Bell Tech W.G.E. use with "sissy" unix

[Scott Turner]

My posting has generated a small wave of E-mail, a couple phone calls, and
a diskette mailer.

First for the non-Bell generated E-Mail and all the phone calls (Bell hasn't
called to my knowledge.)

There are alot of people out there that are a bit frustrated with Bell over
Bell's support of the W.G.E. Two people related how Bell tech support people
would hang up on them at the mention of the M-word. (I'll say it again guys
and gals, don't tell 'em you're "whimps" when you call!) My favorite tech
support person, Jennifer "Our driver gets confused by onboard EPROMs", seems
to NOT be the person to talk to if you are a card toting "whimp" and need help.

But there may be a pile of WGE users out there that like Bell's support and
send Jennifer roses. If so I've heard from none of them. I can only report
on what I am told, and insert this disclaimer in the hopes that there are
happy users or singers of praise for Jennifer.

As it stands I have yet to talk to a totally happy Bell WGE customer. I have
great hopes of talking to one someday though. :)

On to more pleasant items...

While Jennifer has done nothing to make me send her roses (unless they're
the gag stem-only variety with a note reading "Rose petals sometimes confuse
flower delivery personel" ;), there is at least one Bell person who seems to
know his/her stuff.

I'd love to heap praise on this person in public, but s/he is net-shy and
requested I not use their name in public postings. (This person is however
most assuredly *NOT* Jennifer)

I'll thus call this person Deep-X in all my net postings.

Pearls of wisdom from Deep-X:

1. X10R4 driver source IS available from Bell. Call your sales person and
have a cashier's check for $10,000 ready.

My thoughts on the $10,000 price tag:

Seeing how simple X10R4 ddx is, and how cheap programmers are ("Send more
machine guns, we can't manage the programmers without them"), it would seem
less expensive to just write your own X10R4 ddx. (In all seriousness, it
looks like a 1 or 2 man month project at most for X10R4. $5K tops, and you
get "free" training of a person to support/upgrade it)

2. X11R? ddx source will probably NOT be generally available.

3. The mouse is dedicated to being on either tty00 or tty01 because the
mouse drive takes over driving the 16450 serial chip!

I guess Bell couldn't get the stock asy driver to work reliably either. ;)

4. The mouse pointer flickers during scrolling because the X10R4 driver
doesn't use the built in hardware bitmap cursor. The 82786 only supports
16x16 bitmaps for the cursor.

It must have been too much trouble to make the driver use the hardware method
for 16x16 bitmaps and bitblt for larger ones, sigh. (One more reason to write
yer own ddx if you care about flickering mouse pointers)

As for the diskettes in the mail...

As I reported on the net, Bell promised to send me a SysVr3.1 upgrade since
it would fix 1. 62 defect limit problem and 2. Include a complete X10R4. But
alas the update came with only the base SysVr3.1, no X.

Well, in Friday's mail they took another stab at it.

Now we have the promised SysVr3.1 X disks, but only two of them! And to
add to the humor of it, this time we only get fonts. Well not quite, a few
other files slipped out the door on these two disks as well. Several programs
we didn't receive before and some more online dox. None of the new pix
Dimitri was hinting at made it either. (Deep-X claims there have been no
updates to the X10R4, but these two disks seem to prove this otherwise 100%
accurate source of information wrong on this topic...)

I'll give them an 'A+' for effort, but I'm afraid a somewhat lower score
for the missing disks. Or maybe the updates are done on a "Double Randomly
Selected Update Disks of the Week Club" basis. In which case I'll give them
an A+ across the board at this point. ;)

The new programs were QUITE useful and we were happy to get them, now if we
can just get the rest of the goods...

When will Bell do something I can be totally happy about? I'm really so damn
close at this point, just something like 8 X10R4 X disks and I'll be happy.
Or maybe they'll meet their promised ship date for X11 and I won't give a
hoot about 8 missing X10R4 disks. (All my other problems have an easy
answer, just get a custom X10R4 ddx...)

On the online System V 386 manual pages that Dimitri announced...

I haven't heard a peep. My offers of money have gone unanswered, mayhaps
they don't have these precious rarities in stock after all? If any vendor
out there has them, and is willing to part with them for under $200, please
drop me an E-Mail. I'll have a cashier's check out to you so fast the ink
won't be dry when you get it. (so be careful when you get it :)

Back to the WGE for the closing.

My words of wisdom for this week for all those unhappy WGE customers out there:
Keep the faith, X11 is supposed to be released next week. Of course that's
based on information from Bell Sales, not Deep-X, but it's a cheery thought
anyway. Hopefully all the confusion of the X10R4 release will be cured by X11.

Scott Turner
scotty at l5comp -or- uunet!l5comp!scotty