Information sought on Solbourne Computers

[Stan Hanks]

I am joining Solbourne as the corporate Science Advisor effective 7
Februrary 1989. I have a charter to figure out what's going on in the
research community that will be important in the future, what's missing
from current SunOS that would be most useful to the most people, and to
help preach the gospel of Sun Compatibility and show people the Way of
Distributed Computing.

I have been a long-time Sun user (since the Sun-1 running UNIPlus
V7/SysIII), heavily involved with many asspects of Sun usage (I started
the Sun OEM Users Group and chaired it for 2 years, help start the
regional Sun Users Group, etc), and a big proponent of Sun as the Right
Solution. Not to mention having written tons of code for these suckers!

I wouldn't have taken the job if I wasn't confident that the product was
on the money technically and that the company was on target business-plan
wise.  The stated objective is "complete Sun-4 compatibility".  If
something works on a Sun-4, you ought to be able to just take *THE BINARY*
and run it on a Solbourne, with no problems. If you can't, the factory
needs to know about it. To date, very few things that work on Sun-4's
haven't worked on Solbournes. Each time, it was due to a bug that has
since been fixed.

The issue of added peripherals (like SMD disks, 1/2" tapes, and serial
lines) has taken a back seat to getting product visibility and
availability. It will be addressed in the future. As there is a VME bus
with about a dozen available slots, you can add your own Dingbat 915
interface module if you just can't live without it, same as on a Sun.

I do know that the drivers will NOT be the same as Sun drivers, but don't
yet know what is different or how different they will be. But hey, my
first day isn't for another week, and I don't have the hardware yet!!!

I will be available by phone or e-mail from the time I join. I haven't
worked out some of the logistics yet, but I will post them when I have
them. In the mean time, all mail to "stan at rice.edu" or "stan at shell.uucp"
will be correctly forwarded.

Let me know what you think, if you've seen/used a Solbourne. If you'd like
to, let me know that too.

 Stan Hanks
 Research Computer Scientist,                                 (and Postmaster!)
 Shell Development Company, Bellaire Research Center          (713) 663-2385
 ...!{sun,psuvax1,bcm,rice,decwrl,cs.utexas.edu}!shell!stan   stan at rice.edu