Re: UX400S: a decent machine

[Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

    Date: Tue, 16 Jan 90 14:01 CST
    From: dmitchell@backus.trc.amoco.com (Donald H. Mitchell)

    Having used the UX400S for several months now, I am glad to announce
    that this machine is fast and relatively trouble free.  From what I
    understand, however, it is not selling up to Symbolics's expectations.
    Why not?  

I'd guess one reason is you need that big slot (or two) and how many VME
suns are out there anyway? Most people have lots of diskless (or at least
slotless) SUNs, but only a couple with slots being used as file-servers (and
those they may not want to bog down with a lisp coprocessor? - never heard
what the impact is of the Symbolics on the UNIX half if it's currently
highly utelized).

As a suggestion: build a 0 footprint box for the boards that fit under a
sparcstation (or between it and the monitor) and plug a ribbon into one of
the coprocessor slots on the board (the S-bus). That would allow customers
that already have a bunch of sparcs to add a symbolics board to them instead
of buying a new machine. Dunno if the bus can actually support this sort of
access, but I'd hope it can be done, else I don't see much point for SUN
providing it (that is, uxl400 <-> unix access seems pretty minimal). This
could be done as a generic VME extension which would have it's own market,
but that's probably harder; easier to customize the board for this access as
with the MacIvory (but still use local memory, of course).