Sun Announces Sun-3 Software Support End-of-Life

[Glenn Herteg]

Well, not to get alarmist :-), but that's how I read it, at least.

I just got some material from Sun yesterday, and under "ALSO ANNOUNCED BY
SUN" it says,

	SunCD Drive/SunOS on CD-ROM
	===========================
	...

	* Sun will distribute software exclusively on CD in 1991

Since I haven't heard anything about Sun supporting CD players on the
Sun-3 line, I take this to mean it's unlikely they will support Sun-3
machines with their SVR4 release, unless they rush it to press this year.
Or you'll have to have a SPARC machine and a CD player to load your new
software ... a rude shock for anyone using a Sun-3 as a standalone
machine.

I suppose 60MB cartridges had to go the way of 8" floppies some day, but
it really didn't seem like their useful life had ended quite yet.  Aside
from the revenue gained by selling everyone CD drives, I suspect the
motivation for this change is primarily the low cost to manufacture the
disks in volume, versus the slow and expensive process of writing tapes.

If they're going to force all of us to buy these things, do they at least
have a list of CD software titles (other than SunOS 4.1) distributed for
(or otherwise compatible with) Sun machines?