On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Phil Clayton wrote:
> I sold Lantastic for many years, I really loved their products in the
> early 90's..They had great support back then for Technicians like myself
> and end users. However after Windows 95 came out it put them into a
Ditto. Early on they were great to work with. Slowly their phone tech
support required longer and longer waits, until they cancelled it all
together and made you pay for it, unless you wanted to wait a couple days
for an e-mail response that didn't necessarily help your problem at all.
> seemed worthless to buy their network software when all it did was
> Overlay Windows 95 network interface, With the exception of support to
> older DOS machine on a windows 95 network. I at one time had over 50
That's the only reason I bought 7.0. I needed to still be able to access
our DOS servers from Win95 when I bit the bullet and decided to jump from
DOS to 95, mainly for the promise of a better platform (what a
disappointment that turned out to be).
> Lantastic systems in the field that I supported, now most all are
> converted to Windows 95 based peer to peer networks..
I still have about 40 installations still running under LANtastic 5.0 and
they hum along just fine. Of course they are only two nodes in most cases
(a server and a workstation) but it allows me to dial into the workstation
using remote control software, then hop across the network to the server
and do maintenance on it. In fact, every node in my installs other than
my dialup node are configured as servers so I can operate them remotely,
helping our clients through programs or to do maintenance, etc. That
alone was one of the most outstanding features of LANtastic.
I just replaced LANtastic with Novell in my largest installation (20
nodes) and the speed improvement on the server side is phenomenal (of
course I expected that, but I've never dealt with Novell before now).
Getting the NetBIOS code to work under Novell was a whole different story.
I've come to realize LANtastic's implementation was non-standard in a few
respects where it really counted (ie. Broadcast Datagrams). Took much
re-designing of critical system functions and lots of programming, but
just last night we completed the cut-over and its looking good!
> Another Good company going under because of MicroSoft's strong
> marketing. Phil..
I'd rather have networking tied into the OS, and for what it is, 95
networking is not bad for simple networking in the home or a small office.
I think Artisoft just lost sight of its customer and had a poor business
strategy. They seem to be focusing all their efforts on computer
telephony/voice processing these days (Visual Voice). Did anyone ever use
their Sounding Board? Allowed you to send digitized audio over their
network for applications like voicemail tied in with e-mail...an early
example of VON (Voice Over Network) that was in commercial use and worked,
and probably the first commercial example of unified messaging
(e-mail/voicemail in one interface).
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar_at_siconic.com
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Received on Thu Oct 22 1998 - 22:42:48 BST