3-rd party 8mm Drives

[Jonathan Eunice]

Dick Dunn writes:

   jpe at egr.duke.edu (John P. Eisenmenger) writes:

   > ...As it turns out, IBM decided the standard Exabyte PROM was a bit
   > crufty so they replaced it with their own.  A standard SCSI 8mm drive
   > will therefore not work with the RS/6000...

   I think "crufty" is a little more interpretation than the situation
   deserves.  Would it be too cynical to suggest that they only wanted to
   support the drives they sell...and that the way to achieve this was to
   make the drives they sell incompatible with other 8mm drives?

No, I'd say that's about the right level of cynicism to use regarding
one's vendor.  ;-)

But, I'm not sure if "make the drives they sell incompatible..." is a
fair description.  I think what IBM did was to sell a specific 8mm
drive with an AIX device driver for it.  Exactly as DEC, Sun, etc do.
If the drive or the device driver happen to be incompatible with the
Exabyte driver, that's unfortunate, but hardly conspiracy.  

System vendors can't provide drivers for every XYZ add-on device on
the market, or even all of the popular ones.  Think about the *years*
it's taken Microsoft to get its driver act together in the Windows
market, where the requirement is much greater and the payoff is much
higher.  Third party hardware vendors are responsible for providing
drivers for the platforms they want to sell on.

Of course, IBM could make its customers happy by either providing a
stock Exabyte driver, or by working with Exabyte to develop one
Exabyte could provide.  That's good business practice--and mandatory
business practice in the UNIX/open systems world.  Hopefully IBM will
see this point; if they're having a little mental block at the moment,
bring it forcefully to their attention.  But I think if you look at
other vendors, or read the Sun, DEC, etc newsgroups, you'll see that
the "my vendor didn't provide the XYZ driver I need" story is pretty
common.