UX400S product backgrounder

["Donald H. Mitchell" <dmitchell%backus.trc.amoco.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

I would like to buy a couple of these new boards; however, it does not
seem clear what they are indeed compatible with.  I should say that I'm
trying to work with my sales rep and his technical sales support on this
question.

In particular, my deskside 4/110s (three of them) each have an extra 9U
VME bus slot.   I can buy SCSI disks and tapes for these if necessary;
however, I would love to avoid it and have the Symbolics page over
Ethernet (I know about speed problems).  Symbolics, however, does not
have 4/110's in its shop; so, they are reluctant to sell boards for
them.  My questions to the net are how many others would be interested
in 4/110 support? Does anyone see a compelling reason for a local drive
and tape?  Should there be a technical reason the 4/110 won't work?

I also have a SparcServer 390 on order for which I will not have a
workstation terminal (just a RS232 dumb terminal and lots of file
service clients running X).  This fine beast has 2 GigaBytes of disk and
a tape drive; so, it passes those requirements.  However, because it
does not have an X terminal directly attached, I'm not certain it will
work for an embed board.  The Symbolics board would have to have
something in its FEP telling it that its X device was whatever server I
choose (statically or dynamically).  Does anyone see a reason this use
of a remote X server wouldn't work (since X by definition supports
remote)?  Does anyone see why you couldn't put more than one Symbolics
board into this type of machine (it has somewhere between 9 and 13 9U
VME bus slots available)?