avie@wb1.cs.cmu.edu (Avadis Tevanian) (05/06/89)
In article <915@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) writes: >0.9 sounds really nice. Too bad we don't have it. 0.9 is rather nice (of course I'm biased :-). It is a fact that 0.9 was being shipped by our factory on May 3rd. This includes new machines with 0.9 and 0.9 updates to our 0.8 installed base. If you don't have your update, you should get it any day now. I think its worth letting everyone know why there was a delay. Basically, just before our software group released 0.9 to the factory, the factory stopped producing 0.8. Just as the first 0.9 disks were being produced, our quality assurance mechanisms detected more than expected rejections of optical media (we reject some percentage of "bad" media). This problem was detected before any 0.9 units had shipped, and since it was concurrent with the 0.9 release, there was (initially) some concern that there was a 0.9 bug (We use our own software to produce disks). Rather than just living with a lower "yield" of disks, we pulled the plug and put the release on hold until we understood the problem. Since that time, we studied the problem and tracked it down to bad sectors that behaved in strange ways. We enhanced our optical disk driver to handle these cases, and ran rigorous tests on the optical media. We delayed shipping until we were sure the problem was nailed. I think most of the confusion in the field was due to the fact that we were always "a couple days away from shipping." >[I would be more than happy to have .9 arrive moments after I post this, >so I would look stupid. I fear it isn't going to be so.] We don't want you to look stupid, and indeed you don't. Hopefully you will have 0.9 in hand soon. We are sorry that we've caused some grief to people, especially our early adopters. I hope that the new things you find in 0.9 will help to make up for the grief. And THANKS for being so interested! (Check out the Draw example, it's an amazing piece of work yet a simple program --- the source is in /NextDeveloper/Examples). -- Avadis Tevanian, Jr. (Avie) Chief Operating System Scientist NeXT, Inc. avie@cs.cmu.edu or avie@NeXT.com --