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From: jg@jumbo.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec,comp.arch
Subject: Re: DECstation 3100 info.
Message-ID: <13532@jumbo.dec.com>
Date: 25 Jan 89 04:34:45 GMT
References: <617@blake.acs.washington.edu> <2056@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Reply-To: jg@jumbo.UUCP (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Cambridge Research Lab, Cambridge, Mass.
Lines: 44

In article <2056@sun.soe.clarkson.edu> abstine@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Arthur Stine) writes:
>From article <617@blake.acs.washington.edu>, by lgy@blake.acs.washington.edu (Laurence Yaffe):
>> 
>>     Does getting 3rd party SCSI drives also entail getting a device driver
>> from the 3rd party vendor, or are all SCSI drive alike?  (I know next to
>> nothing about SCSI devices.)
>> 
>> On an unrelated note, does someone know if the keyboard of the DECstation 3100
>> has a reasonably-placed escape key?
>> -- 
>
>It depends on the third party device. Disks should be just fine, since DEC
>supplies a device driver for the SCSI drives (although I am unsure of whether they check for their device types explicitly or not. I think their intention 
>though is to make it as flexible as adding 3rd party disks to a Sun). Tape
>devices and other SCSI things will probably need their own device driver
>unless the device looks like a TK50Z or the RRD40 optical drive. DEC has said
>that they will be supporting additional SCSI devices in the future though...
>whatever that means...

Be careful on selecting 3rd party drives; experience has shown that many
devices have had bugs in their SCSI implementations.  We tried several
other drives during testing of the PMAX which appear to work, but know 
that firmware problems in the drives we qualified for the RZ23 and the 
RZ55 had to be fixed for reliable operation.    (Or are we a statistical
fluke?  Somehow I doubt we were...)

Presumably as SCSI becomes
more mature as a standard these kinds of problems will diminish.  But
this is always true of buying third party devices, so I'm really not
saying anything new, other than the history of the drives we use was not
without a bit of excitement.

>
>As far as the keyboard, I believe from what I have seen that the keyboard is
>the same as the other VAXstations, the LKxxx type keyboard, which has an
>escape key in a dumb place. Sorry...
>

Using X, you can reprogram the keyboard to an almost rediculous extent,
so put the escape key anywhere you like.  I know; I designed that part
of X, and didn't want to put up with the escape key's (or the lock keys)
location. See xmodmap on the X distribution.

			Jim Gettys