[ On Monday, January 13, 2003 at 08:43:40 (+0100), Igor Sobrado wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: misc/19820: SPARC trademarks fixes for the NetBSD on-line  documentation
>
> No, I am speaking about a lot of references to SPARC machines
> (not the sparc port itself), SPARC64 machines (i.e., UltraSPARCs),
> and so on.  For example, SparcStation is wrong, as it is SPARC Classic.
> Those trademarks have a well-known spelling, as it appears in
> http://www.sparc.org/.  When most than one spelling is correct
> both words appears in the trademarks section.

Well, first off I don't know that changing the case of a word is the
same as changing the spelling, though I suppose at least some trademark
lawyers may feel they have some special rights to declare new rules of
language, but only in their little domain I'd hope.

Of course "SPARC" is, language-wise, an acronym (Scalable Processor
ARChitecture) and typically we in the computer business use all
uppercase letters for such things.

However when refering to the processor type, it is commonly written in
all lowercase letters as "sparc", even by Sun themselves eg. as is
reported by 'uname -p' on SunOS-5:

	$ uname -p
	sparc

Sun do use special uppercase words to refer to the hardware
implementation though:

	$ uname -i                                             
	SUNW,SPARCstation-5

(and if I'm not mistaken that latter string comes originally from the
boot ROM, not the OS)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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