avoiding obsolescence

[William Clare Stewart]

Dave Collier-Brown wrote about the problem of Sun 3/50's being obsolete -
not enough memory to run 4.0.X, but not wanting to stick the users with
3.5 either.  The throw-money-at-it solution is to buy upgrade boards for
about $1000 ($500=board + 4MB SIMM), which will give you 8MB - enough to
run 4.0.X or 3.5 with lots of windows.  (The person who answered the phone
at one of the memory vendors said she's totally non-technical and had no
trouble installing it herself.)

In article <3319 at brazos.Rice.edu> yar at basser.cs.su.oz.au writes:
> Is anyone out there working on a native version of an Xserver for sun
> 3/50s so that they can be used as very nice X-terminals, no SUNOS, no
> paging, no need for more memory. That way we can find a cheap way of

When I last talked with Grasshopper Group this summer, they were working
on a NeWS server for the 3/50, which does the same kind of thing, in
good-looking Postscript (instead of clunky rasters.  The demo I saw at
Usenix looked good, and they expected to have a version that never needed
to page by the time they finished.  This will let you use your 3/50s as
the execllent cheap 19" system they are, while buying some real computing
power for the back-end.