Using UX-boards with SBus based machines?

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Thu, 21 Mar 91 09:23+0100
    From: Stefan Bernemann <berni@iml.fhg.de>

	Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 00:04:07 EST
	From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	Yes, the architecture is designed to be bus-independent, but it still takes
	work to implement a new board.  Considering how often we tell Symbolics to
	stress their *software* expertise over hardware work, and the disappointing
	sales of the UX400S line, I could hardly blame them for being conservative
	about developing other co-processors.

    How much of development cost is used for hardware work (e.g. bus-specif adaptions)
    and how much for software (i.e. integration into a specif OS - specif as SUN OS and
    not UNIX)? In other words: having done the SUN-OS integration (great job as far as i
    can judge), is the development of an SBus interface to expensive compared to the
    expanding market of smaller, SBus based machines?

I've never actually worked in the hardware area, but I expect that
hardware development costs for a new Ivory board are much higher than
the software development costs for a new host OS, especially if the OS
is a variant of one that is already supported (e.g. another flavor of
Unix).

                                                barmar