Important news for st driver users

[sramtrc at windy.dsir.govt.nz]

Apologies for those beta testers who are waiting for the 1.01 version of the
st driver. Our mail machine (AMV) crashed and although the hard drive has
been replaced PMDF (or whatever it's called - it's the mail that you send
using in%"" under VAX VMS) mail has not been working properly. Incoming
mail has been bouncing between two machines until it is let in manually
and outgoing mail has been doing who-knows-what but it has been getting
out sometimes, and sometimes is returned after 9 days. And trailing
blanks are getting stripped from files (so files that do get somewhere
won't uudecode properly). The whole mail package, TCP/IP package or
whatever is going to be reinstalled when the person who is doing it is
flown up. If it is not done by Friday night I will make the update available
by anonymous ftp from rascal.ics.utexas.edu. I haven't arranged this with
Werner - I'll just stick it in some public directory. So it should be
available for Friday (USA time).

Just for the record, there are two beta drivers that I have circulated. The
teac 1.01 which I no longer support and the st driver which subsumes the
teac driver and supports other drives as well (all MicroNet drives except
the new Teac 600MB drive which will be supported in the 1.02 version). I
don't know what MicroNet's policy will be towards selling the st driver
for non MicroNet drives. I think that it will be bundled with MicroNet
drives and will not be available seperately. All beta testers will get the
release copy of the driver (this has always been the case and always will
be - nothing has changed there).

I don't need beta testers for the Teac 155MB drive. But new testers are
welcome for TDC drives (Tandberg), WangDAT, and I am now calling for
testers for the Teac 600MB drive.

The teac 1.01 driver has no expiry date (it does have bugs that have been
fixed in the st driver). The st beta drivers have expiry dates because I
found that when I sent out the teac driver to "testers" I only heard back
from 20% of the people I sent copies to. Now the figure is 100%. Tee hee.

Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz    <- don't use this address till, say, next
                                  week unless the message is not important