wendt@arizona.UUCP (01/31/87)
The purpose of this note is to relate some trouble I had in dealing with the Heathkit company and mostly my local store. I've had no problems with the Miami store where I originally bought the equipment. Since then I've moved to Tucson, Arizona and had nothing but problems with the store here. I did buy a hard disk and 1/2 meg of memory from the Tucson store, so I wasn't exactly a stranger. It started when I bought Venix and tried to get it to run on the 151. I had many flakey problems, seize-ups, data errors and the like. I replaced the hard disk and controller with a set recommended by the folks at Unisource, and things got a little better; the system could almost stay up long enough to load the floppies. I asked the people at the local Tucson store if their machines would run Venix and the answer was an unqualified "yes". They said that there were people that they knew personally who were running Venix on my hardware. They declined to name anybody (customer privacy must be preserved, don't you know). They also declined to perhaps call any of these folks and ask them what Bios rev they were running, what version of Venix, what hard disk, etc. They suggested that I subscribe to a bulletin board and send out inquiries (talk about customer support!) After inquiries over the net and at Unisource, I've yet to hear of a system V running on a Heath 151. There are some of the old version 7's, running on Zeniths. I don't blame Unisource, supporting flakey and/or incompatible hardware is the pits. They could probably get me going in a week, but then they would have this conditional code to maintain forever. I've noted that recently Zenith has toned down their absolute guarantee of IBM compatability. So the next step was to get the newest bios chip set and see if that would work. I should have known that something was amiss when I saw the big, hand-written question mark scrawled on the outside of the envelope containing the rev 8 chipset. I didn't, though, I took it home, installed it, and of course it didn't work at all, period. Presumably some other customer had returned this same set and, rather than test it themselves, they decided that it was more conceptually elegant to let the next customer do it. I called up the Tucson store. They were out of stock, more chip sets would have to be ordered. I suggested that they go ahead and order them, and that when they came in, I would stop by (across town) and make the exchange. They declined; I would have to bring in the bad set before they would contact the factory. So instead of one trip across town I would make three. At this point I stopped payment on my check and contacted the store in Miami, who had a more recent rev, for about half the money, and mailed them out the next day. I copied the national sales office on the letter I wrote to return the bad set. Their response was that "the excellent staff in our Tucson office is anxious and willing to serve you". They did not comment on the question marked-envelope and subsequent problems. I've never been able to get V to run on Heathkits. The people at Unisource claim that there are differences between Heaths and Zeniths (which they do run on). The folks at Heath claim otherwise. If I was willing to send the machine up to Boston for a month and make myself unpopular, maybe somebody could figure things out, at least for the version that they built that week. I'll let my folks use the machine for a boat anchor or to run MSDOS accounting apps. Nice keyboard, though. Alan W. UofAZ CS