Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!RICHTER.MIT.EDU!krowitz
From: krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: ADUS conference news
Message-ID: <9010191532.AA20967@richter.mit.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 90 15:32:37 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 49

Over a year and a half ago, just after HP had purchased Apollo, several
people at a New England local users' group meeting were speculating what
was going to become of the DN10000. I ventured forth the following
observations:

HP had HP-PA
Apollo had PRISM
maintaining two seperate product lines was expensive both in hardware
design and in software support.
HP bought Apollo, not vice-versa.
The DN10000 was a dead-end.

A regional marketing manager from Apollo (ie. Chelmsford, not an HP
transplant) overheard the debate. She got up during her session and
announced (to the best of her knowledge at the time -- I am not
blaming her) that the DN10000 was a long-term viable product, and
outlined how the current DN10000 would first receive a 2X CPU upgrade,
and then a merged HP-PA/PRISM CPU upgrade which would be the path
to the combined HP/Apollo product line. It sounded good at the time.

The 2X CPU upgrade has still not been delivered.
The merged HP-PA/PRISM CPU is not going to be developed.
OSF will not be ported to any DN platform.
The majority of the people I used to know and correspond with in
Chelmsford have left the company.

Workstations, in general, have about a 3 year lifetime from product
introduction to the end of production. Software obsolecense begins
about 3.5 ro 4 years after the product introduction, and becomes a
near certainty within 6 to 12 months of the end of the hardware
production. Apollo's compilers stopped producing code for DN460/660
CPU's with the introduction of SR10.0  nearly 3 years ago due to
compiler bugs. These bugs are supposedly fixed in the SR10.3 compiler
suite (the CR1.0 compiler releases). At the time that SR10.0 was
released, our DN460/660's purchased in 1985 were about 3 to 3.5 years
old, and they had been made obsolete by the DN3000 only 18 months
after their purchase. Such is the workstation market. You buy a
machine with the expectation of getting 18 months of good use out
of it, another 18 months of ok-but-not-great work out of it, and
then 18 months of struggling to keep it alive. Then you throw it
out. 


 -- David Krowitz

krowitz@richter.mit.edu   (18.83.0.109)
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@eddie.mit.edu
krowitz%richter.mit.edu@mitvma.bitnet
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