Sam Ismail wrote: Bingo....couldn't put it better myself. I used to love Artisoft networking until they got so big for their britches that they think just because big business blindly buys from them that they can treat their customers any way they feel.

On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Phil Clayton wrote: Ditto. Early on they were great to work with. Slowly their phone tech support required longer and longer waits, until they cancelled it all together and made you pay for it, unless you wanted to wait a couple days for an e-mail response that didn't necessarily help your problem at all. That's the only reason I bought 7.0. I needed to still be able to access our DOS servers from Win95 when I bit the bullet and decided to jump from DOS to 95, mainly for the promise of a better platform (what a disappointment that turned out to be). I still have about 40 installations still running under LANtastic 5.0 and they hum along just fine. Of course they are only two nodes in most cases (a server and a workstation) but it allows me to dial into the workstation using remote control software, then hop across the network to the server and do maintenance on it. In fact, every node in my installs other than my dialup node are configured as servers so I can operate them remotely, helping our clients through programs or to do maintenance, etc. That alone was one of the most outstanding features of LANtastic. I just replaced LANtastic with Novell in my largest installation (20 nodes) and the speed improvement on the server side is phenomenal (of course I expected that, but I've never dealt with Novell before now). Getting the NetBIOS code to work under Novell was a whole different story. I've come to realize LANtastic's implementation was non-standard in a few respects where it really counted (ie. Broadcast Datagrams). Took much re-designing of critical system functions and lots of programming, but just last night we completed the cut-over and its looking good! I'd rather have networking tied into the OS, and for what it is, 95 networking is not bad for simple networking in the home or a small office. I think Artisoft just lost sight of its customer and had a poor business strategy. They seem to be focusing all their efforts on computer telephony/voice processing these days (Visual Voice). Did anyone ever use their Sounding Board? Allowed you to send digitized audio over their network for applications like voicemail tied in with e-mail...an early example of VON (Voice Over Network) that was in commercial use and worked, and probably the first commercial example of unified messaging (e-mail/voicemail in one interface). Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ever onward. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 09/21/98]