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From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst)
Newsgroups: comp.realtime
Subject: Re: VME Board manufacturers?
Message-ID: <137677@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 14 Dec 90 01:55:11 GMT
References: <1990Dec10.180513.10032@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 35

>... I have found the following companies who manufacture 68030 VME Boards...
>If you know of any others, postings or e-mail replies for the name,
>address and telephone of them will be greatly appreciated.

You missed all the manufacturers who specialize in communications boards: SBE,
CMC, Performance Technologies Inc, and Systech. Pyramid OEMs SBE's boards, and
we have generally had a very good working relationship with them. PTI is a
small company with a limited product line, but what they do have is done very
well; we might have gone with them had we not already had the relationship
with SBE. PTI's biggest weakness is poor documentation. Systech may be the
biggest name in datacomm boards, but their products are garbage. CMC has been
a mixed bag over the years; it always seemed like that at the moment we needed
something specific, it wasn't quite ready yet. But I generally have a good
feel about them.

Then there is Interphase, which traditionally has specialized in disk and tape
controllers, but also offers Ethernet and (recently) FDDI. CMC has FDDI, too;
I don't think anyone else is shipping it.

The companies you named -- Motorola, Mizar, Force, et al -- seem to only make
generic boards, too limited to be interesting for my purposes; and their sales
critters generally are too busy with making volume sales to take an interest
in their customer's applications. The smaller companies -- SBE and PTI are the
ones I know best -- are much more willing to talk to you, and make honest
evaluations about how their boards fit your needs. I was particularly annoyed
by Mizar, who insisted they had the perfect board for my synchronous datacomm
frontend, when it was blatantly obvious that they had nothing that could even
touch the five-year-old boards I had from SBE.

Let me know if you want phone numbers, etc., for any of the companies listed
above, or look them up in the already mentioned VME products catalog. Alas,
the catalog doesn't tell you anything about whether the vendors are any good
or not. Which is why I posted the above....

<csg>