[SPARCbook] Resurrecting sparcbook 2 ... how?

[BSD Bob]

> > > You will, however, need to contact Tadpole UK, and be very nice about it
> > > too, cos SB2's aren't supported anymore, and they'd be allowed to tell
> > > you to nick off.  :P
> > 
> > That would be bad business practice.  I would hope they are better than
> > that.  Stiff upper lip, the customer is always right, and all that.
> 
> The customer is not always right. These machines won't work properly
> anyway within a few weeks. There is an end to supporting old machines.
> Normally I would say 5 years after the last unit was sold new. (This is
> what Compaq does and they have at least gone to some heavy expenses for a
> single machine.)

Well, I see we can agree to disagree.....(:+}}... and that is fine.
I learned from the old school that in business, ``the customer is
always right''.  Nowadays, it seems, that may have changed a little,
and the customer is ``constrained to accept'' whatever.  Bad karma.

As to the machines working.... good machines work for a long time.
I have some 15 year old unix toys going strong every day, and if you
don't need gigahertz speeds, then the still speak the speak and quack
like the racing ducks, just fine.  Some of the older machines are even
built way better than some of the newer machines, in many respects.
That silly little SB2 is built like a Tiger Tank, and will probably
outlive me.   I would expect I could get at least another 5 years out
of it, and possibly more.  It won't be a prancing horse from Modena, but
it will still do its job, just fine.  But, it has two potential buggerboos.
One is that darned NVRAM Sun thingie of the latter SPARC era.  Battery
nvram is a nice idea in theory, but a dud in practice.  Also, it locks
you into system.  IFF that particular nvram goes out of production, and
by now it probably has, with just shelfstock around, then what do you do?
A nightmare for service folks or the tailendian charlies like many of us
aboard the list, who only touch the prized high and mighty unix toyz
when they come out the other and at a fiver per.  A second are special
codes that become lost in time as support fades or parts need replacing
and docs become separated from the hardware, or something as simple as
the guys left the company for elsewhere, last year.  Then a perfectly fine
machine becomes a total dud because not because of any fault of its own,
but because of a silly 4 digit code  (or whatever it actually is).
A nighmare for us service folks or tailendian charlies, again.

That is the kind of thing that tends to bother me, as a great waste
of horsepower.  It is a compromise in design type of constraint upon
the customer.

If a company backs the customer into that kind of a corner, and then
just totally forgets you, that IMHO is not too kool.

Tadpole has been nice, though, to me to help me resurrect the critter.
I commend them heartily for their assistance, even though it is now
out of the mainstream niche.  One of my pair of SB2's is purring almost
like that prancing horse from Modena  (well maybe like the Arrows),
but the other still needs its secret codes twiddled.  It will survive
in the end, and be a fine little machine.

> Hugo.

Bob