Symbolics Germany prices

[<@IU.AI.SRI.COM:slug-admin@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM>]

Date: Mon, 26 Aug 91 11:36+0100
From: Vincent Keunen <keunen@milou.nrb.be>
Subject: Symbolics Germany prices
To: SLUG@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM
cc: uucp%"ks@dfki.uni-sb.de"@nrbv01
Message-ID: <19910826103636.3.KEUNEN@milou.nrb.be>
          
          
          
          Recently the monitor of our old lonely 3600 died and we won't spend
          the deutsch-marks symbolics demands for a repair. But we still need
          the color system (8bit) of the 3600.
          So my idea was: why not put the color system (color-controler,
          color-mem, color-paddle) in our 3640? There are tow free slots,
          (marked CC and CM = color-controler and color-mem??) and the only
          problems I can imagine are with different firmware revisions needed to
          run the color-system in the 3640.
          
          Has anyone done that before? Is it possible at all?? Both systems run
          Genera 8.0.1 if it matters.
          
          Thanks in advance,
          -ks
          -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          Kurt Schreiner                          VOICE : +49 681 302 5270
          German Research Center for AI (DFKI)    FAX   : +49 681 302 5341
          Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3  (Building 43.1)   E-MAIL: ks@dfki.uni-sb.de
          D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, Germany
          -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          
We are also concerned by the high prices of Symbolics in Germany.  How
come it's *twice* the price in the US?  I would be very surprised that
taxes and transportation (+insurance, even) cost the price of the
goods...  We need Symbolics machines, but at these prices, we are
*forced* to look for alternative solutions, with the overhead of
migrating.  We would just love to be able to buy production symbolics
machines at the same prices as the other manufacturers machines...
Wouldn't that make sense?  After all, Symbolics are great development
machines, but they're not that good as regular production machines
(performance, standardization, availability of third party
peripherals...), so why charge that much?
 
To give you an idea of the fun we have in Europe:
- MacIvory model 2 processor board (40 bit Ivory processor, 8Mo NUBUS
memory) => $25000 (approx)
- Genera 8.0 Ivory dev system => $13000
 
plus some 3 months delays before getting the latest versions (model 3,
Genera 8.1,...
 
How do you like that?
 
Vincent Keunen
keunen@nrb.be