Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ERENJ.BITNET!SRFERGU
From: SRFERGU@ERENJ.BITNET (Scott Ferguson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Don't Let this Happen to You
Message-ID: <8912141352.AA03361@umix.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 89 13:33:57 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41



Here's a good one you can get a chuckle out of (or not):

A company called Mercury Computer Systems makes plug-in boards for computer
systems. The boards are based on Weitek floating-point chips, and have their
own C and Fortran compilers. They run at something like 20 MFLOPS, and plug
into an AT-bus.

About two years ago, we bought one of these boards for heavy image corrections
and it worked real well. With 10 MBytes of RAM on the board, it cost about
$10,000.


I've been griping about 3rd-parties not upgrading to SR10 to the ozone for
a while, and I decided it was about time to really start getting on their
case about it.

Mercury, saying they've only got 5-10 Apollo-using customers, and isn't going
to bother re-doing their software for SR10. So, I can either throw out the
board and go to sr10, or stay at 9.7 for the rest of my days or until I replace

all my Apollos with some other brand. Anyhow, I was just wondering:

Is there some kind of unwritten legal obligation for a vendor to provide
usability for a period of time? This board has only been here for less than
two years, and that's not a sufficient product cycle in my book. Maybe
we jost got hosed, I wasn't here when we bought the thing, but I'm tired
of telling myself that "that would work if I had sr10 up", and now my system
is doomed to stagnation. I wouldn't mind being able to legally force the
company to upgrade.


Thanks for listening to my weeps, and I'll take offers on a Mercury MC32
array processor from anyone interested (I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn,
cheap, too!)

Scott Ferguson
Exxon Research & Engineering
Annandale, NJ 08801
(201) 730-2339