Genera 8.0 Announcement

[JCMA@reagan.ai.mit.edu (John C. Mallery)]

    Date: Mon, 5 Mar 90 10:01 EST
    From: JR@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Johanna Rothman)

	Date: Mon, 5 Mar 90 00:59 CST
	From: Cohen@MCC.COM (Richard M. Cohen)

	    Date: 2 Mar 90 15:57:00 GMT
	    From: groberts@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com, jr@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com

	    This letter went out in hardcopy to all customers this week. The sales
	    reps also received this letter. If you have questions, please address
	    them to your sales rep, Gary Roberts, or Johanna Rothman.

	    ----

	    Dear Symbolics Owner,

	    ...

	    Customers eligible for Genera 8.0 will receive distribution media, an
	    initial documentation set, and one extra documentation set for each
	    additional five covered systems at a site.

	In the brouhaha the new restrictions on software distribution, perhaps
	this additional policy change got overlooked.  Apparently we no longer
	get a set of documentation for each machine under software maintenance!
	Do we even get one set of release notes per machine?  Do we get the
	right the duplicate the documentation for the other machines under
	software maintenance?

    Yes. In fact, since you get the documentation on-line, and since we
    provide hardcopy functionality in Document Examiner, we expect you to
    hardcopy any documentation you might require.  Right now, we include
    release notes as part of the doc set, and only one set per five machines
    is distributed.

Of course, many users complain that file access in the ``document examiner''
is unusably slow.  They find it faster to look up documentation in the
manuals.  Is this fixed in rel 8?  If not, don't expect people to neither read
the documentation nor use Symbolics Lisp Machines.

This is not to mention numerous other shortcomings of the document examiner.

Hardcopying documentation suffers similarly.

	Symbolics tried to pull a similar stunt back at Release 5, claiming that
	they would only distribute one set of documentation per site.  The
	policy was very short-lived.

	-- Rich

    Actually, many of our customers have said that we send them too much
    documentation, i.e. too many sets. You can buy more sets, and parts of
    sets for a nominal fee. Your sales rep has details.