bursting with gossip about the
demise of Envos, and the future of us poor folks in the user
community?
The latest dirt I heard is that Xerox is committed to seeing
the Medley product line continue, but not as committed to being
the ones doing the continuing. Any takers? Some immediate
candidates should be Sun, and maybe TI (that box and this
environment would be a great pair). Anybody have any more
dirt. What happened to all you guys down a PARC, you must
have heard something :-).
Anybody have any speculation about whether Envos was doomed
from the start. At the launching user group meeting, former
Envos Prez Walt Samuelson said that there were 8000 6085/1186
boxes on the market, which leads to a guess of < 1000 as a
starting customer base. With Loops a dead-end and Rooms a
product which will be slow to catch on (why do I need it?),
and the user community already on a free upgrade path, where
where they supposed to get the revenue to cover a 40 person
staff (40 x $100,000 pp/a = $4M/a), and other costs? What
were the expectations about other revenue sources: Medley-S taking
off (when it sinks a 3-260?)? Ironically, now that it could
run comfortably on a $10K SparcStation1 that seems like a more
plausible assumption. (By the way, did they ever finish the port
to OS4.x?)
Any comments?
p.s. We've been having some trouble with the address our mailer
deamon is putting on our e-mail. The correct address is
the one below, if the header says comething different,
please ignore it.
James Buchanan james@sparrms.UUCP
Spar Aerospace Ltd
1700 Ormont Drive (416) 745-9680
Weston, Ontario, CANADA M9L 2W7
p.p.s My opinions do not reflect the opinions of my employerhitchings.wbst@XEROX.COM (04/27/89)
Personally I'm disappointed by Envos's demise for two reasons. First, Interlisp-D is one of the best development environments around and it is finally available on a commercial platform (SUN). Second, Xerox has always had trouble turning PARC research into profitable products and a lot of us hoped that Xerox's solution for Interlisp-D of spinning off a startup company would work. However, it seems that Envos's problem was no cash flow. I guess they didn't have any customers. As for the future, we hope that Medley will be supported on the SUNs. However, I doubt you could talk TI into implementing Interlisp-D on an Explorer rather than enhancing their own O.S.
sjc@VAX3.ITI.ORG ("Steven J. Clark") (04/27/89)
> > Why isn't this newsgroup just bursting with gossip about the > demise of Envos, and the future of us poor folks in the user > community? In my case it's because I've heard just a few clues, enough that I realize I ought to keep my mouth shut. I can just imagine that nearly everyone has heard the same thing, so we're all being careful not to tell each other what we all know. > > The latest dirt I heard is that Xerox is committed to seeing > the Medley product line continue, but not as committed to being That is clear because they didn't simply let Envos go down the drain. I had thought they established Envos to let it "sink or swim", but they aren't letting it sink. (They are continuing SW support, e.g.) > starting customer base. With Loops a dead-end and Rooms a Loops is the only environment for lisp-based object oriented programming; the rest are all just languages. Loops is the Interlisp of object- oriented programming languages. It is not a dead end; in another 5 years or so maybe someone will put together an environment for OOP in Common Lisp or Flavors that approaches Loops, but I doubt it. In the meantime, I'll stick with Loops. > product which will be slow to catch on (why do I need it?), I find Rooms to be pretty handy, but not worth a lot of money. On the other hand, it is very easy to use it to jazz up a demo -- for small effort on my part, it greatly increases the snazziness of my demo. I can do development all the time, and when someone walks in for a demo, just go to the "demo room" -- or rather, to one of the "demo rooms". > were the expectations about other revenue sources: Medley-S taking > off (when it sinks a 3-260?)? Ironically, now that it could Sure it sinks a 3, any 3. But it does great on even a 4/110. I run it on a Sun 4/110 with 8 Mb, diskless, and it runs about twice the speed of an 1186. My fileserver is a dog, and yet I'm still very comfortable - very little swapping. > run comfortably on a $10K SparcStation1 that seems like a more > plausible assumption. (By the way, did they ever finish the port > to OS4.x?) Yes, I'm using it right now (running Chat to a shell to read/write mail). > > James Buchanan james@sparrms.UUCP -Steve Clark sjc@iti.org
welch@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Arun Welch) (04/27/89)
>Why isn't this newsgroup just bursting with gossip about the >demise of Envos, and the future of us poor folks in the user >community? It's probably a case of people not wanting to feed the rumor mill with unsubstantiated stuff. The Official Word (tm) from Xerox is "We're working on it. We've got a number of options, all of them good, and we're not sure which one we're going to take. We'll keep you informed." I've been calling one of the Xerox execudroids in charge of the switch about every other week, and having 15-minute conversations which would yield a NIL on semantic analysis... I've been stressing to him that we as users aren't going to go for a support organisation consisting of completely new people, who are learning Interlisp so that they can support us. I'd rather go without support, thank you. Some people may have had problems with AISupport, but on the whole I've been pretty glad they've been around, and it would make me uncomfortable for me if I knew more about the system than anyone that I'm paying for support. It would be *real* nice if the former Envos employees ended up supporting us again, one way or another. >Anybody have any speculation about whether Envos was doomed >from the start. I have a theory on that, but I better not say it on the mailing list... > At the launching user group meeting, former >Envos Prez Walt Samuelson said that there were 8000 6085/1186 >boxes on the market, which leads to a guess of < 1000 as a >starting customer base. Well, there are 140 entries in the mailing list, most of which are mailing lists themselves. Add to that the unknown number who read this from the comp.sys.xerox side of the fence. And a coupple of the entries are mailing lists for the other side of the atlantic, which I'm sure burst still further. Of course, going from that is kinda hard, since there's no way to tell now many people aren't on the list, or how many people have multiple machines. [Oh yeah, Walt was a VP, Roger McKee was the prez]. >where they supposed to get the revenue to cover a 40 person 40 seems a tad high. Also, a number of those were working on the NCP project, which was funded directly by Xerox. > Medley-S taking off (when it sinks a 3-260?)? Ironically, now that >it could run comfortably on a $10K SparcStation1 that seems like a >more plausible assumption. (By the way, did they ever finish the port >to OS4.x?) Actually, Medley was a whole lot better behaved than Lucid was on a 3. A 3/50 with 8Meg of memory was about the speed of an 86, with the added advantage that it actually ran on the 50, and didn't crash it randomly as opposed to Lucid. If I remember right, the OS4.x finished beta test in mid-december, so it's been out for about 3 months now. I've been switching between a diskless 4/110 with 8M of memory and my 1186, and it's pretty hard to go back to the 86 after the speed of the 4. ...arun