Greg Earle <earle@isolar.Tujunga.CA.US> writes:

> > I am not sure why this is "unbelievable" since SMCC funded the
> > NetBSD sun4m work.
> 
> OK, I'll bite: Did they pull the plug on the money before getting around to
> funding a sun4m DBRI ISDN/audio driver?  :-)

Ok, so this is a bit late, but I've been ignoring the lists due to
real-world pressures for a few weeks. I thought people might still
be interested anyway...

I was the one (indirectly) funded by Sun to do the NetBSD/sun4m port.
The money originated in, I believe, Sun Labs; they fund(ed) Margo 
Seltzer's research group at Harvard, and one of the conditions of
the funding was that some of it should go to getting a BSD port onto
the (then-current) SS20-class machines. They also generously supplied
hardware for the port. The goal in this case was to get a BSD 
environment for file system research on more modern hardware than
the 4c, not for publicity/profit reasons (as the FreeBSD port seems to
be, from what little I know about it). They were also interested
in the extensible OS technologies we were developing using NetBSD
as a base, and they wanted to see this stuff run on a SPARC. The
NetBSD port served as the base for this.

In any case, the port was funded by Sun Labs (East) via Harvard, and
the goal was only to get a research-platform-quality port working. I'd
like to think we (me, pk, and all the others who helped with the 4m
port) got a reasonably useful and stable port out of it (I used it as
my desktop for over a year with few complaints), but the funding was,
regrettably, never intended to add bells and whistles such as the DBRI
driver. :-(

I would have liked to have gotten those things (audio, parallel port,
24-bit SX graphics) working, but they were relegated to my "free-time,
unpaid" todo list, which I unfortuately never got around to 
finishing off due to other research and college pressures. :-(

> 
> Still wishing he had a chance to run the RealAudio 5 Solaris binary and get
> 16-bit audio output from his SS20/71 at work,

Yeah, me too. Well, at least I did before I moved to Berkeley and lost
physical access to any sun4m's...

--Aaron