Re: Buying Whatever (non-XW)

[hseaver@xxxxxxxx (Harmon Seaver)]

On Sat, 11 Feb 1995 12:30:35 -0500 (EST), nsivin@xxxxxxxx
(Nathan Sivin) wrote:
> I don't buy weird hardware. In fact I don't buy hardware. The least
> I can do, however, is take what the University gives me. But I prefer
> not to be flamed if I point out, after pointing out that neither NEC

  That certainly wasn't meant to be a flame, Nathan, sorry. But
 Gateway (and that particular NEC CD-ROM) is weird -- i.e.,
non-standard -- hardware. And I used to choose Gateway over
others for office systems I was being paid to set up. No more.
And I am one of the first to buy weird hardware, although I'm
tending away from that. But a good example is the Perstor drive
controller I used to run -- it formatted a regular
MFM drive at about 32 sectors instead of the stock 17, so you
essentially doubled your drive space (without software
compression) and it worked quite well. Then I got OS/2 2.0 and
tried to install it ---IBM tech support finally figured out what
was wrong, and sent me a small fix. But you can't expect a
company to make it's product compatible with every last strange
offshoot some other company puts on the market.
  Another example is parallel ports and printer cables. There
are, or were, a great many companies producing substandard cables
which didn't work with Unix, and didn't work with OS/2. Newbies
to OS/2 (most of whom had never gone near Unix) whined about OS/2
not working with their junk cables and/or parallel ports, as if
it were IBM's fault. I got an excellent testing program for
parallel ports which tells you how the port is actually set up
-- and many of the most expensive
I/O boards I tried out had inverted IRQ sensing and wouldn't work
with either Unix or OS/2 -- most of which were supposedly the new
type "bi-directional" parallel ports. The company which produced
the testing program and who worked exclusively with parallel port
technoloy told me the problem was that most of the engineers
designing those ports just didn't have a clue.
  The point is: Should IBM have re-done their product to make it
 compatible with all the junk parallel ports or cheap cables?
After all, they worked with DOS, which didn't put such high
demands on system hardware. I don't think so. And even some very
good hardware might become unusable with newer systems because no
one does a driver for it. My Irwin tape drive (Irwin got out an
OS/2 program and drivers for it quite early, thank goodness)
won't work with
Linux, for example. When I used to run Xenix, I had drivers. But
no one is going to write drivers for Linux, and certainly not for
the PowerPC, and so eventually I'm going to have to buy a new
tape drive, one that is more mainstream. That's life, and I'm
not going to expect IBM/Apple/Motorola to write drivers for my
Irwin.
  Nowadays I won't buy anything that isn't fully OS/2 and Unix
compatible -- and quite frankly, any company who produces a
product that isn't is just shooting themselves in the foot. And
people who are stupid enough to buy such hardware, well, what can
I say? Like people who buy these expensive printers with an
interface card that only works under windoz. Geez! $1200 for a
printer that won't work with anything else? Nathan, if I were at
your school, I would be seriously agitating for the firing of
the moron who was in charge of purchasing those Gateway/NEC
machines. Seriously.

Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx hseaver@xxxxxxxx
seaverh@xxxxxxxx harmon@xxxxxxxx

All is impermanent -- and this too shall pass away.