From jwh Tue Jul  3 12:00 MDT 1990
Received: by hpfclw.HP.COM; Tue, 3 Jul 90 11:59:59 mdt
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 90 11:59:59 mdt
From: Jeff Hendershot <jwh>
Full-Name: Jeff Hendershot
To: dew@hpfclw, jwh@hpfclw, jws@hpfclw, mlc@hpfcrt, mlk@hpfcoll
Subject: PaWS and MACE
Status: RO


Mike K., Mike C., John , Dave ,

>To: jwh@hpfclw, jws@hpfcoll
>Subject: PWS support of MACE
>Cc: Bruce_Farly@hp2200, len@hplisa, lord@hpfcml, mlk@hpfcoll, palermo@hpisla

>After a brief  phone  conversation  with Bruce Farly about the  interest
>being shown in the new MACE CPU being done for IA/MA through Rob Harris'
>team, I decided that we had better make every  effort to support it with
>the Pascal  Workstation.  This is  projected  to be a simple  task since
>MACE will be a DIO based S300  family  member.  As I told Bruce,  formal
>commitments  are not made until  ItoL.  He would like us to hold an ItoL
>covering MACE intended support within about 60 days.

>Bruce  intends  to write  up both  RMB WS and PWS  support  as  customer
>requirements.  Beckton-Dickenson  visited  last week and their ire about
>the  S400  dropping  RMB and PWS was  appeased  almost  entirely  by the
>indications  that the  MACE  product  would  be in the S300  family  and
>supported  by both RMB WS and PWS.  There is a lot of  confusion  in the
>field  concerning the new S400 which was announced as a replacement  for
>the S300  line.  No mention of RMB or PWS caused the field to react very
>negatively  at  times.  There  will  be  a  white  paper  to  the  field
>explaining  the plan for MACE and that the  MA/IA  sales of S300  should
>continues  as  though  S400 was not a  replacement  for  S300s  in these
>markets.

>Thus, I am  recommending  to the team  that we state  our  intention  to
>support  the MACE  SPU as early as  possible  to  reverse  the  negative
>effects  of the S400  announcement.  We shot  ourselves  in the  foot by
>ignoring the MA/IA systems in the S400  announcement.  We must try to be
>aggressive to recover from this error and build S300 mind share back up.
>Since the MACE  product  will be a DIO based S300 it should not  require
>any PWS  changes....just  testing.  Let's let the field  know  about our
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

See comments below.

>commitment  for support just as soon as we can verify the  definition of
>MACE meets the PWS needs.  Note that units will not be  available  until
>about  January....  We might be able to sneak a proto to do a quick test
>earlier to increase our confidence in the cost of final testing.

>Thanks and looking forward to your replys,


>Mike Kolesar, CoLL


I spoke with Dan Swanson this morning about MACE (he is the project
manager). He gave me a PDS...he also confirmed that MACE will be
in the series 300 family. He seemed very happy that we are initially
intending to support MACE.

The job will not be as simple as it seems at first. There will be
two displays available - a VGA 640 by 480 compatible upgradeable
to 1024 by 768 hi-res 6 plane color or grey scale.

We currently support the hi-res (catseye) display. Looking at the
description of the product, our current system would probably
come up and run fine with this display (I don't know about the
SCSI floppy). 

We do not support the VGA compatible display (this display is
not catseye based or catseye compatible). This would require
the creation of a new driver, perhaps 1 - 3 weeks. The real killer
would be DGL. DGL would have to be modified to interact with this
new driver. This task took Scott Bayes several months for the catseye
driver. After describing this display to Scott on the phone this
morning, Scott called Leonard Gilmore (author of the PDS) who confirmed
that the VGA display will not be catseye based or compatible
(Note - there does exist a catseye based VGA display. This is
NOT the display under consideration for MACE ).

Scott also discovered that this display might not have a color map,
which will introduce incompatibilities between this display and
the DGL module (some DGL functionality will not map to anything
meaningful on the display). Scott and Mark Giesenhagen are both
more than a little concerned about this as it breaks Basic as well
as PaWS.

Scott estimated a total effort of about 12 MTS weeks to get PaWS working
with the VGA display (which DOES include testing time). He also
warned me to get ready for one of the nastiest jobs I've ever done
(I guess the DGL code is really bad news). I'm not sure what we would do
about the DGL incompatibilities - maybe we should start lobbying right
away for a color map on this display.

This figure of 12 weeks is Scott's estimate - I am not committing
to this number for myself.

If anything besides the VGA display pops up which could increase the
effort required for MACE support I will let you know.

Maybe we need to have a planning session for the Pascal Workstation
to figure out the best way to incorporate MACE support into our
release schedule (PDS indicates MACE is intended for release in 
Q3 '91).


Comments appreciated,

Jeff.


