"AT&T to resell Pyramid computers" (for real)

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

friedl at vsi.COM (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:

>     I'm not a marketing type, but this looks like a positive
>development.  We looked into a 3B4000 some time ago and got the
>pretty clear impression that they weren't doing so well, so maybe
>this was in fact the case.

This is in fact the case. The 3b4000 is a great machine for milking
accounting data out of a 5ESS, but as a general purpose UNIX timeshare
system it's hopeless! (I speak from experience here. We have a 3b4000
sitting in the corner of the machine room. AT&T said it would support
300-400 users. The president of the University believed them :-)  The
machine has been in production as a tape server for several months now.
Performance is terrible.)

[ I asked Ken Thompson why Plan 9 wasn't running on any AT&T hardware,
  "such as the 3b4000." His answer answer was most amusing :-) ]

>     A question I have is whether they will do their own raw port
>of UNIX to it or rely on Pyramid's.  Certainly the latter is the
>more expedient, but it opens them up to the same kind of
>nonportability problems they had with the UNIX PC where the
>operating systems aren't the same all around.

What I want to know is if AT&T is going to bugger the hardware sufficiently
such that a UNIX distribution from Pyramid won't run on it.

What would be *really* nice would be if AT&T would become a Sun OEM. We have
~$1M that we have to spend on AT&T products (credit for the 3b4000 we're
sending back :-)  I'd much rather buy a bunch of RISC servers and 
SPARCstations, or a big Pyramid. Mind you, the 3b2/1000's that we *are*
getting look pretty impressive. [ Betcha never thought you would catch *me*
saying *anything* good about AT&T :-) ]


Lyndon Nerenberg  VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
  {alberta,decwrl,lsuc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon at cs.AthabascaU.CA
     "I think every man should have a wife.  You can't blame
         everything on the government."  -- Jed Clampett