"Smart" serial boards for the 80386

[Mr. Jim's Own Logon]

    A lot of complaints about Bell Tech all of a sudden. I'm sorry that you
don't like the serial card. You are in the minority. It is still the best
selling smart card in Europe, and one of the best in the US. We have a full
time tech support staff to handle problems with any of our hardware or
software products, and they would soon be aware of any prevelant problems
with the board or the driver software. Most problems are with the users not
reading the manual, or not understanding what they want to do. Those that
are technically knowledgable often blaim the added feature, which is the 
serial card. In Microport 386, when you add a smart card and it doesn't
work properly, is it the card, the driver, or the OS?

   I realize that you will take all of this with a grain of salt since I'm
from Bell Tech (I did the ICC hardware), but I wanted to present our side.
There are a lot of satisfied Bell Tech customers using everything from 
samrt cards to high resolution graphics; and many of these people are on
the net. Like any company or any product there are those that will leap out
to flame them for whatever reason (I could go through our tech support data 
base and find out the history of the complainers here, but I don't think
a mud slinging contest will help any).

   Anyway, our ICC smart cards as well as the new ACE smart cards work fine
with terminals, modems, printers and all other serial devices. Large
companies that have evaluated our smart cards against the top 5 or so
other smart card companies have all signed OEM deals with us. And this is
after a 2 month testing and evaluation period. If they had the type of 
problems that you claim, we wouldn't be selling them 1000 a month.

   Sorry for the length of this, but it IS a good design.

							-Jim Wall
							Bell Technologies Inc.