SI controllers & a question

[tom patterson]

+
    I called up some people at the SI home office last week (about
Sept. 3) and they told me that the SI 4.3 driver for the 9900 should
be out in about a week or two.
    (Also got polite hints to the effect of "if you _really_ want
to keep up with the situation, go bother the guys at your local SI
office")
    I believe they are also polishing up a 9900 driver for the uVAX II,
but I'm not sure what the tentative release date is...
    [ I don't know how close they are to a REAL release of any of this,
but they sounded more confident than usual. ]

    Meanwhile, we've been using the 4.2 BSD SI 9900 driver under
4.3 BSD on 3 750's for the past few weeks with no known problems (or 
rather, no more problems than we had before; actually the SI controllers
& Eagles on the Massbus have always behaved more reliably than the UDA-50 
and RA81 despite some of SI's problems, at least at our site; I wish we had 
some Emulex stuff to compare against DEC and SI).

   Anyway, you should be able to get the latest 4.2 driver from SI
immediately -- I asked the local office back in July, and they sent me
one with the driver and the nifty bad-block handling utilities.

   [while I'm here: thanks to the guys at utecfa who told me about SI's
Simacs product; sorry I lost your address ]

what I'm really curious about:
    has anyone been using an SI 9500 on a VAX?  we have a couple which
are hanging off some old 11/34's & it would be really nice to just throw
them on the 750 (Unibus, since if I have to pay for a CMI interface card,
I'd just as soon move the disks to the 9900).
    the person who was fiddling around with moving our 9500 from
the 11's said it shouldn't be too hard to do, but it would be kinda
tedious... (then he took off for greener pastures [ AT&T & big bucks] ).

    thanks in advance if anyone can tell me a little more about this
one.

	..tp..			Box 1045,Engineering Computer Lab
	tom patterson		Lindell & Skinker Blvd
				Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130
phone: 314-889-6305	uucp: {seismo,ihnp4,cbosgd,gatech}!wucs!tp