Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Sun's Competitive Strategy (Was: Re: P1754
Message-ID: <1990Nov24.232406.696@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <AGLEW.90Nov15214625@lasso.crhc.uiuc.edu> <1990Nov16.225515.494@zoo.toronto.edu> <ROLAND.90Nov19160821@lolly.Stanford.EDU> <6749@uceng.UC.EDU> <1990Nov21.174938.7861@zoo.toronto.edu> <6769@uceng.UC.EDU> <1990Nov23.181851.26588@zoo.toronto.edu> <11182@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 90 23:24:06 GMT

In article <11182@pt.cs.cmu.edu> agn@unh.cs.cmu.edu (Andreas Nowatzyk) writes:
>This is plain BS. The Arcons project here at CMU had SUN's schematics for
>the SUN-2 boards...

I'd be extremely surprised if this wasn't under a nondisclosure agreement,
one that took some effort to get.

>... You just have to talk to the right people...

And have a convincing project, and be lucky.

>This is much less an
>issue of secrecy rather an issue of documentation cost. It takes time and
>money to document things to the point that some outsider can make use of it.

Except that in many cases, this stuff is already documented for internal use.
(Often the documentation is a bit raw, but that's a different issue.)  I
can't speak for the Sun 2, actually, but near-complete programming docs for
the early Sun 3s *do* exist... and very few people can get them, even today.
-- 
"I'm not sure it's possible            | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
to explain how X works."               |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
