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From: pha@CAEN.ENGIN.UMICH.EDU (Paul H. Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  SR10.2 and life
Message-ID: <47cb7191b.000f088@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 2 Jan 90 14:08:24 GMT
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	From: lray@civilgate.ce.uiuc.edu
	Subject: SR10.2 and life
	
	Welcome to the world of workstations, a world where the software grows
	and changes daily. Apollo likes to obsolete software; during the time
	I've worked with their machines they have changed binary formats twice,
	required that all disks be reformatted, and changed their install
	procedure quite a number of times. The amount of time I've had to spend
	patching and reconfiguring the system has grown.

In fairness, just look at Sun, who introduced a 386i, then announced plans
to drop OS support for it and the entire Motorola line of machines (Sun2 and
Sun3).  This is an interesting alternative, isn't it?

Besides, considering that I can still run binaries from three or four major
releases back, things on the apollo aren't bad at all.  I'm very impressed with how Apollo
has always made strong attempts to preserve backwards compatibility, sometimes
at costs that I would consider excessive.  Source level compat has always been
good, too.

Look at the extensive effort to keep the DM alive in the face of X windows
standards - at 10.2, both reside on the machine, either can be used independently,
or a nice mix of both can be used with few problems.  Most vendors have chosen
to keep their manager and X completely separate, but not Apollo.
	 
	Of course, I don't really blame Apollo for that. While their software
	has molted, so has their hardware, so has their customer service, so has
	their sales, and so has their profits. They were well on their way to
	recovering when HP bought them.

I don't see that they were on the road to recovery, survival, perhaps, but
not recovery to the top of the heap where they belonged.  HP might change some
things for the better.

This note isn't intended to be an apologist's letter, especially since I'm
having fairly extroidinary difficulty keeping our 500 nodes working.  The
bottom line seems to be that at least among the traditional manufacturer's,
nothing really seems that great these days.  Maybe DEC or IBM will surprise
us with exceptional support for their machines, but I'm skeptical.
	 
	Just spendin' my days,                  Leland Ray
	                                        Systems Administrator
	  Soakin' in them cathode rays.         UIUC - Dept. Civil Engineering
	                                        (217) 333-3821
	
Paul Anderson
Apollo Systems Programmer
Computer Aided Engineering Network
University of Michigan