sramtrc@windy.dsir.govt.nz (12/13/90)
Apologies for those beta testers who are waiting for the 1.01 version of the st driver. Our mail machine (AMV) crashed and although the hard drive has been replaced PMDF (or whatever it's called - it's the mail that you send using in%"" under VAX VMS) mail has not been working properly. Incoming mail has been bouncing between two machines until it is let in manually and outgoing mail has been doing who-knows-what but it has been getting out sometimes, and sometimes is returned after 9 days. And trailing blanks are getting stripped from files (so files that do get somewhere won't uudecode properly). The whole mail package, TCP/IP package or whatever is going to be reinstalled when the person who is doing it is flown up. If it is not done by Friday night I will make the update available by anonymous ftp from rascal.ics.utexas.edu. I haven't arranged this with Werner - I'll just stick it in some public directory. So it should be available for Friday (USA time). Just for the record, there are two beta drivers that I have circulated. The teac 1.01 which I no longer support and the st driver which subsumes the teac driver and supports other drives as well (all MicroNet drives except the new Teac 600MB drive which will be supported in the 1.02 version). I don't know what MicroNet's policy will be towards selling the st driver for non MicroNet drives. I think that it will be bundled with MicroNet drives and will not be available seperately. All beta testers will get the release copy of the driver (this has always been the case and always will be - nothing has changed there). I don't need beta testers for the Teac 155MB drive. But new testers are welcome for TDC drives (Tandberg), WangDAT, and I am now calling for testers for the Teac 600MB drive. The teac 1.01 driver has no expiry date (it does have bugs that have been fixed in the st driver). The st beta drivers have expiry dates because I found that when I sent out the teac driver to "testers" I only heard back from 20% of the people I sent copies to. Now the figure is 100%. Tee hee. Tony Cooper sramtrc@albert.dsir.govt.nz <- don't use this address till, say, next week unless the message is not important