Stan Sieler ([log in to unmask]) wrote: [snip] : Remember...HP sells many more 700s than 800s ... and it shows in the : prices ... you can get a high-performance 700 for *much*less than : an equivalent performance 800. : The right answer is: : We've been saying for years that the low-level drivers on both operating : systems share a lot of code ... so we'd be glad to put MPE on the 700 : hardware...where it *belongs*, and where users have been asking for it : for more than 3 years. : > have to leverage an existing box. It would be a huge investment for a very : > small payback. I don't think the cost of the development platform is an : If the drivers aren't shared (sorry, I can't comment on what I do/don't know : about this), then they *should* be shared, preferably in a manner that : allows future HP-UX driver work for possible future machines to be : immediately used by MPE/iX. Having two groups developing drivers for the : same hardware is, well, a waste of very valuable resources. Unfortunately there are several I/O systems that work with PA-RISC. MPE only addresses a few of them. As you know Stan, HPE and HP-UX had the same I/O architecture and the drivers were interchangable; but as time went on, MPE and HP-UX modified the interfaces. A couple years ago HP-UX abandoned the common I/O architecture for a more standard UNIX one. This was to allow 3rd party developers to write drivers. The cost to HP-UX was large. MPE did not want to incur that cost. As you know MPE drivers are port based, while the UNIX drivers are procedure based. I have always been sadden at the the fact that the HP-UX and the MPE drivers were not common after alot of people developed a common I/O architecture. In the early days, the basic difference was that HP-UX did not want all the diagnostics that MPE had in the drivers. Now they do. But you know how history sets the tone for the future. Rick "don't use [log in to unmask]" Ehrhart [log in to unmask]