forceten@dalcs.UUCP (ForceTen Enterprises) (08/02/85)
*** BACKUP THIS MESSAGE WITH YOUR TAPE DRIVE ***
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Earlier I posted a request for information about suppliers of
tape drives for the IBM PC/AT running Xenix and promised a summary.
Although the response was not overwhelming, I have located several
sources, and the summary follows. Thanks go to Jerry Deroo, Tom
Poindexter, and Patrick d'Entremont.
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Emerald Systems Corporation
4757 Morena Boulevard
San Diego, CA 92117
USA
(619) 270-1994
contact: Douglas Cooper
or Stephen Mahar
Emerald has a distributor in Canada, but I haven't got hold of them
yet. They sell hard disks and tape drives for the AT running either DOS
or Xenix. Hard disks from 36 to 140Meg (unformatted), and tape drives
in both 1/4 inch cartridge and 1/2 inch reel to reel format, are
available. They do seem a bit pricy: $2050 for an internal drive, $375
for a cabinet (I don't know if this includes a power supply), $250 for
the Xenix instalation kit. Other prices include $275 for 5 tape
cartridges, and $250 for the "AT Upgrade Conversion kit", which means I
don't know what; but presumably includes an 18 MHz crystal, as these
come with the disk drives. However, they claim to be shipping right
now! The work on the AT driver is newly completed, so who knows how
fast it is.
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ComputoneSystems Inc.
One Dunwoody Park
Atlanta GA 30338
USA
(800) 241-3946
(404) 393-3010 for Canadians
contact: Dave Middleton (on vacation until August 12th)
or Jack Berlin
Computone does not yet have a Canadian distributor, but they are
looking for one. They have been shipping an 8 serial port board for use
with PC/AT Xenix for around 5 months, and one respondent indicated that
he was very satisfied with its quality. However, they are still working
on the device driver for the 1/4 inch cartridge 60 Meg Archive drive.
Their prices seem likely to a bit less than Emerald's, about $2000 for
the drive and software. They got the thing working today, but it will
be two weeks before they go to Beta test. For the record, the 8 port
board has a quantity one price of $1295.
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Consensys Inc.
somewhere in Toronto, Canada.
(416) 440-0096
contact: my first one, and I can't read my own writing.
Very polite, he was, and seemed quite knowledgeable
Consensys Inc. is a Value Added Reseller of PC/AT systems, just getting
established. It was formed by some people who became disenchanted with life
at HCR (Human Computing Resources, a big company). They have a package
consisting of an 80 Meg. CDC disk drive, 60 Meg 1/4 inch tape cartridge,
error correcting memory (how much I am uncertain), and an 8 channel serial
board. They were just sending material to the printers for glossies when
I called (a week ago), and the package price was to be around $7500. Sorry
for the sketchiness of this report, but this is more my fault than theirs,
as I was the one asking questions. They haven't decided whether or not to
sell the tape system separately or not.
[The price figure is in US dollars]
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Irwin Magnetics
(313) 996-3300
They are not expecting anything for a couple or so months, but are
working on what would seem to be the cheapest alternative: the 1/8 inch
tape unit used in the Compaq Deskpro, running off the floppy controller.
I didn't work much on this one because the capacity didn't seem likely to
match our needs.
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That about covers it. If anyone else knows of any more potential
suppliers, please let me know: if I get more , I'll post more.
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Neil S Erskine decvax!dartvax!dalcs!force10!erskine
ForceTen Enterprises Inc.
3845 Dutch Village Rd.
Halifax, N.S.
(902) 453-0040