[Ed: Written by John Pezzano--jp@hpuepta.uucp--part of a series]
Via: cadorette@wagon.enet.dec.com
DIGITAL SELLS ITS EMPLOYEES - Digital Equipment Corporation announced today that since it has had so much trouble selling its VAXes and has so many excess employees, it will begin offering the employees for sale. According to our reporter, DEC expects its employees to run about 20% faster than its older machines and about half the speed of its RISC based DECSTATION line. Prices and delivery are expected at the NODECEMP show in January.
HP/APOLLO MERGER FOLLOWUP - It has come to the attention of this paper that analysts have finally concluded what HP and Apollo each brought to their recent merger. HP brought Tauruses and Apollo gave HP yet another line of incompatible machines and lots of third party peripherals to compete with HP's own. Most analysts are convinced HP should have bought Apollo years ago when HP could have also brought donuts.
COMPAQ announced last week that it has the world's most expensive PC line at prices up to $80,000. Compaq also announced sales of 2000 to its PC competitor Hewlett Packard. HP spokesperson Fasta Cieuw said that the new machines will allow HP management to do even larger and more complicated Lotus spreadsheets. HP had previously announced the replacement of its world renowned MBWA with MBLS.
Sun Microsystems recently pronounced that X-Windows is not an industry standard. A SUN spokeswoman claimed that it couldn't possibly be a standard as SUN has not invented it yet. "As soon as we come up with it, it will be made a standard," she said. "We expect to have a working X-Windows before the turn of the century and we promise to be first to market as we always are."
DEC INTRODUCES ITS FIRST MAINFRAME. - Digital Equipment Corporation announced its first mainframe size computer. "We tried to make it bigger than IBM's but we did not have enough sheet metal in the plant" a DEC spokesman said. "However, it does outrun the DECStation 3100 by 20% and is at least twice as fast as the employees we will be selling in the next year." The spokesman was referring to the previous announcement about selling its employees.
HP ANNOUNCES RETURN TO THE GOOD OLD DAYS - Because of recent criticism from employees about how the "HP WAY" was going away, HP recently announced some major plans to reverse the trend. "The first of these is the recent removal of backup from our HP-UX SAM subsystem. We wanted to go back to the old way of making a decision without any field or customer input just like we used to do," a spokesperson from HP announced. The spokesperson also stated that there was no truth to the rumor that HP was intending to bring back donuts by merging with "Debbie Does Donuts." "That kind of business is incompatible with the image we want to project," said the spokesperson.
IBM ANNOUNCES NEW WORKSTATION LINE - In a surprise move, IBM announced a fast way to bring in a new, powerful line of workstations totally compatible with its current mainframe line. In an amazing feat of technical brilliance, IBM claimed 100% compatibility between mainframe and workstation. IBM spokesman Joe Isuzu said the new 3090SRX is at least as fast as the Apollo DN10000 "and a lot bigger and more expensive." Mr. Isuzu denied that the 3090SRX is just a 3090 with all terminals removed except the console. "Would we do something like that" he asked? Prices for the new workstations are in the $1M to $10M range. Delivery is expected to start by 1993.
HP CRITICIZES CUSTOMERS - In a surprise move, HP sharply criticized some of its customers for having centralized administrative machines and failing to put workstations on the desks of their field engineers. "Who do they think they are?" a spokeswoman said. "Only we are allowed to be so backward because we make them."
SUN DOUBLES MTBF - SUN Microsystems claimed the MTBF leadership position in quality. "In the tradition of leading the industry, we at SUN are proud to claim the best quality increase. Once again, we lead not only in price/performance and support, but now we are the quality champion" said the new SUN Vice-President Jane Doe. "We increased our MTBF from 100 hours to 300 hours, a 300% increase. HP can't do that. The best they can do is 10.1 years to 10.2 years, a measly increase of less than 1%. That means we are more than 300 times better than HP! That's leadership." This reporter asked HP to respond but we were unable to find anyone in public relations or marketing. In related news, this reporter found out that the name "Jane Doe" is not the real name for the SUN Vice-President we had talked to. However, she said it was more convenient to use that name as it saved the company considerable money in not having to reprint business cards every time an executive left.