Used Symoblics hardware

[Henry Lieberman <Henry@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

Symbolics is trying to kill off the second-hand
market in used 36xx machines.

There are many used Symbolics machines on the 
market right now at cheap prices.  I was all set to 
buy some.  I called a Symbolics salesman inquiring about
upgrades and maintenance and he told me:

* There was a "strictly enforced" $10,000 "software license 
transfer fee" between the old owner and the new.  

* Maintenance on a 3640 is about $7,000/year [you could
think of this as one Mac II a year] versus $1,200 for
MacIvory.  

making the used machine deals not attractive anymore.  
The charge seems like a gratuitous harassment device.
Obviously, they're trying to force you to buy MacIvory instead of
a used machine.  But buying cheap used machines would give
us an opportunity to increase [or at least not further erode]
our Symbolics user base, since we have to compete against
price/speed arguments for Unix machines.  Also, we have
to keep 36xx's as an option, since Symbolics does not yet
offer a color Ivory.  Finally, and most discouragingly, 
it raises the spectre that they would pull a similar trick
[prohibitive maintenance and inability to buy cheap used
machines as spares] with the current model of machine in 
another two or three years.