Chris Sparks wrote:
>
> W. Wesley Groleau x4923 wrote:
> >
> > Rhetorical question (but go ahead and answer if you wish): Why did the
> > R1000 & Delta die when it was so obviously "superior" ?  Does that sound
> > like another common lament from our group?
>
> I used the R1000 years ago too.  I knew that it would go south because
> the keyboard was a pain to use.  Being used to a normal PC keyboard this
> thing was a monster.  Since it had more keys and sequences to remember I
> gave up trying to master it.  It also didn't have graphics capability.
> A real bummer back then.

I haven't used one recently (duh) but IIRC the keyboard was similar to
those on LISP machines -- remember those?  I think the industry prefers
special software tools on general-purpose machines, rather than having
a box for every tool.

I think moving to a Unix-based box was the right move for Rational.

Having a separate box required them to be a hardware and OS vendor,
in addition to an Ada tool vendor.  And, any advances in Unix would
not be reflected in the R1000 -- they'd always be trailing the OS pack.

It also required you to buy (or rent, I suppose) a box in order to
try out their tools.  They had to bring a box just to show you a demo.

As a customer, you'd have to get a really amazing advantage to
justify buying a bunch of new hardware, making your people learn
a new OS, and settting up support for the new hardware and OS.

The R1000 was a nice development environment, but it wasn't THAT
good.  (I don't know how it COULD have been.)

Besides, their current tool, Apex, which runs under a normal OS,
gives many (non-embedded) projects the luxury of hosting their
development on an instance of the target machine.  This can make
early testing a LOT faster and easier.

Best,
Sam Mize

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Samuel Mize -- [log in to unmask] (home email) -- Team Ada
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