avoiding obsolescence

[David Collier-Brown]

miranda!mc at moc.jpl.nasa.gov (Mike Caplinger) writes:
| Reading this list, one frequently sees exhortations to buy more memory,
| get a faster processor, or otherwise totally replace one's hardware in
| order to "keep up" with the latest SunOS release. [...]
| Some of us, however, can't afford the luxury of trading up to
| a new CPU every 18 months.

| The sad thing is, I remember when a 2-meg 68010 Sun configuration was
| usable, and even though I have a 20-meg Sun 4 now, I don't think I've
| gotten an order of magnitude better performance, from a whole-system
| perspective.

Well, this raises a relate problem I'm looking at: the widening of the
"market" for workstations in our organization.

We have administrative users who could make use of a windowing
environment, primarily for keeping track of **many many** simultaneous
concerns/tasks.  We have support (secretarial) users who would love to be
able to do more than a single task at a time.

Both of these types of people can be "sold" machines like 3/50s. But a
3/50 (and my old 2/50) cannot be provided with enough memory to usefully
run SunOS 4...  Which means we freeze them at 3.5, and hope they wear out
before Sun drops support.

So here's a question for Sun and for the readers of this list: how do we
broaden the customer base?  How long **should** we keep a machine around
after the power-freak developers have got a faster one?  How long can we
get hardware and software support for one?

David Collier-Brown,  | davecb at yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | {toronto area...}lethe!dave 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | Joyce C-B:
CANADA. 416-223-8968  |    He's so smart he's dumb.