Sun-3/80-SOS 4.1-floppy disk drive WARNING

[Dan Davison]

Sun has just deleted all the Sun-3 hardware from the latest price book; I
guess they're not interested in the existing hw either.

Background:
Sun-3/80 with floppy disk drive.  Recently upgraded to SOS 4.1.  When
formatting disks in the drive with the command "fdformat" I got an
error at the end, when "verifying" the disk and writing the magic SOS
hoojoo on the disk.  "fdformat -v" fails immediately.  This happens
with lots of different disks.  So, I call Sun support.

A very nice tech support person informs me that (1) it is a known bug in
4.1 on the 3/80; (2) they are "working on it"; (3) there is no intention
to (or mechanism for) informing 3/80 owners when the fix is available; (4)
you should NOT use the disks that pass the format (they just don't verify)
and newfs successfully because data could be lost.

Gee.  If I wanted to get ******** on hardware, I would have bought DEC.

It's sad to see what has happened to Sun.  I estimate about an 8 year lag
between the decay vis a vis their customers and DEC's similar decay.
Except that it took DEC a LOT longer to get as nasty (on all fronts:
salescritters, support, hw, sw)  as Sun has become.

Anybody know of a friendly workstation vendor?

dan davison
davison at uh.edu
DAVISON at UHOU (BITNET)