Comments (flame) about lack of 3/50 memory upgrade

[Tom Wadlow]

Helios Systems (sometimes called Piceon, for reasons I am unaware of) just
came out with a 3/50 memory upgrade, which I just went down to see earlier
this week.  They patch into the Sun by soldering a flex PC board onto the
bottom of the 3/50 CPU.  This terminates in a connector that attaches to a
board that contains the memory.  The memory board clips on to the two
stiffener bars that run across the CPU board.

The flex board is fairly complex, which leads me to believe that Sun never
gave much thought to upgrades, because it sure didn't look like it was
easy to do.  I have heard elsewhere that Sun had an internal upgrade for
the 3/50 that never saw the light of day (as happens to many interesting
things in a billion dollar ex-startup).

The Helios upgrade comes in 4 or 8 meg flavors (giving you 8 or 12 meg
total).  Apparently it is important to know whether you have the 15Mhz,
16Mhz, or (a surprise to me) the 12Mhz 68020 in your 3/50.  You can find
this out by pulling the CPU board, and looking at the 68020 chip.  The
last two numbers (followed by more characters) are the speed rating.  The
upgrade costs $2500 for 4 meg and somewhere around $4K for 8meg.

We are considering buying some of these, and I would be interested in
hearing from anybody with some experience with them.  If we do get some,
I'll report back on the results.  --Tom

P.S.  I have no connection with Helios other than as an occasional customer.