Bell Tech W.G.E. use with Microport

[Dimitri Rotow]

I know this is tedious for most people on the net, but Scott has made some 
entirely unwarranted complaints, told some untrue stories, and made some
personal attacks that are entirely out of line.   If you don't care about
this stuff or what he thinks or I think, now is the time to bail out ...

I wouldn't waste the net's bandwidth on this, but if I don't reply there will
be people who think some of the rubbish posted is true.  Scott, what follows
is pretty hostile and personal.  That's a shame because you can be a pretty
fun guy, but you started it.

I don't know why you get so personal, because our policy on Microport
support for the Blit (aka "WGE") is nothing personal about Microport.
Your entirely unwarranted abuse of our technical support people is no way
to win friends.  Tech support people are human too, you know, and are not 
paid to work with abusive jerks.  Them be the ground rules, son. 

Your abuse of Jennifer is out of line and outright libel.  She is well known
in the Valley as one of the outstanding technical support people in the 
industry.  Verbal abuse, making up stories to tell the Net, and other juvenile
stunts are not the way to get on her good side.  If you're going to buy 
products and use them where they are *explicitly* not supported, you should
think about making friends, not losing them.

As regards Blit support for Microport, there are about a hundred constructive
ways to make it happen, only one of which you've tried (posting a procedure
to the net).  Tom McCalmont (Microport's new VP Engineering), Bob Glossman
(our VP Engineering) and I have known each other for over eight years, ever
since we worked together at Cromemco.  Tom is an outstanding individual, and
you could be working to make it easier for he and Bob to be able to develop
synergies between what Microport is doing and Bell Tech.  Let me address
a few of the remarks you've made with specific rebuttals.


In article <446 at l5comp.UUCP>, scotty at l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) writes:
> 
> 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
	
	Extreme.  Microport isn't supported right now.  When people get 
	verbally abusive, they *do* hang up.  
> 
> 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.

	Crocodile tears.  

> 
> 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. :)

	Scotty, people don't go through the effort that Elan did with Eview
	or Neuron Data with Nexpert or the hundreds of other people that
	have ported or are porting to the Blit without being happy with
	the product.  We now have 22 companies (including 10 of the multi-
	billion dollar majors) bidding over 60,000 units worth of the Blit
	in various OEM deals.  The Blit is a *hot* product that people like
	a lot.  Support for most people is fairly straight-forward, but it
	is *does not exist* in certain areas (namely, conversions to 
	Microport and certain other custom releases).  Despite that, people
	have ported the Blit over to six or seven other UNIX release, PLUS
	News for the 80386, AND Xerox Smalltalk.  All of those other projects
	put together have not resulted in one-tenth the unwarranted grief 
	your use of the Blit in Microport has caused our tech support staff.


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

	This is true.  If you think you can beat the price, go for it!  
	That's not sarcasm: I have done as much for sensibly priced X
	as anyone, and I welcome any effort that supports getting more
	X and UNIX to everyone.

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

	Nonsense to speculate.  We have not announced an X11 product yet
	nor our policy on source thereto.
> 
> 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)

	There are cogent reasons why these are the case.  While you are 
	learning why it's reasonable to price X source at $10K by trying
	to do it for less, you'll learn why for yourself.

> 
> 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...)

	Hey Scotty, what you say is just not true.  One reason our tech
	support people aren't willing to support you on a "friends" basis
	even if you're doing something for which we have no established
	support is that you can't be trusted to get a story straight 
	without a tape recorder being put to the conversation.  There's lots
	of new pix on the images tape ...  you didn't order that and given
	the poor state of your relationships with our tech support people
	(and just about everyone else in the industry, from what I hear)
	you can hardly expect them to send it without charging you the $25
	or whatever it costs these days.  For the record, you got lots of
	disks, the right disks, and exactly the disks you and tech support
	agreed would be sent out.  The problem was you didn't know what 
	you'd asked for, you abused people, and there was a limit to what
	effort they were willing to expend to punch through your bad 
	attitude to help you out.  You know, they'd be perfectly within
	their rights not to work with you in an area where you and they
	agreed up front there would be no technical support (the use in 
	Microport thing).

> 
> Or maybe they'll meet their promised ship date for X11 and I won't give a
	
	Whoa! nobody ever promised a ship date for X11, and don't you go
	making up another story that someone did.

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

	Thank you for saving me the trouble of convincing everyone that 
	you exaggerate.  Faithful readers of these airways know 
	that Dimitri never "announced" no online man pages.  He 
	simply posted a message explaining AT&T's stated licensing 
	fee and asked for input, then did the smart thing and left
	for a week's vacation.  See my other posting for the results
	of the poll. 
 
> 
> 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.

	Nonsense.  We won't announce X11 until after we've shipped at least
	a few dozen or a hundred or so to legitimate third party customers.
	Sales doesn't even talk X11 except to guarantee that we will deliver
	it.  The only time quote given to date is that it will be here in
	"a reasonable time."   Others will announce 11 sooner, but none 
	will have a totally reliable product sooner than us. 


Scotty, you know how to get people steamed up.  I think you enjoy it.
I apologize for getting personal, but a lot of people here do not like the
shitty, inaccurate way you have characterized Jennifer or your interactions
with our technical support staff.  We try to accept in a professional manner
criticism of our products no matter what the forum, although there are
certainly productive and unproductive ways of offering critiques in any 
forum.  But we draw the line at personal attacks, especially unwarranted,
especially at people who have gone out of their way to help when they
have no duty to do so.  I hate to get hostile with someone who's done
as much work with the Blit as you have, and who so obviously has got a 
lot of technical skill, but at some point you have to draw the line. 

- Dimitri Rotow