VMS is not the evil empire

[Rob Robertson]

In article <20469 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>DEC's pathological resistance to providing hardware service on Vaxes
>running Ultrix or Unix is a good reason not to buy Vaxes, it's no
>reason not to buy Unix which can be had from responsible vendors.
>
>This has been known for years as the "We can't fix it because it runs
>Unix(Ultrix)" DEC field service standard excuse #1. 

i hate to start defending dec, but......

my experience with their hardware field service personnel has been
excellent.  we run 4.3 and when ever we had a problem they have been
out here and have fixed the problem, no complaining, no comments.
occasionally i've been told "under vms we could run disk resident
diags, 'cause your running unix we're going to have to boot the
standalone diagnostics."  which is entirely reasonable.

now Systems Industries...  the first question our SI FE asks on any
service call is, "did you change the software recently?"  if yes is
the answer our drives can be smoking, and he'll blame the software.  
our problems with their inability to deal with unix (such as a
complete set of standalone diags) are endless.

pardon my bitching.

rob
				william robertson
				rob at philabs.philips.com