MACALLSTR@vax1.physics.oxford.ac.UK (02/22/88)
DIGITAL are asking us for 60 pounds per month ( about 100 U.S. dollars ) for BASIC maintenance for the DMB32 driver software. I know the driver has been packaged as a separate piece of software but to charge extra for what is a standard VMS driver is a bit steep! What good is the DMB32 without the driver? Is this normal practice or has our local office not yet got its act together? John
bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright) (02/23/88)
In article <8802220653.AA17483@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, MACALLSTR@vax1.physics.oxford.ac.UK writes: > DIGITAL are asking us for 60 pounds per month ( about 100 U.S. dollars ) for > BASIC maintenance for the DMB32 driver software. I know the driver has been > packaged as a separate piece of software but to charge extra for what is a > standard VMS driver is a bit steep! What good is the DMB32 without the driver? > Is this normal practice or has our local office not yet got its act together? > John I am not sure exactly why DEC decided to package the DMB32 driver as a separate piece of software - I assume that it is basically a marketing decision (who would buy a $1M machine and scrimp on driver software costing only a few $K?). DEC certainly does not normally charge extra for device drivers unless they are "special" - such as 3270 emulators. The DMB32 driver doesn't really qualify on these grounds. But it does appeal to a somewhat limited audience (only users on BI-bus machines, mostly running DECNET or BISYNC on it). As for what good is the DMB32 without the DEC driver, that sort of depends on how good you are at writing device drivers. I have written a device driver which uses the DMB32 (and which does not use the callback entry points into the SIDRIVER), and I can assure you that it is a _complex_ device - much more so than any other communications device I have ever dealt with (though perhaps no more so than some disk subsystems I've seen). But if your needs are simple and you have some time it is quite possible to construct a driver for it yourself ....... Bruce C. Wright