UX400S product backgrounder

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

    Date: Thu, 10 Aug 89 19:05 EDT
    From: Barry Margolin <barmar@Think.COM>

	Date: Thu, 10 Aug 89 15:08 CDT
	From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

	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'm just guessing, but I suspect that the UX400S will require TWO 9U VME
    slots -- one for the processor board and the other for the memory board.

Good guess but not true.  Symbolics already confirmed that one slot is
adequate if you don't need more than 4MW memory.  They're just wary of
releasing the board in any machine they haven't tested.  Seeing that Sun
has a couple dozen potentially compatible machines, this restriction
could be very costly in time and money.

When talking to my Symbolics sales rep yesterday, we lamented the lack
of good information about the Suns.  In particular, because Sun is
currently pushing the SparcStations and  Servers and not the 4/110 or
4/150 etc, my Sun configuration guide book was very sparse on
information about these "old" machines.  We couldn't discern the
difference between the machines other than number of slots.