25 Apr
2007
25 Apr
'07
1:34 p.m.
On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 22:53 -0500, Jim Leonard wrote:
Warren Wolfe wrote:
I thought the AT&T 6300 PC was more than a little cheesy. That's
mostly because of the crap that EDS had put in them to save a few
dollars. But, clearly, this particular problem had NOTHING to do with
the 6300s. And, IBM trying to ensure that their software only runs on
their machines, as it says on the box, while a marketing strategy that
borders on the retarded, is their right.
No, my real grouse in this situation was with EDS. To take a seven
million dollar payment (IIRC) as a consulting fee, and throw up (pun
intended) a cheese-bag system with a monocrhome IRMA card to run color
CAD/CAM, and select software and hardware without even seeing if the
software runs on that system, is such an outrageous action, I find it
hard to believe. I know that if I had ever done anything even remotely
like that, I would have been sued within an inch of my life. It shows
how carefully they evaluated it, and how they DIDN'T earn their money.
Peace,
Warren E. Wolfe
wizard at voyager.net
Imagine my surprise when DisplayWrite would
not even run. Seven
million for a study, and they didn't bother to even set it up. Sheesh.
Anyway, I ended up talking to Mort Myerson, the V.P. of EDS within a few
minutes, and I explained the situation to him. He said he would take
care of it. In the meanwhile, I was using a debugger to try to find out
what actual problem was causing the failure. It turns out that
DisplayWrite checked the BIOS ROM, and if it did NOT find "IBM" it shut
down. I figured we would get IBM to change the program... but, no.
Within a couple of hours about five Bell Labs techs showed up asking for
me, and got to work on the BIOS. I explained what I had found, and they
verified it. They then re-assembled the BIOS with a nonsense trademark
notice about IBM, and started cranking out copies of the new chip.
DisplayWrite then found "IBM" in the BIOS, and was happy.
Hopefully you're not blaming the AT&T 6300 for that mess... I think the
"IBM-string-in-the-BIOS-check" by the software is completely arbitrary
and the real dunce of the story...