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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!olivea!sgigate!sgiblab!svcs1!slix From: slix@svcs1.UUCP (Bill Miller) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Controller manufacturers (was Re: Colorado Memory Systems) Summary: does this attitude apply to Mountain and other QIC manufacturers I may want to write them Message-ID: <706@svcs1.UUCP> Date: 5 Sep 92 23:25:12 GMT References: <h!mn#wj.hasty@netcom.com> <147@snidely.UUCP> <1992Sep5.193929@eklektix.com> Organization: Silicon Valley Computer Society, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 21 In article <1992Sep5.193929@eklektix.com>, rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn) writes: > I suspect this applies more (or only?) to the manufacturers of the little > cassette drives. They're in a very price-competitive market; they need all > the help they can get for "product differentiation". This tends to lead to > uncooperative behavior. o> I am wondering whether this applies to mountain. I have a Mountain Filesafe tape drive (DC2120) with a mach2 controller - they've been rather good in the past with doing things like giving me a new half-card controller for free, new free updates of their DOS tape software, etc., and it's a pretty good drive. I deeply wish to not have to go off and get an "approved" drive like an Exabyte or Archive as 1) it won't probably fit in my machine and 2) I have not the bucks to just replace this drive just so I can backup my bsd filesystem onto tape. I would like to use the Mountain. I hope that Mountain is better at releasing this information than CMS seems to be, otherwisethis will be hopeless. >These companies are not in the software business... They should be - otherwise when their drives end up not being compatible with a particular OS, people won't buy them. It's as simple as that. OTOH, these people pretty much have the DOS market tied up, and they don't even give a shit about Unix because DOS gives them all their revenue.