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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: BSD/OS v2.0 HWE disappointments
Message-ID: <AMOSS.95Mar11114141@picton.cs.huji.ac.il>
From: amoss@picton.cs.huji.ac.il (Amos Shapira)
Date: 11 Mar 1995 09:41:41 GMT
References: <3j837n$6ar@genesis.npr.legent.com> <1995Mar4.043248.1@spcvxb.spc.edu>
Distribution: world
Organization: Inst. of Comp. Sci., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
NNTP-Posting-Host: picton.cs.huji.ac.il
In-reply-to: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu's message of Sat, 4 Mar 1995 09:32:48 GMT
Lines: 43
terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) writes:
The 174x is still manufactured. DEC is a large OEM customer for these.
Adaptec would rather sell the 2-series board as there should be lots more
profit in it. However, the fact that DEC, a much larger company than BSDI
(at least at the gross level - I think BSDI made more net than DEC for a
few quarters 8-) doesn't support the 2-series might give you something to
think about.
I think I have news for you - I'm going to buy a DECpc XL-Server by
the end of this month and they clearly advertise that they have an
Adaptec 2940 embedded on-board (somewere else it says 7870, I'm told
it's the practically the same). From what I heard about Adaptec
support I would rather have another SCSI controller but that's what
the XL-Server is coming with (and DEC's is the only PCI mother board
I'm aware of with a potential to install Alpha's and other CPU's on
it).
I've got news for you - the Unix/Windows NT/OS/2/whatver market is so
small that any hardware vendor could easily kiss it goodbye and never no-
tice. That's the root of Adaptec's arrogance. When BSDI's lack of Adaptec
2-series support causes Adaptec to lose 10's of thousand board sales, may-
be Adaptec will sit up and listen. However, unlike Intel's Pentium fisaco,
10,000 individual users bitching to Adaptec won't have any effect (it was
tried when the 2-series first came out). It needs to be from big vendors
of hardware (not software, like BSDI, but hardware, like DEC) saying they
won't buy the boards unless the programming information is public. Of
course, those vendors generally don't ship source-level drivers, so even
if they did negotiate a deal with Adaptec it might not help BSDI.
I'm not familiar with the market (nor with BSDI) but from what I've
seen I'd tend to agree with you - Adaptec is giving very hard time to
the people who are trying to develope support for these cards in Linux
and FreeBSD.
Cheers,
--Amos
--
--Amos Shapira | "Of course Australia was marked for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st. | glory, for its people had been chosen
Jerusalem 93 805 | by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL amoss@cs.huji.ac.il | -- Anonymous