Re- UX400S- a decent machin

[Phillips@GOLDILOCKS.LCS.MIT.EDU]

Date    1/18/90
Subject Re- UX400S- a decent machin
FromPhillipsTomiller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
CCslug
 IN REPLY TO:   Re: UX400S: a decent machin

    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).

There's a company called Bit3 (612) 881-6955 which is planning on
selling
an Sbus - VME bus converter which is just as you describe.  They make
many permutations of thisbus to thatbus converters and are just
adding
Sbus to their set.  Call them up and tell them how much you'd like it
so
they'll get it done sooner.

I have no idea how hard (or easy) it'd be to get the ivory board
working
on a Sparcstation rigged up this way but it'd certainly be a lot
cheaper
than buying a VME sun.