rbn@brl-vgr@sri-unix.UUCP (09/09/83)
From: R. Bruce Natalie (CTAB) <rbn@brl-vgr> ----- Forwarded message # 1: Received: From Columbia-20.ARPA by BRL-VGR via smtp; 8 Sep 83 2:15 EDT Received: from CU20B by CUCS20 with DECnet; 8 Sep 83 02:16:14 EDT Date: Thu 8 Sep 83 02:14:36-EDT From: John Whitfield Bito <ps1.John@CU20B> Subject: Notes on Eagle Computer. To: info-micro-request@BRL-VGR.ARPA We bought an Eagle-1630 micro a few months ago, and I'd like to share my experience... The machine is very nicely packaged and seems to be well engineered. The 10-Mbyte Shugart hard disk is fairly fast and has been completely reliable; it also has a floppy drive, but making back-ups with it can be excessively slow. The screen is high-resolution green phosphor but it streaks very noticeably -- this is my only complaint with the hardware. It also comes with two RS232 ports and one Centronics parallel interface. The RS232 ports are a 9-pin D-type and the standard DB-25; both can be used simultaneously. The screen is driven by a memory-mapped processor which can address up to 15 screen pages. The RS232 ports are driven by one Zilog 8350 I/O processor which can generate interrupts, if desired. It has an 8086 processor, but, as far as I can tell, no provision for the 8087 floating-point co-processor. It comes with MS-DOS 1.2, an editor known as SpellBinder, and a spreadsheet which someone told me was called UltraCalc. MS-DOS is good. SpellBinder is a bag-biter if you want to use it for writing programs, but it seems to be decent for document preparation except that the printing/formatting is often unacceptable (always if you never write rough drafts); it's (poorly) modeled after WordStar. I don't have much experience using the spreadsheet, but it seems very typical (like SuperCalc). Now for the BAD part: support. It's non-existent! There's supposed to be a network support system: you call your dealer who calls his distributor who calls Eagle. Then they give you the information you need, right? Wrong, wrong, WRONG! As you might expect after going through so many nodes with almost no bandwidth and very little processing ability, your result is nil. Now for the WORSE part: documentation. It's very pretty, but, alas, as with so many pretty faces, the beauty is only skin deep. The manual contains VERY explicit instructions on how to operate the menus and some of the programs provided. It does not contain ANY technical information; even the programs documented are covered incompletely. There is only a short section on MSDOS -- the first, second, and part of the third section of the real manual -- few of the standard programs and none of the system calls are covered. Now for the WORST part: the "technical 'manual.'" It's not even pretty. We got it only after three months of calling dealers, distributors, and Eagle, finally talking to some junior exec and threatening a lawsuit if we didn't get something that would facilitate effective programming. I was extremely happy when it arrived, only to find that it was as incomplete as the user's manual. The system calls were listed (not described), bios calls were described, but very poorly, and it was all xeroxed -- some pages were very reminiscent of the IBM-PC technical manual, others were dot-matrix or line-printer output, but almost every page had some illegible scribbling on it (I keep thinking that if only I could read that handwriting, I would know everything there is to know about the machine). In short, don't do business with Eagle Computer Inc. -John W. Bito ------- ----- End of forwarded messages