'386 Unix Wars

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR]

As quoted from <1991Jan3.174300.968 at sci34hub.sci.com> by gary at sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston):
+---------------
| Folks, how about a vendor offering a training course (for a fee), the
| participants of which receive free or very low cost support. This
+---------------

"There is nothing new under the sun."  Plexus did something very much like
this for hardware support:  if you took their (3-day) training course for a
fee, they would let you sign onto their lower-cost parts exchange program.
For a fixed and relatively low cost per month, you could call at any time with
hardware problems and they'd just ship boards to you and let you put them in
and ship back the originals until the problem went away.  No labor charge, no
extra hourly charge for phone support, just the cost of the board(s).

Be nice to see this for software, though, I'll admit.  On the other hand, it
may be notable that Plexus is no more.  (On the *third* hand, they were the
last of the companies from the early Silicon Vally boom to disappear --- many
other computer companies from the same time period died much earlier.  (Second
last if you want to quibble about Acer buying Altos.  But do your quibbling
elsewhere, please.))

++Brandon
-- 
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