At 11:04 AM 3/17/97, Masami and Ken Nakata wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Mar 1997 11:33:48 -0800,
>hotz@jpl.nasa.gov (Henry B. Hotz) wrote:
>> I got the impression from the SoftwareFPU doc's that it was only the first
>> released version of the chip that had the problem and that Motorola had
>> acknowledged it and would replace it if you could find your way through
>> channels.
>
>Really?  The attached is more or less the doc that came with the
>latest release of SoftwareFPU, and I didn't notice anything like
>this... (I extracted ASCII characters contained in the distributed
>Word document using GNU Emacs, so there may be some typos).
>
>> Perhaps I'm reading too much into what they said, but it's
>> basically the same kind of situation as the famous Pentium FPU bug.
>
>I'd say much better than that *in*famous Pentium FDIV bug, though.
>Motorola disclosed the bug information without waiting for some poor
>user to find it ;-)
>
Based on what you quoted I suppose I did read too much into what they said.
They are offering to sell you a replacement themselves.  If you pay money
you might as well buy a real '040.

>From a legal standpoint the two cases are similar though.  Motorola is
liable for providing a product that does what it was claimed to do when
sold.  It's called an "implied warranty of suitability for a particular
purpose" or something like that.  Independent of explicit warranties, there
is no particular time limit on the implied warranty, although there *may*
be a statute of limitations.  I'm not sure how much this may vary from
state to state, and all bets are off outside the USA.

If people wanted to get sticky then Apple is Motorola's customer, not us,
and Apple could claim that they fixed the problem in their system software
so no flaw exists.  Running software other than MacOS is not an "intended
use" of Apple hardware.

So I have just given two reasons why no one may fix the problem for us.
Anyone with a broken LC040 want to try calling Apple and Motorola to see
what they can get out of them?  Apple may be difficult, but you never know.
Motorola may give you a new chip, but leave the installation up to you.
If *I* were stuck I would want to give it a try.  You've got nothing but
time and frustration to loose.

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h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu