Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU!welch
From: welch@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Arun Welch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.xerox
Subject: Re: The demise of Envos
Message-ID: <8904271545.AA23832@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 89 15:45:56 GMT
References: <226@sparrmsuucp>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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>Why isn't this newsgroup just bursting with gossip about the 
>demise of Envos, and the future of us poor folks in the user 
>community?

It's probably a case of people not wanting to feed the rumor mill
with unsubstantiated stuff.  The Official Word (tm) from Xerox is
"We're working on it.  We've got a number of options, all of them
good, and we're not sure which one we're going to take. We'll keep you
informed."  I've been calling one of the Xerox execudroids in charge
of the switch about every other week, and having 15-minute
conversations which would yield a NIL on semantic analysis... I've
been stressing to him that we as users aren't going to go for a
support organisation consisting of completely new people, who are
learning Interlisp so that they can support us.  I'd rather go without
support, thank you. Some people may have had problems with AISupport,
but on the whole I've been pretty glad they've been around, and it
would make me uncomfortable for me if I knew more about the system
than anyone that I'm paying for support.  It would be *real* nice if
the former Envos employees ended up supporting us again, one way or
another. 

>Anybody have any speculation about whether Envos was doomed
>from the start.

I have a theory on that, but I better not say it on the mailing
list...


> At the launching user group meeting, former
>Envos Prez Walt Samuelson said that there were 8000 6085/1186
>boxes on the market, which leads to a guess of < 1000 as a 
>starting customer base. 

Well, there are 140 entries in the mailing list, most of which are
mailing lists themselves.  Add to that the unknown number who read
this from the comp.sys.xerox side of the fence.  And  a coupple of the
entries are mailing lists for the other side of the atlantic, which
I'm sure burst still further.  Of course, going from that is kinda
hard, since there's no way to tell now many people aren't on the list,
or how many people have multiple machines. [Oh yeah, Walt was a VP,
Roger McKee was the prez].

>where they supposed to get the revenue to cover a 40 person

40 seems a tad high. Also, a number of those were working on the NCP
project, which was funded directly by Xerox.

> Medley-S taking off (when it sinks a 3-260?)?  Ironically, now that
>it could run comfortably on a $10K SparcStation1 that seems like a
>more plausible assumption. (By the way, did they ever finish the port
>to OS4.x?)

Actually, Medley was a whole lot better behaved than Lucid was on a 3.
A 3/50 with 8Meg of memory was about the speed of an 86, with the
added advantage that it actually ran on the 50, and didn't crash it
randomly as opposed to Lucid.  If I remember right, the OS4.x finished
beta test in mid-december, so it's been out for about 3 months now.
I've been switching between a diskless 4/110 with 8M of memory and my
1186, and it's pretty hard to go back to the 86 after the speed of the 4.

...arun