masscomp

[Dan Johnston]

     We would like to provide an alternate experience.  Overall, we are
quite satisfied with our 2 masscomp systems.  Yes, we have had problems
and frustrations, but masscomp has been very responsive to our needs.
Service has been wonderful, our local salespeople have done everything
possible to make us happy, and we have had open communications with
corporate headquarters, including conversations with several vice
presidents (I even spoke to the CEO once).

     That is not to say that masscomp is without faults.  For example,
their choice of a mux was awful, the original monochrome graphics
station was unreliable, and they were slow bringing out their promised
floating point and array processor boards.  One could argue that perhaps
they have tried to do too much for a small company--real time data
acquisition, proprietary floating point and array processor boards, and
graphics--and that this is why bugs in some products are more numerous
than one would like.  Nonetheless, I believe that they have excellent
engineering and they are dedicated to bringing state-of-the-art products
to market at reasonable cost.

	One must keep in perspective that they were one of the first and
still one of the few to do real time A/D under un*x, and their 1 M Hz
sampling rate is hard to beat.  The floating point performance has been
improved by a factor of about 20 since we bought our system (Jan 84)
through the addition of floating point hardware and improved fortran
environment, and they appear dedicated to continue to do so.  Ethernet
is up and running between our two systems, and we have experienced no
problems.  We have bench marked (our programs) on a number of un*x
systems in the same price range, and masscomp still looks good even
though the CPU is nearly obsolete (68010).  They will be announcing new
hardware shortly that should put them nearly in a class by themselves in
price/performance.

	In summary, we do not share your experience with masscomp.  We are
quite pleased and will probably be buying their new generation equipment
in the near future.  They are a good company suffering from the ills of
newness.  We are happy to have an alternative to DEC for laboratory
computers.  Anyone wish to trade DEC war stories?


dan johnston
dept of neurology
baylor college of medicine
ihnp4!shell!neuro1!dan