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From: DCS05@RMC.CA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: RE: ADUS conference news
Message-ID: <901015.16343798.030626@RMC.CP6>
Date: 15 Oct 90 20:19:44 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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Some Additions to Mark Krause' observations.
Not supporting OSF-1 on the DN families was purely a
marketting decision.  HP admits that there are no technical reasons why
OSF-1 would not run on these platforms. Supposedly there are huge financial
costs involved in porting to the older (no - not older, current!) product
line.  No one, so far, has offered any details on what the cost to the
consumer would be.  I'm not much of a systems programmer so I find it
difficult to swallow a huge incremental cost when both product lines
are based on the same technology. Call me cynical but I figure that this
decision is based on stimulating sales for the new product line. That's
HP's perrogative - this is a free enterprise system. They will have to
live with the results.  In our case that will probably mean the
cancellation of all DN product purchases. We will look at the 400 series
instead. But, hey, if we need to buy new hardware to get OSF-1 maybe
we should look at some RS6000's - they seem to have a lot of bang for the
buck.

WRT the death of SR9.7- Barbara Poppe did the survey of who was using
what version. After the huge show of hands of those still relying on
SR9.7 her next question was something along the lines of ' Who WANTS
to be using SR9.7?'. I didn't see a single hand go up.  It would seem
that people are stuck at 9.7 for reasons other than personal preference.
For some the reasons may be SR10's lust for disk and memory but for most
the slow up has probably been the lack of support from 3rd party vendors.
I know that Autotrol only went to official support of SR10
this summer. Will this slow up the end of support for SR9.7. Probably not.
Definitely not unless HP gets lot's of feedback.

For Willem Jan Withagen - The confusion on the 2 dates might be the date
that SR9.7 goes off the price list (can't be ordered) which should be very
soon, and the date after which they will not support it ( requests for
bug fixes, etc) The support will not end until  the spring.

Steve Lloyd
Network Administrator
Royal Military College of Canada
LloydS@rmc.ca (LloydS@rmc.bitnet)