Bell Tech System V

[Charles Hedrick]

Bell Tech's cheap SV looks very attractive, particularly in comparison
with Microport's new higher prices.  However I'm curious whether
there's any way to evaluate how it is going to work out in the long
run.  As I see it, they are essentially duplicating the history of
Microport.  From what I can find out, Microport started out on the
theory that since Intel and ATT had spent all this money developing
SV/286, it should be possible to produce a version for the AT with
very little extra effort.  Little extra manpower would be needed to
support it, since ATT and Intel were already committed to do most of
the work.  Thus we had Microport undercutting SCO by a factor of 2.
This is all fine in theory.  But it didn't work.  As serious bugs
started building up with little in the way of fixes, it because
apparent that you can't support a product without a development staff.
(Note that I am separating development and support.  Their support,
i.e. dealing with questions from users, seemed OK.  The problem was
when a change needed to be made to the software.)  I'm hoping that the
recent price rises indicate that they realize they're going to have to
increase their staff, and that these problems will be fixed.  However
their large price advantage is also largely a thing of the past as
well.

Now we have Bell Tech.  They are charging much less than Microport for
what is nominally the a very similar product.  However as they put it
themselves, they are simply publishers for ATT.  If you find a problem
(presumably with the exception of Bell Tech device drivers), about all
they can do is MR it to ATT.  This all sounds very familiar.  Is there
any reason to think that this effort at bypassing a development staff
is going to work better than the last one?  I'm prepared to believe
that ATT is more serious about the 386 product than it was about the
286 product.  Thus it might be that ATT is committing enough resources
to make this work where the 286 didn't.  But does anyone have evidence
yet of how responsive ATT via Bell Tech is to problems?

These are not rhetorical questions.  I'm probably going to wait a bit,
but at some point I'm going to want to upgrade to a 386 processor.
Since Microport seems to have given up the idea of selling 286 to 386
upgrades for less than the price of a new 386 license (a decision that
I suspect will prove to be very bad), this means I'm going to be
reevaluating the alternatives.  I'd love to save money, but I'd also
like software that works.