A105@UWOCC1.BITNET.UUCP (11/21/86)
Does anyone know anything about this product? 1st I heard of it was in a Canadian DECUScope article. Price (ball park)? How about product licencing for same? Thanks as usual. Brent Sterner Computing & Communications Services Natural Sciences Building The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7 Telephone (519)661-2151 x6036 Network <A105@UWOCC1.BITNET>
LAV@BRANDEIS.BITNET (11/23/86)
We have a bunch of Logicraft cards on a 785. My opinion: I wouldn't touch them with a dung fork. It took Logicraft nine months to get them working right; one reason is that they have only one intelligent employee and you don't often see him. The documentation is shoddy. The design is questionable: for example, the VAX files which serve as the PC disks must be pre-allocated to their full size. You want a ten-megabyte PC disk, it'll always use ten megabytes of VAX disk space. And the things run just as slow as real PCs. My two favorite idiocies in the software: 1) All broadcast messages are disabled when you're using one of these things. Thus they're useless on a system of any size, where you might want to tell people that the system is shutting down instead of just shooting them. 2) A quotation from their manual: The IBM-PC display monitor has 25 lines, and many software applications make full use of all 25 lines. DEC terminals have 24 lines, therefore, CARDWARE tries to determine which window to present: window 1-24, or window 2-25. The comma key (,) on the keypad is provided as a way to toggle that window to the users [sic] liking. Sneakily hidden on the last page of the last appendix. Perhaps it's superfluous to mention that these are my opinions and not those of the people who wanted to buy these things in the first place... John Lavagnino (lav @ brandeis.bitnet) Systems programmer, Feldberg Computer Center, Brandeis University 415 South Street Waltham, MA 02254 617-736-4594