[rescue] Perverse Question

[Robert Novak]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Dave McGuire wrote:
>
> >    Actually I think it's more like "sold-on-marketing PC bigot who has no
> > technical defense for his position". ;)
>
> I actually thought he was talking about a U5 before he let us in on it.
> Very few PCs back then had a whole 256k of cache. ;)

And very few of them had PGX8 video too. :) (or at least few called them
PGX8, that I saw....)

You are correct, Jonathan. The machine in question was one of the first 8
Ultra 5 270s I ordered for my workgroup at Nortel. Compared to the Ultra
1s and SS5s most of my group was using at the time, they FLEW. I had
developers kissing my feet when I'd bring one to their cube. Building
release versions of switch code for our product went from several hours to
under an hour, as I recall, and a 2-3 module partial rebuild could be done
in a quarter hour or less (depending on which modules the developer had
checked out). No changes to the build environment except replacing the nfs
client workstation where the builds were being done.

But maybe an Ultra 5 is a PC. I know it has PC-type components in it,
sure. And maybe the fact that the Ultra 5 I mentioned ran five years with
only one (software-related disk-fillup) hiccup is PC-bigot marketing.
I'm willing to live with both, especially if the Ultra 5 I'm picking up in
3 1/2 hours runs five years with only one software-related disk-fillup
hiccup like the one I put in at Nortel in '99 or so. Yum, 768MB and dual
LVD SCSI.

--Rob
-- 
Robert Novak - rnovak at indyramp.com