[rescue] Wow, 30k Graphics Card From Sun

[Andrew Weiss]

...yes and then came the wonderful machines made  from "Quality new and 
used parts."

No toll free tech support... waiting two hours for a pimply faced 
windows wiener to tell me what I already knew.

ISA video cards in a PCI machine, and a sound card that only worked when 
the factory disk image was installed complete with their coding fudges 
to make their card work.  Not even the reference drivers worked ok....

sold with those printers that you have to either use the black or color 
cartridge but not both...

etc.

FudgePacker Smell computers.... loved to hate them.

Andrew

On Friday, July 26, 2002, at 10:42 PM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Bill Bradford wrote:
>
>>> Am I the only one that remembers Packard Bell as the company making
>>> good, high quality 386 clones?
>>
>> What universe are YOU from?
>
> Their early machines were actually built quite well.  Their 286s were
> extremely well-shielded and very expandable.  Their 386s were a bit
> spotty.  The larger ones were okay.  The tiny ones (in the form factor
> that was just wider than a 13" monitor) were proprietary crap.
>
> I have an old 486SX made by them, and it was certainly acceptable for 
> the
> era.  Not the best machine by any standards (stupid DRAM controller that
> could only see 1MB SIMMs), but it was amazingly compatible with 
> everything
> I plugged into it (including CPU upgrades), and everything that was
> onboard could be disabled either in the BIOS configuration, or with
> jumpers.
>
> They even had great technical support.  The wait times were horrible, 
> but
> they spent hours as they walked me through memory, hard drive, and CPU
> upgrades the first time, back when I was a clueless newbie.
>
> That box ran DOS 5.0 through 6.2, OS/2 2.1 and 3.0, Windows 3.1 through
> 95, and Slackware Linux, all without complaint.  In that same timeframe,
> many machines would have trouble running Windows 95, and wouldn't run
> something as exotic as OS/2 at all.
>
> However, when they changed their logo and "image", everything went to
> shit.  They stopped shipping genuine rebadged MS mice, and shipped cheap
> weightless crap (hollow fucking mice balls--evil); the keyboard also 
> lost
> about threee pounds.  They started introducing all-in-one multimedia 
> cards
> that were all-or-nothing, so, if you upgraded to something faster than 
> the
> 9600bps modem, you have to upgrade your sound card and CD-ROM drive 
> (since
> the built-in drive wasn't always Masushita or Panasonic).  They managed 
> to
> invent a case even worse than the Sun Ultra 10 or newer Compaq "home
> computers".
>
> Rather than bundling full manuals, interactive tutorials, and useful
> backup discs, they shipped electronic manuals, "user experience"
> software (their own MS Bob clone), and "Multimedia master discs" that
> didn't let you reinstall individual programs.  Even their unlimited free
> (toll-free, even!) technical support became pay-only.
>
> --
> Jonathan Patschke
>   "gnu: we aim to fuck up everything with the potential to not suck"
>                                                    --alex j avriette
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>
>
-Andrew
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"Oh good... my dog found the chainsaw." -- Lilo

"Technical Animal Fat Not Intended for Human Food" -- on a tank truck