3/50 upgrade product announcement from Sun

[Steve Jay]

I'm underwhelmed by Sun's offer to upgrade my 3/50 to an 8 MB 3/60 for
$6,650.  Based on prices listed in the June 27, 1988, pricelist ($4995 for
3/50M, $11,900 for 8 MB 3/60M), Sun is essentially offering to give me the
orignal purchase price for my 3/50 if I trade it for a 3/60.  I guess
that's generous, but it misses the point.

Sun seems to be saying that you need a mimimum of 8 MB to run reasonably
on OS 4, and their cheapest 8 MB machine is $11,900.  That's over twice as
much as the minimum useful machine under OS 3.  It's absolutely absurd to
have an OS "upgrade" require a machine that's twice as expensive as
before.

I suspect that a lot of Sun's success in recent years was based on the
$5000 entry level machine.  Things are quite different at $12000.

Customers do not appreciate the forced obsolescence of equipment that they
bought only a year or two ago.  DEC was always good at doing that.  I
wonder how many current Sun customers gave up on DEC just because they did
it one too many times.

I don't think that Sun purposely tried to force us to buy new machines by
making the new OS require more memory.  I suspect they just didn't notice
that 4 MB performace went to hell as they worked on OS 4, probably because
all the developers had at least 8 MB.  I think Sun could fix the problem
(make OS 4 work reasonably on 3/50's) very easily:  take all the machines
away from the developers except for 3/50's.  Within a few months, you can
be sure they would figure out ways to make OS 4 reasonable for themselves.

Does anyone remember when 4 MB was A WHOLE LOT of memory?

[[ I do.  The first computer I ever worked on only had two memory sizes
for jobs (measured in 16-bit words):  10K and 16K.  Sigh.  --wnl ]]

Steve Jay                       domain: shj at ultra.com
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