Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Kronos vs. Hardframe Message-ID: <128750@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 4 Dec 89 21:12:11 GMT References: <3481@convex.UUCP> <8750@cbmvax.UUCP> <5184@abaa.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 53 Dave Haynie wrote : I wish someone would design something interesting for a change... In article <5184@abaa.UUCP> esker@abaa.UUCP (Lawrence Esker) commented: >Yeah, LIKE A GENERIC TAPE DRIVE AND SOFTWARE THAT WORKS ON ANY SCSI CONTROLLER. >Or, at least the A2090A. Common, someone has got to do it soon. First, you need a GENERIC Tape Device. If you have ever written SCSI software then you know that most manufacturers put in whatever the hell they feel like for a command set (although most will at least put CCS in there) and then a lot of the spec is "vendor specific" because it is a damn legislated standard and no one wanted to change the way they reported or delt with bad blocks so you still need to know about every single manufacturers device if you really want to support it. * Standard Chuck "Standards" Flame * SCSI is a piece of shit. It is another example of how American computer companies, and computer companies in general, screw the world by saying "standard, standard, standard, ..." And then in the documentation saying "except, except, except,..." As a computer programmer you would think there is some book which says "To do this you do that, and to do this you do that, and to do this you do that, ..." but there isn't, and the reason there isn't is because if there was, there wouldn't be anything to separate the Seagates from the Quantums of the world (except for stiction problems of course :-)) and they would have to compete on price and performance and quality. The three words that say "Japan, please rape this market." For a graphic example of this look at the IBM PC-Clone market. Here, IBM, rather than some standards body, layed out exactly what was in a PC, including listings of its BIOS, and made a complete map of what was a PC, little or no ambiguity was involved. What little ambiguity there was like, "If there is a BIOS ConOut() call will anyone write directly to the screen memory?" were settled after a few applications didn't run on the clones and they got toasted for it. So we get a completely level playing field and *bam* the Japanese own it. Except for some hold outs like Bell (pushing performance) and Compaq (pushing quality) the best trump card is Japan Inc (pushing cheap). * Flame off * Ideally, there would be a standard tape drive and someone could just sell a package with their SCSI controller and say "Oh, if you buy a tape drive, you can use this to talk to it." Instead, it will probably be something like, "You have to buy brand X tape drive, otherwise the software won't work." And the reason no one will sell tape drives is because if you are a small company and get the 100 unit discount, when it becomes obvious you are going to be successful (like you sell 50 or so drives and people start talking about you) some distributer will buy 1000 and undercut your price leaving you with 50 unsold. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you. "If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"