Problems with Masscomp

[Charlie Perkins]

I read with great interest Bruce Karsh's complaint regarding
Masscomp's Unix systems.  I have a great deal of experience
in dealing with Masscomp, so I thought I would add a few words
to this discussion.

Under no imaginable circumstance should my statements be regarded
as related in any way to IBM policies, strategies, plans, or
anything official at all! (there, is THAT strong enough??).

First of all, I was surprised to read that there had been
trouble getting phone calls returned from Masscomp sales
people.  For me, it has been exactly the opposite.  Masscomp
sales has been unfailingly considerate and diligent.  I have
even found that the sales people know something about the
technical details of their computers, although not
enough.  I keep getting the impression that they want to
sell me more computers and that if they return calls and
describe upcoming products they will have a better chance
of doing so.

We have had many, many problems with our equipment here.
The most prominent problem (and it has been a super headache)
has been the Ethernet card used by Masscomp, made by Excelan.
This card (in my opinion a poor choice since, using it, Masscomp
cannot be a network gateway) has recently been found by
Excelan to have (other) design problems.  I am told that
when the redesign is finished, we will be getting more reliable
cards as needed.  And, it is about time.  I have noticed the
other problems that Bruce mentions, but only rarely.  Ethernet
data is never lost going into a file, only when it is to be
displayed by the window manager.

Other problems have included power supplies, flaky graphics
cards, and interrupt problems resulting from not following
certain guidelines which were never documented.  They are
all fixed now.

I really have to compliment Masscomp service.
In our many dealings with the service organization, I have been
usually satisfied with their response time and effectiveness,
and have always been satisfied with their courtesy.  My major
complaint is the length of time it took to figure out the Ethernet
problems.  There have been a few other problems.  For me it has
been very frustrating not to have source, because our entire
department relies heavily on the use of the network, and I just
want to go fix things when they don't work.  The service we have
received for software problems has been much more uneven than for
hardware, but still generally acceptable.

I will not comment on the use of the Graphics libraries.  I like
the use of the window manager that comes with it, but there are some
incredible bugs.  Trying to suspend the C-shell you get with
a new window will hang up the entire window manager (including
mouse and keyboard!).  As superuser you can send
CONT signals to the affected processes but the window manager
never completely recovers.  I am hoping that the newer
release of the graphics products will be much better (rumored
for later this year).  All in all the window manager is a
nice feature to have, but implemented poorly.

Masscomp provides an ambitious array of features.  They do have
bugs, but they are serious about getting them out,
and things are getting better (around here, at least).  They
have good performance for floating point computations and
good overall performance.  I will be finding out lots more
about the graphics side of things later this year...
However, I think that they have little competition when it
comes to gathering data onto disk in real time (at least,
in the Unix marketplace).  I would be interested in hearing
about competitive products if there are any.

In summary, I will say that our Masscomp systems have been
an effective computing medium for our needs.  There have
been lots of technical problems, but not many people problems.
I could go on with choice tidbits about specific bugs, but
I am sure every computer manufacturer has these.  Don't get
me started about the Vaxes I used to work with!  And, finally,
in my opinion there are a lot of competent engineers
working at Masscomp who intend to fix problems as they are found --
as well as continually upgrading and adding needed features.
That has to count for a lot.

Charlie Perkins, IBM T.J. Watson Research	philabs!polaris!charliep,
		perk%YKTVMX.BITNET at berkeley,  perk.yktvmx.ibm at csnet-relay

PS. Masscomp, are you listening??  When are you going to implement
    bug submission via electronic mail???  How about tomorrow?
-- 

Charlie Perkins, IBM T.J. Watson Research	philabs!polaris!charliep,
		perk%YKTVMX.BITNET at berkeley,  perk.yktvmx.ibm at csnet-relay