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From: johnm@cup.portal.com (John - Madison)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Sun != Open Archtecture
Message-ID: <37681@cup.portal.com>
Date: 7 Jan 91 06:26:06 GMT
References: <36911@cup.portal.com> <5089@trantor.harris-atd.com>
  <1990Dec19.024945.12335@lingua.cltr.uq.OZ.AU>
  <1990Dec28.224236.5163@erbe.se> <1991Jan5.135651.486@tscs.uucp>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 40

>Sun tried to continue the 680X0 product line with the 3/80 and tried to
>enter the 80X86 product line with the 386i.  They did their part, it was
>us consumers who failed to maintain Sun's multi-architecture support
>by not purchasing sufficient quantities of their newer non-SPARC machines
>for them to justify making them.

The Sun 3/80 was a miserable machine.   Among its fault were:
	- it was slower than the machine it replaced, the 3/60.
	- although it used the same package as the SPARCstation, it
	  did not use the SBUs.  Instead, it used 3/60 daughterboards,
	  and you could only install one board per machine.   This
	  was a proprietary standard, and nobody but Sun used it.
	- it was *very* late.  Sun was about the last company to start
	  shipping 68030 products.

The 386 shipped large numbers of machines.   The real problem was that
Sun could not produce a 486 based machine.   The problems included:
	- an OS that had diverged from SunOS for the other platforms, so
	  that integration of newly developed OS features was increasingly
	  difficult.
	- an inability to actually get UNIX to run on the 486.  This was
	  blamed by Sun engineers on bugs in the 486 chip, but this seems
	  unlikely.
	- an unannounced, but widely leaked, plan to stop porting new OS
	  versions to the 486, because of these reasons. 

Also, don't forget the 3/360 (or whatever it was numbered), the vme
68030 system.  It too was late and enormously expensive.  The cpu board
was loaded with expensive chips and never did work right.

Sun could easily have saved the 68xxx family by producing a better
desktop machine and a lower cost, more highly integrated vme machine.
They didn't.  It is tempting to claim that this was a preplanned
strategy to migrate customers to SPARC, but the actual reason is
a combination of engineering blunders and management stupidity.  If
Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim hadn't spent $200,000 of his own
money to develop the SPARCstation, Sun would be in big trouble right now.

Sun's "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan is just a recognition that
they burned all the other ones.