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From: mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: net.micro.att
Subject: Re: Problems with the 7300
Message-ID: <133@mips.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-May-85 02:40:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: mips.133
Posted: Fri May 17 02:40:56 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 19-May-85 06:18:36 EDT
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 66

Dwight Earnest ...vax135!timeinc!dwight writes:
> BTW, there is an interesting article about the history of the
> development of the Unix PC (a.k.a. 7300) in the May issue of
> _Popular_Computing_. As many of us already knew, the article
> explains that the Unix PC was not developed in-house, but was
> rather specified in-house, in a small team effort, and then
> "farmed out" to an outside systems house (Coherent, I think).
> The article says that the biggest mistake made was the choice of
> the 68010 instead of the 32100 chip set, and that this mistake
> was made mostly due to proprietary marketing considerations
> which no longer existed when the machine was finally completed.

1) Coherent ---> Convergent Technologies, of course.

2) The article indeed commented as described on the biggest mistake.
However, regardless of whether the magazine heard this from someone
inside ATT or simply speculated, the statements are at best an 
over-simplification.  The article said:
a) ATT WE manufactured the more powerful WE-32000.
b) The WE-3200 was still proprietary, hence could not be used in
any product manufactured externally.  ATT couldn't release the specs
to CT and thus couldn't use it.
c) [BY IMPLICATION] ATT & CT would have preferred to use the WE-32000,
but bureaucracy got in the way.

a) ATT WE manufactured the WE-32000.  It is not instantly clear
that it is more powerful in this application, although this might be
answered by running CPU benchmarks on a 3B2 vs a 7300 (or CT MiniFrame).
[Note that the WE32000 of 3B2 & 3B5 and WE32100 are different chips].
b) The WE-32000 was still proprietary. As I recall, as part of
the process of readying a bond offering last fall, that it was possible
that some proprietary parts available only from ATT might be in
short supply.  This statement caused numnerous people to worry that
CT wouldn't be getting enough 32000's.   ALL of this was nonsense -
there is of course a proprietary ATT part in the 7300, but that part
NEVER was a 32000.
c) It is not instantly clear that ATT and CT preferred the 32000.
ATT first: it may be that somebody may have preferred to put the
32000 in this product.  Remember that ATT IS (with whom CT worked) and
ATT Technologies (who make 32000's) were fairly separate organizations,
with (necessarily) different viewpoints, priorities, and goals.
I'd speculate that there were some interesting discussions....
CT next: by the time this deal really got going, CT already had a
demand-paged System V running in a system (MiniFrame) well-designed
for low-cost manufacturing, using a 10Mhz 68010.  Important considerations
in this market are manufacturing cost and time-to-market.  I don't know
cost and availability figures on 32000's and supporting chips; I
speculate that they might not necessarily be cheaper than the 68010s
that CT had much experience with.  As a fact, the 7300 started life
as a MiniFrame variant, and if there ever was serious consideration
inside CT of wanting to use a 32000, it died out very quickly.

On a separate note related to the 7300, it seems that ATT can't win.
First, people complained that ATT was too UNIX-conscious and was ignoring
personal computers.  Next, when the 6300 came out, people complained that
it was boringly standard, wasn't exciting, and didn't even run UNIX.
Finally, the 7300 comes out, combining many good attributes of
UNIX + Mac, and people complain that it doesn't run MSDOS.  Sigh...

In my opinion, the 7300 is a great little box, with some good hardware
and software engineering to get the cost/performance that it does.
-- 
-john mashey [ex CT, ex BTL]
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