No new software eminating from the Sun Microsystems Inc enterprise in any of its guises will be going out on tape any more, according to Sun’s self-appointed CD Cop William Petro, a manager in SunSoft’s CD-ROM product marketing group. And co-incidentally? – continuing the Star Trek Next Generation theme that Interactive Systems Corp began when it was part of Eastman Kodak, Petro has been awarding CD-Romulan T-shirts to compact disk converts within Sun – read my disks, the garments challenge. Indeed Petro said that at last week’s announcement of Solaris 2.0 for Intel Corp systems, SunSoft’s launch team incorrectly alluded to a taped-out version of the software that would be available. It will be available only on CD-ROM, from Sun, Petro says, although the distributors – Dell Computer Corp, AST Research Inc, CompuAdd Corp and the like – are likely to offer the operating system bundle on other formats, as few personal computer users have CD-ROM capability. This, he admits, is likely to cause a number of installation and device driver headaches for the Intel crowd, not least because Solaris has not been put together in such a way that would enable it it to be taped out in a single stream. However, we think Petro should take a stroll down the corridor and talk to some of his SunSoft colleagues who take an opposing view: a SunSoft spokeswom an told our sister publication Unigram.X that Solaris for Intel will go out on tape as well as compact disk and that floppy disk is being evaluated. Who said islands of information?
