This is the text of a Usenet post from David Small, of Gadgets by Small. It has an odd formatting, due to the terminal he was using, but it is informative reading. David Small may be reached directly from DELPHI by translating his e-mail address into DELPHIese, so to speak . That would make it: internet%"dsmall@well.sf.ca.us" (And you _do_ have to include those "s.) ========================== message follows ================================ >From: dsmall@well.sf.ca.us (David Small) >Subject: ..from d small >Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link >Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1993 05:42:56 GMT Hiya, folks. I wanted to let you know I'm back to The Well and "I'm baaaack". There have been some complaints about Gadgets (and sort of, about me) not being available. I plead guilty, but extenuating circumstances. I am certainly not as available online or by phone/fax as I was two years ago, and there are reasons. First off, we're trying to get Spectre 3.1 out the door. I spent time in Oregon last December getting this tuned up (we had DMA troubles with the TT). 3.1 now understands TT SCSI hard disks, and can handle the AHDI/HDX 3 and above "XGM" partition scheme, which was causing users problems. You can concert partitions on SCSI drives to HFS or MFS, just as with ACSI, and no problems. (Working this into XGM cost an extra couple of days, not fun.) As a lot of you know, 1992 was not much fun for the Smalls in general, not just Gadgets by them. Eric, a 10 year old, was hit by a car and broke his upper leg, which is one of those bones you don't want to break. The bone also tore up his thigh muscles. He had to have a steel rod put into his thigh to hold the multiple pieces together; it took the surgeon an extra hour to line them up. (Gee, that'll be a fun thing to read after dinner). This happened in May '92. He attended graduation in a 4-legged "walker". We shut down Gadgets completely over summer 1992. I mean, nobody, but nobody got answered on anything. The reason was we were working with Eric on physical therapy; we didn't want him to have a short or weak leg the rest of his life. My wife begged off on PT; she had been through it twice with knee surgery and knew how much it hurt. So I got to do it. I also got to sleep around Eric when he'd wake up with muscle spasms, and they hurt quite badly. This went on all summer, and the closest analogy is a new baby in the house that's real fussy -- every 2 hours. It turned out well. Eric calls himself "The Terminator" now and points out that bullets would bounce off his steel leg. (He gets it out in a month or so, oh joy.) He went back to school in September with no walker, bouncing around, rough-housing with the kids, running up and down the stairs. It is incredible how fast 10 year olds can heal. Innn the meantime, some folks that wanted to get ahold of us were rather peeved. We made up a FAX sheet and sent it out in general (ST-Report quoted it) to our dealers, explaining what had happened. We even scanned in the X-rays of Eric's leg, which are real graphic. (Definitely worse than the start of "Basic Instinct"). And we discovered we were 4 months behind in FAXes and telecalls and so forth, and our input buffer was getting swamped. Our normal input buffer, "Barb", is now in Jamaica enjoying running a scuba diving biz. We're looking for someone else. Sandy was taken away 100% by the need to straighten out our taxes, which had glitched (we filed for extension, then Eric happened -- kaboom). We're basically understaffed at this point. (Anyone out there want to handle phone and FAX traffic? Drop me a line...) The input is pretty overwhelming. People set autodialers to work on us, so the minute I complete a call and put the receiver down, the phone rings. No hesitation. The FAX is just unreal. I'm positive we have lost FAXes in the overall overload. We've been trying to find some help, and with all the aerospace layoffs in Denver, maybe we will succeed. I've talked with 4 people so far that did not feel right to me; a telephone person is your whole contact with your customer. You don't want an engineering type doing it. In the meantime, we answer the phone and ship to dealers when we can, particularly when Sandy is sick of taxes or I'm wasted on Spectre 3.1. (The recent, most embarrassing bug was to find out the hard disk write command was changed into a read accidentally; this is surprisingly hard to discovrer after the avalanche crash it caused.) My attitude is that I would rather make X thousand customers happy than one person happy, by *not* answering the phone and wrapping up 3.1, getting it through Beta, and OUT, so TT users can start using SCSI drives. (3.1 does not (yet) allow generic SCSI, that is another issue; we are "special-casing" disk I/O.) 3.1 also has some long-wanted bug fixes, like the Mega-STe with less than 4 mb RAM fix, and the > 4 meg fix for TT's, but I am having a lot of fun with big memory in general and the MMU; I have to provide a secure ST RAM disk I/O and screen buffer, and the *combinations* are giving me flak. (The TT, for instance, has that big screen monitor which uses up so much more RAM than the ST 32K... I have to allow for it in ST RAM). 3.1 is essentially ready for Beta test once I get done wiring up the Mac- required device table stuff ("Gee, is a hard drive ejectable?"), and is headed there, probably on GEnie to begin with but that is not a restriction to there. I *definitely* want to test out one thing at a time so I don't get combination errors; big memory combos in particular have WEIRD bugs. For instance, Mac programs often compress the heap by requesting 8 meg of memory. Request fails, but the heap compresses. Well, with a TT and GeSoft board, we have 12 megs (or with SST), so... the request works. WHAM! The Mac is also "24-bit dirty", meaning it uses the upper 8 bits (like older GFA Basic) for flags, meaning an MMU has to watch it to keep it from crashing. This is real fun when people are promising to put 68EC030 chips into the ST, where there IS NO MMU, and where I don't know a way to lock all 256 "groups" of 16 meg ST-size pages into one. The manufacturers say it is no problem to run Spectre; I have absolutely no idea how it could work with 3.1. We have long put out an advisory on this, but it is, shall we say, in the interests of an EC030 board maker to contradict us. As for patching our code to kill caches (mentioned), Spectre is real touchy about being patched, on purpose, because of the Dr. Typo dweeb that made a pirate version -- and wiped out the boot sector of most machines it ran on. (He was 2 bytes off on a patch, and fell into disk write code with D0 = 0 = absolute sector # = partition sector). This totally blew away the hard disk for most folk. So. We know we are too hard to get ahold of; I presently have 130 messages in my email buffer here on the Well. Yup, that's truly scary, especially with the "bounce percentage" I get of replies of fail. Oh, well. There are hundreds more on GEnie and so forth. But 3.1 is pretty well done, and it was a lot of work. [We are debating putting in Sparrow...oopps.. Falcon support for IDE and Sparrow SCSI, which is TOTALLY different than TT SCSI, beware!, but I'd like a seperate revision for that. The IDE and SpSCSI code seems straightforward.] We have absolutely, definitely stopped saying "No" to a Color Mac II'-style emulator. If you don't know, it's been done for the Amiga, Jim Drew & Co., called Emplant, and is very, very impressive; we've talked. I expect that when we finally find the right frontend person (I just hate to call people buffers) that things will ease up, and we can all get back to our proper jobs. We did manage to ship a whole bunch of SST's in the one year it's been out, and MegaTalk is out as well; both of those involved extensive coding and writing of manuals.] I'll post up here (or someone will beat me to it, no worries) when 3.1 is thru beta and solid. I don't want to high-speed timing screw up SCSI drives, and some do it, believe me; we're trying to make the code Mhz independent so all them 150 Mhz accelerators will work. (grin) Okay, back to discussing the real issues of the day: Whether a PC is a better buy than a Falcon -- surely the most apples to oranges question I've seen. Oh, yes. We finally whacked through the Sys 7 thingo that caused so much trouble. But that's news for another note. Hang in there, folks. At the end of 1992, at midnight, we re-formatted a disk labelled "1992". That is our comment on the whole blasted year. Hopefully 1993 will be an improvement; nice and dull would be GREAT! -- thanks, Dave Small / Gadgets by Small, Inc. / Bottlewasher, programmer, VP, all that stuff p.s. It's late, and I don't remember how this editor works. Forgive me the typos.