Risc System/6000

[John Gilmore]

>    . . . POWERstations and POWERservers . . .

I like the way they adopted the Sun Marketing naming convention
(SPARCstations and SPARCservers).

>                          . . . a complete system starting at $12,995.

Including OS and window system?  Manuals?  Ethernet?  Compilers?  In
the original RT/PC announcement a few years ago, the lowball price
didn't even include a keyboard or monitor, which cost $thousands!  One
analysis showed that if Sun had charged as much for Unix as IBM, they
could've thrown in the workstation for free!

Also, one breakdown I saw was that this system only has four slots --
and all of them are in use.  No expandability.

>               Documentation is available on a 5.25-inch compact disc
> (CD-ROM) that may be accessed from the user's POWERstation or from a
> network POWERserver.

At extra cost

> IBM announced industry-leading graphical user interfaces . . .
> available as separate licensed programs.  Customers can choose the
> interface most applicable to their environments.

At extra cost

>           IBM announced a one-year warranty that includes 24-hour,
> seven-day-a-week availability of hardware service.  Full software
> service is included in the license charge.

License charge?  For a warranty?  Oh, I get it!  If you buy the Unix
from them, you are forced to buy full software support for it!  Well,
no problem, I'm sure there are lots of third party vendors selling Unix
for the RIOS...

> In addition, IBM has significantly increased its number of skilled
> systems engineers to assist customers in the design, configuration,
> installation and support of the RISC System/6000 family.

I heard from a usually reliable source that there are TWO people
in the Bay Area who are trained to configure and repair these machines.
That's a "significant increase" from last year, when there were NONE!

> IBM also announced SystemXtra for the RISC System/6000 family, a fee
> service . . . . . . . . . . . .  total service solution . . .

At extra cost.
-- 
John Gilmore      {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu      gnu at toad.com
Just say *yes* to drugs.  If someone offers you a drug war, just say no.