Need info on ISI systems

[Bill Johnston [csam]]

We have been running two of the ISI Q-bus systems as back-end troff
engines for somewhat over a year. These systems are rock solid hardware
and software-wise. We have had no hardware problems, except for the failure
of a cooling fan (which happened over Christmas break - the system ran
for a week with no fan before it was discovered).

Based on the experience of the past six months with some OEM systems,
the VME based systems initially had some bugs (in the backplane for
the 24 slot chassis, and in the kernel support for more than 4 MB
physical memory), but these now seem to have been worked out and I
expect they will be as reliable as the Q-bus systems.

As far as the byte swapping tape issue, I don't know why they do not
swap bytes in the driver (I guess it depends on your point of view as
to whom you should be compatible with), but tar is provided with an
's' flag (like dd) for swapping on read or write.

	Bill [johnston at lbl-csam]