Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@beer.org> writes:

> Dale Ghent <daleg@lithium.elemental.org>  wrote:
>  > On Thu, 18 Dec 1997, Greg Earle wrote:
>  > 
>  > | OK, I'll bite: Did they pull the plug on the money before getting around to
>  > | funding a sun4m DBRI ISDN/audio driver?  :-)
>  > 
>  > Yeah! Nothing would be better than to actually *use* the soundbox I have
>  > for my LX. Although, the ISDN stuff itself would be fun to play with, too.
>  > 
> 
> I think there's a difference between "funding the port" and "providing
> hardware to facilitate the port".  While the latter is still a wonderful
> thing, it's not quite "paying some number of people to do the work".
> 
> IIRC, what happened with the 4m stuff was that hardware (and possibly
> documentation) was provided.

Actually, there was money for a person (me), but it was an
undergraduate research internship stipend (e.g., a pittance), and
essentially limited to getting a stable research platform (see my
other post).

The amusing thing is that Sun did supply hardware, but refused to
supply documentation for a long time; the port was done almost
entirely with freely-available manuals and a bunch of reverse-
engineering; we didn't get a hold of the infamous (and actually pretty
useless) Sun4m architecture manual until after the port was booting
single-user, IIRC.

--Aaron