🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <16444@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> brsmith@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Brian R. Smith) writes:
>
>I didn't get to go to SURF - busy with classes, etc.  Did Sequent
>*reveal* anything?  I got this really cryptic letter beforehand:
>
>"It's more than a concept now...  ... It's a NEW SYSTEM OFFERING."
>
>I'd also be interested in whatever other goodies popped up.
>
>Thanks
>
>Brian

The cryptic thing was an add for one of their new babies:

	It is called S3.

It is a S81 in the body of a Micro. Pretty nice design. From what I could
see, this machine will be good when you need to offload your Symmetry. The
most logical use I see is to connect it through ethernet using TCP/IP plus
NFS. 

I was told that the price range was int the low $30K.

The O.S is called Sub-sequent  (accentuate the sub) and is 100% Dynix
compatible.

For the most the SURF was pretty melow. Some interesting things happened
though. They pretty much outlined what they have in mind for the next years
to come: faster disks, SPARC systems, more variations of the S3 such as S16 and S27.

Work is being done to make the S81 an ideal system for database systems.
Ingres is doing quite a bit of work on parallelism with database technology.

It looks like Sequent has got a very good chance of making big as they
become a multi-million dollar company.

The choice of the hotel sucked all the way. Simply poor planning.

I hope next year is different.




Robert Young
(Peregrine Systems)

>For the most the SURF was pretty melow. Some interesting things happened
>though. They pretty much outlined what they have in mind for the next years
>to come: faster disks, SPARC systems, more variations of the S3 such as S16 and S27.

SPARC systems?  The impression I got was that future Sequent RISC systems
(if any) would be anything but SPARC.

>The cryptic thing was an add for one of their new babies: It is called S3.
>It is a S81 in the body of a Micro.

Or to put it another way, they've ported Dynix to a PC. Pretty clever, since
it gives you binary compatability between a supermini and the desktop; it
actually starts to make NFS useful. :-) But is that $30K price accurate? That
seems way too high; I was under the impression it was much cheaper.

What I find humorous is that one of the decisions that went into selecting the
80386 for the Symmetry (instead of the more obvious NS32332) was that someday
Dynix would be able to run PC software. Instead, they turned it around and
made a PC run Dynix software. :-) 

Sequent has also promised their SVR3/POSIX port on the Subsequent, although
there's no real indication of when that's going to be available; rumor has in
1Q 1990. (What I want to know is, why is Sequent hell-bent on an SVR3 port at
a time when everyone else I can think of is getting ready to ship SVR4?)

<csg>

In article <90818@pyramid.pyramid.com> csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>Sequent has also promised their SVR3/POSIX port on the Subsequent, although
>there's no real indication of when that's going to be available; rumor has in
>1Q 1990. (What I want to know is, why is Sequent hell-bent on an SVR3 port at
>a time when everyone else I can think of is getting ready to ship SVR4?)
>
><csg>

I can't say "why" for sure, but it certainly follows their tradition.
After all, they're still shipping (primarily) 4.2bsd in DYNIX, when
the majority of the BSD-based world has been shipping 4.3bsd (and
beyond) for years.  Be happy they're looking at POSIX....

-- 
Marion Hakanson         Domain: hakanson@cse.ogc.edu
                        UUCP  : {hp-pcd,tektronix}!ogccse!hakanson