[SunRescue] Hardware reference re-structuring ideas.

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.com]

   I have an amorphous mass of wreckage which is the state that the SHR was
in when last I looked at it some years ago. Anybody who wants it as a
starting point is welcome to email me but it's probably more confusion than
it's worth.

   Sorry I've been silent so long, but my connection went out to lunch for
New Year's and it took several days of bugging my ISP to get them to even
understand the problem let alone fix it. Anyway, here's my several cents
based on my experiences with the original SHR:

   1) Organization is a tough call because the reference can be used so
many ways. Are you trying to identify a heap of miscellaneous stuff? Are
you trying to find out what boards of a particular type are available for
your machine? Etc. My organization was a compromise between these two
questions, grouping items by function and providing the part-number list
so that people trying to identify stuff had a place to go from known
information (the part number on the item) to what section it was listed in.

   2) Don't forget the 386i!

   3) One thing the original SHR didn't do well was help novices identify
equipment. This was primarily due to time limitations on my part: it was
as much as I could do (more, really) to just take the information I had and
render it into a semi-consistent format intelligible to experts. I would
suggest that the new SHR should have a "field guide" section, and it should
start with the advice GET THE PART NUMBERS and where to find them. Recognizing
chassis is well and good, but there have been a lot of variations, a lot of
chassis shared between models, and with Mbus and especially VME units there
is no necessary relation between the chassis and what's actually in it.
Your twelve-slot VME chassis could actually be a cluster of six 3/50's.

   4) A related note as it applies to authoring the reference: if you haven't
seen the hardware, you're at a terrible disadvantage. For example, unless
you've seen both a 3/80 and another P4-bus unit, you'll never know that
the difference between P4 boards intended for one or the other is that the
3/80 has no opening for BNC connectors and that even for boards which don't
have BNC connectors you may need to add or remove a faceplate. And in order
to get the full P4 story, you also need to have seen a P4 board attached to
a VME slot plate and realize that it goes with the single-wide version of
VME CPUs that have a P4 connector and come in single- and double-wide versions.
And just to add to your headaches, just because *your* 3/80 doesn't have
an opening for BNC connectors doesn't mean that none were ever made with them.

   5) When assembling the SHR, I made extensive use of information from
FEHs and other Sun documents. I did so based on my understanding of
copyright and other intellectual property law, which is this: copyright
covers the expression of information, but not the information itself.
This is what allows you to do research at a library and then write a paper
based on what you've learned, for example. There's some sticky issues with
diagrams and tables, where there isn't much distinction between the
information and the expression, but abstracting the information into a
different form ("it goes in slot one"; "the jumper is in the lower left
corner") should be safe. Now, the information could be protected in other
ways. However, because it has been published publically and is available to
anybody who wants to pay the money to buy a FEH, it is neither proprietary
nor a trade secret. Some of it might be patented, but patented information
may be published and discussed freely; indeed, that's the entire reason the
patent process exists!

   --James B.