[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 02:59:39PM -0400, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:

> The problem isn't that the thing was poorly designed for its time, but that
> we haven't learned from the PC's design compromises and moved on to
> something better.  Of course, no one want to come out with something
> PC-incompatible, since they would have to create an OS ($$$), convince
> software houses to produce applications for the machine/OS (more $$$), and
> have an uphill marketing compaing to sell the thing (yet more $$$).  Since
> they'd have to price it in the same ballpark as "what's out there" in order
> to sell it, spending all that money on marketing and bespoke software
> wouldn't leave much profit.
> 
> PCs aren't very good, but they are inexpensive, popular, and hard to compete
> with.

At the risk of sounding like I'm advocating windows, if someone made a
Opteron machine that did away with the PC compatibility stuff, it would
probably be fairly easy to write a Windows XP/2003 HAL for it, just like
SGI did for the 320 and 540 machines, and the users would likely never
notice any compatibility issues (unless the design also required OF
cards, in which case they would have to hunt for special PCI/AGP cards).

Not to mention getting linux, freebsd, or NetBSD onto the thing.