Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Integer Multiply/Divide on Sparc
Message-ID: <1990Jan11.204235.6727@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <8840005@hpfcso.HP.COM> <1249@otc.otca.oz>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 20:42:35 GMT

In article <1249@otc.otca.oz> gregw@otc.otca.oz (Greg Wilkins) writes:
>OK Sun Microsystems!  we know you out there listening.  How about an
>official comment on this????     What about the ABI (application binary
>interface) standard you guys are pushing.  Signing up all those
>clone manufacturers etc etc.  So your going to spring a multiply
>instruction on them and make it all out dated (when compared to the sun5???)

Why are you so surprised?  Some of us have been wondering about this
all along.  Sun as a company is *not* committed to open systems, despite
their marketing hype; just try to get hardware documentation out of them
for the Sun 3 line.  When the party line on SPARC, S-bus, etc. is "well,
we're not really a workstation company, we see no problem in everybody
being able to build compatible hardware", and the party line on the Sun 3
is "the innards of that workstation are secret, and we can't let out any
information on it, and we can't understand why you persist in making such
ridiculous requests for what is obviously necessarily Top Secret stuff",
then either the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing or
there are some really heavy-duty ulterior motives involved.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu