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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: ADUS conference news
Message-ID: <4d6efa70.1bc5b@pisa.ifs.umich.edu>
Date: 16 Oct 90 15:16:31 GMT
References: <901015.16343798.030626@RMC.CP6> <9010151904.aa17376@concour.cs.concordia.ca>
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Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
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In article <9010151904.aa17376@concour.cs.concordia.ca>, goldfish@CONCOUR.CS.CONCORDIA.CA (-- Paul Goldsmith) writes:
  Before you get out your hankies and start crying over HP's costs for
  putting OSF onto an Apollo, the Apollo DN4500 was demonstrated running
  MACH (which is the OSF kernel) at the Montreal Computer show. (I
  didn't see it myself, however another analyst saw it there.) Once the
  kernel runs, any other excuses for not putting the OS up are STRICTLY
  MARKETING.

I worked on the original port of Mach to Apollo hardware back in 1988.
Getting the basics (compiling and booting) is pretty easy.  But the fact is
that "once the kernel runs" you've just barely started.  All the support
costs are directly proportional to the number of different architectures you
want to support.  And the number of different architectures is amazingly
high.  Did you know that the dn3000 comes with two different MMUs?  (One of
them is actually the dn3010 if you want to get picky).  Every time a new
release comes out, Apollo has to beta test it on all the different
architectures.  Add in the different display, memory, disk, and net options
and the number of permutations is unbelievable.

Marketing certainly goes into the equation, but there are in fact very real,
and very high, costs associated with supporting (as opposed to just
releasing) OSF on all the current Apollo hardware types.

I doubt that HP is planning to strand owners of the current products.  By
the time HP drops support for Domain/OS, no one will be using Otters
(dn[34]xxx) any more, for the same reason that no one uses Terns (dn[46]60)
any more.  It just won't be cost effective to keep them operating.

Of course, it would be really cool if somebody made Otter OSF available as
an unsupported product.  I doubt that we'll see this.