tj@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Thomas E. Jones) (02/14/90)
No, the library request was never resolved. Last time I called the Concurrent User's Group "Interchange" was about a month ago, and they were busy with some upcoming meeting so they didn't have time to work on the old Masscomp Program Library. I talked to some people at Concurrent-Westford, and they said they had most of the programs and would get me a copy of a couple of them, but they never did. I've pretty much given up on the user's group. On top of that the newsgroup comp.sys.masscomp was changed to comp.sys.concurrent, and the group never made it into the New England area. Nobody at MIT or BU or around here has access to this, the files are dropped long before they reach us by some machine that thinks the newsgroup is bogus. On top of that, we ordered 2 machines that came about 5 months ago. The A/D circuits were never up to spec, with noise levels in the bottom 6 bits. After over 2 months of tracking this down, the noise source was in the power supply. Concurrent informed us that they changed power supplies just before they made our machines, and the new power supplies are way too noisy. All user's that have 16 bit A/D systems and this power supply have useless data. They're designing a new power supply which they plan to in-house test sometime late March, and production should start right after that. We've basically been told we'll have to wait until the new supplies are ready before we can use our machines. You wouldn't have any idea how much trouble we've had since the change to Concurrent. They're shipping computers that don't work, they were 5 months late on our shipping date, a new memory board is taking 5 months to order (I hope they overestimated this.) The customer training courses have been totally re-organized, meaning our technicians have to sit through 20 days of training just to learn how to change boards on the system when they break. The maintanance agreement that cost us $28,000/year is supposed to have 24 hour turn around, but so far the quickest respose was 24 hours before the technician gave us a call to tell us it would be a couple days before he could come out. CCC was to develop a special driver program to handle some special disk drives for us, and they were 7 months late, the driver crashes the system on a regular basis, and it's only 98% as fast as they specified it would be. The custom engineering group that developed the software for us has been dismantled. One of the guys went to a networking group, and the other left the company, yet CCC will not give us source code to the software so we can try to fix it. I'm very disapointed with how the company has fallen apart. They use to have a great product, great people, and great support. Now they can't even ship a working machine after being 6 months late. - tj@xn.ll.mit.edu Articles to: concurrent@soma.bcm.tmc.edu or uunet!soma.bcm.tmc.edu!concurrent Administrative stuff: concurrent-request@soma.bcm.tmc.edu Stan Barber, Moderator