> Bruce Lane, Owner and head honcho, Blue Feather Technologies wrote:
>
> Also, I've met quite a few old-line FE's, mainly when I was working as a
> lab tech with an 11/70 in the late 70's. Every one of them was fully
> qualified to trouble-shoot to the component level, using O-scope,
> multimeter, and anything else they needed. Are you sure "under-trained
> ignoramus" fits that description?
Yeah, but the quality dropped out in the early to mid 80's when they
figured the diags would do the work and all they'd need is a parts
changer.
And I can say that 'cause I WAS the parts changer from 81-86.
DEC made great stuff... as did IBM.
The one thing people forget is the reliability on the average WD drive
or Maxtor is ten times that of an RP06.
The average retail quality PC is 10 times better than the
core memory and early mos memory boxes of yesteryear.
The chips are more reliable, the hardware's faster. The one main
problem is the software quality...
I've run my FreeBSD PC about as long as I've seen an 11/780 run in
the '80-88 timeframe with the same uptime as VAX/VMS a v3.5 or Ultrix.
I'm not using Windows to do this, however.
Let's not knock the PC architecture. PCI bus is fine... DIMMS
are ok (especially ECC ones). The CPU screams. The Symbios and Adaptec
SCSI cards are reliable and affordable.
There's nothing as slick as an HSC50 for PC's YET. However,
they raid quickly and cheaply.
No daily reboots here... on a cheap K6-2 PC platform (FIC 503+)
last shutdown was for a thunderstorm.
FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE i4got.pechter.dyndns.org
12:06PM up 9 days, 3:45, 4 users, load averages: 0.03, 0.21, 0.19
The Sparc ELC's doing a netbsd build now... Going to go to 1.4.2 from 1.4.1
8-)
Bill
--
bpechter_at_monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
| Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
| BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?
Received on Thu Apr 06 2000 - 11:09:18 BST