Altos 5000

[Bob Palowoda]

>From article <3864 at altos86.Altos.COM>, by ti at altos86.Altos.COM (Ti Kan):
> In article <1990Aug25.014213.17353 at fiver> palowoda at fiver (Bob Palowoda) writes:
>>From article <3854 at altos86.Altos.COM>, by ti at altos86.Altos.COM (Ti Kan):
>>>>ti at altos86.Altos.COM (Ti Kan) responds to a flame-ette from Foulk about the
>>how Altos fined tune there hardware software that makes it more reliable
>>than ISC's or SCO's UNIX (includeing the third party vendors).    
>>
> 
> Without delving into technical details (and possibly divulging proprietary
> information),

  This is what I think alot of customers want to hear. For example they 
want to know exactly what makes your disk cacheing/mirroring is better 
and more reliable than lets say DPT's or someone elses. You have to
give the customer something to measure the quality of your product 
against.  

> degree of reliability and performance -- given the
> time and resources available
> -- if we didn't have a specific list of
> target hardware configuration.

  So just how are you going to prove to the customers that you spend more
time and resources than lets say SCO or ISC. Can you imagine if you
found out you spent less time on the QA than they did. Would your product
be less reliable if you found out they did?  I was wondering why they
came out with those lists anyways. Could it be that they run QA suites
on that hardware. And before it got on the list it passed the equivalant
of Altos test suites.

> number and variety of PC-class hardware on the market that they support
> means that they cannot spare as much development effort into all these
> nitty gritty optimizations that we could do.

 "nitty gritty optimizations", what you have dirt in your OS?
  
> In many cases, we as
> software engineers can have a say in our hardware design specifications,
> so that the software/hardware integration can be more efficiently
> implemented. 

 Ahh, something interesting. Details? 


> You may not find this significant, but in reality it is
> an incredible value to be able to simply walk to a different part of
> the building and talk to the guy that designed a particular expansion
> board, which you are implementing a device driver for.

 Heck I don't spend that much time. I just pick up the phone and call them
even if it's another vendor that is out of the building.

> Moreover, our
> Software Test and QA team work closely with the engineering team, on
> our own target hardware, to ensure that everything in various combinations,
> hardware and software, will work reliably together. 

 Some of our software and hardware people go to bed with each other. Don't know
if this improves reliablity of our product any but at least there working close.

[some stuff deleted]

>>> Again, the original point of the discussion was the question why
>>> one would choose a box like the Altos 5000 with standard EISA bus
>>> and 486 CPU, but with special expansion I/O cards and special UNIX
>>> release, over a generic PC with SCO or Interactive UNIX.  I think
>>> I have made my argument pretty clear.
>>
>> And your ego!
> 
> I would rather not comment on this, but Tom Yager's follow-up
> article on this topic eloquently reinforces my point.  I am not
> being ego-centric,

 I'm was commenting on Tom's follow-up.

> I am simply an engineer who is proud of his work
> and the quality of his company's product.  Is there anything wrong
> with that?

  This seems to be about the first important thing you said. 
"his work" and "his company's product". I really didn't mean to sound
like I was flameing. It was just a few short comments I got from reading
your article. I was actually more interested in the fine technical details
that make Altos 486 ESIA bus computers worth 3 or 4 times more than 
anyone elses. Hey I might even be a potential customer. My company purchases
more 100 386's a year and we are looking at 486 ESIA machines for our memory
testers. Let's say the Altos machine performs the best. Than he asks me
why. What am I going to say "Ti said they spend more time on QA and 
development than ISC or SCO did on other products". How about Altos
has proprietary hardware/software which makes it more reliable. He's going
to want comparison measurements to help him determine performance.

 The term "reliablity" as seen from the customer and manufacturer is too vauge
to get into here. One observation I have made is customers measure reliablity
against other competeing products internally and this data is usally hard
to get a hold of.  
 
  If Altos 5000 is in a class by itself than I guess there is nothing to
compare it against other than the salesperson's word. If it's not considered
a PC class machine competeing against other ESIA bus machines, you maybe in the
wrong newsgroup.  

---Bob

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