Nibbles
from SPARC History
In
1987 Sun introduced the the first SPARC based computer the Sun-4. This was a VME
bus based machine and was packaged in the same enclosure as Sun's top of the
line Motorola based Sun-3 servers.
| |
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| SPARC History |
| Spellabyte and
Terrorbyte loved sitting around the campfire, discussing the good old days of
SPARC computing. | | |
|
Nibble Re:
The Netherlands
The relationship between England and the
Netherlands goes back a long way. Dutch people are very generous and in 1689
they were kind enough to lend England
William prince of Orange
who became the new English king.
In the early 1990's when I was
selling the print edition of the
SPARC Product Directory
worldwide using mailshots, I found that Unix VARs in the Netherlands were great
customers, because they spoke perfect English and were easy to do business with.
On one occasion I was phoned by a worried Sun reseller who said that
they had accidentally wired GBP 6,000 for payment of a single directory, instead
of the correct price of GBP 60. That was a good price for a book! It was in the
days before the web had been invented so I couldn't check my bank details
online. Anyway, I went to the bank and it turned out they were right. The
customer was very relieved when I transferred the rest of the money back
Also
in the early 1990s while most of Europe's postal and delivery companies were
still operating in the dark ages, the Netherlands developed a very advanced
infrastructure for shipping goods across Europe. As a result it was here that
Sun Microsystems set up its original European mail order catalogue operation
called SunExpress. (The marketing guys at SunExpress also found our directory
useful by the way for researching into new suppliers.)
Of course it's
now a lot easier to ship goods from the US into Europe. One UK reseller of Sun
parts
Latitude UK
tells me they can import Sun parts from the US and clear through UK customs in
a single day. But it's much slower if you try to go the other way round... as I
found when sending STORAGEsearch
T-shirts to my US advertisers in 2000. They reached the US alright on the same
day via Fedex and then would spend a week waiting in customs, because T-shirts
are regarded as a protected market. So in many ways the European market is now
more open to goods than the USA. | |
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the USA
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the UK