Copyright 1995-2016 by Kevin G. Barkes All rights reserved. This article may be duplicated or redistributed provided no alterations of any kind are made to this file. This edition of DCL Dialogue is sponsored by Networking Dynamics, developers and marketers of productivity software for OpenVMS systems. Contact our website www.networkingdynamics.com to download free demos of our software and see how you will save time, money and raise productivity! Be sure to mention DCL Dialogue! DCL DIALOGUE The Same Old Digital Originally published November, 1995 By Kevin G. Barkes Those of you concerned about the massive changes at Digital Equipment Corp, take heart. Despite massive downsizing, restructuring, outsourcing and a couple other buzzwords I can't remember, the New Digital is really a lot like the Old Digital, except the incompetence has been decentralized. Those of you who've read this column for a while remember the debacle surrounding my leasing of a VAXstation 4000 Model 60 a couple years ago. The machine arrived quite late with a dead monitor, a dead system disk, and assorted other problems. Back in June I was looking for a hearty Intel-based computer on which to build a TSX-based bulletin board system. I wanted a good machine with good local service, so I thought of giving Digital a try, since Digital's Pittsburgh service guys are without peer. I also wanted to see if the highly-touted "New Digital" had indeed cleaned up its act, and since I really wasn't planning on actually starting the BBS until early next year, I figured that if there was an ordering problem with Digital, it wouldn't have an adverse affect on my business. Smart move on my part. I called DEC Direct in early June to order a Prioris system with a 90 Mhz Pentium processor, 32 MB of memory, two 2 gigabyte SCSI hard drives, a quad speed CD-ROM, an RDAT tape drive, a DigiBoard multiplexer, a monitor and the other usual accoutrements. I happed to call on the day Digital transferred its PC sales to an outfit known as PCs Compleat, so my order was actually taken by "Digital @ PCs Compleat". Only the bugs weren't completely worked out of the new phone system, and the automated attendant kept hanging up on me. I perservered, and after a six or so tries I was connected to a friendly and knowledgeable salesperson who took the information and faxed me a quotation in under two hours. I called back to confirm the order and tell the salesman I planned on leasing the system through Digital. The salesman said I should consider leasing it through the outfit PCs Compleat used, but I responded that Digital handled my current VAXstation lease and that I wanted to give them the business out of my appreciation for the fine way they've serviced my account. No good deed goes unpunished. I called my local Digital office to discover the person who had handled my VAXstation lease was long gone and that Digital Leasing and Remarketing was now Digital Financial Services (DFS), which was acutally run by General Electric Leasing, and that my "local" leasing office was now in Cincinnati, Ohio. Okay, so I called Cincinnati, spoke to the rep, and all-in-all waited until mid-August until the lease was finally approved and all the paperwork was in order. Now, honestly, if I had been in a big rush for the system I would have been on the phone hourly screaming about the situation and would have probably cancelled the order in a week and headed over to the local computer superstore to pick up a Compaq or similar machine. Instead, I just let things move at a glacial pace, calling maybe once every two weeks to prod Digital Financial Services along. Around the beginning of Septmeber, I started getting calls from PCs Compleat informing me that the okay had come from DFS and they were building the system. Only they had a problem sourcing the DigiBoard, a common multiplexer used in BBS systems and available from any number of mail-order outfits (at prices well below what PCs Compleat was charging, I might add). Finally, on September 11, I told PCs Compleat to forget the DigiBoard and ship the system without it. Despite the delay caused by having to contact DFS to revise the pricing, they shipped the machine on September 12 and it arrived on September 14 in three big boxes. One box contained the CPU. The second contained the monitor. The third was filled with empty boxes. This puzzled me, until I realized they had shipped along the packing material for the peripherals I had added to the base system. I guess this made sense, in the event I had to ship something back to them, but the system came with on-site service which would seem to negate the need for holding on to all the packing material. What the machine did NOT come with was a mouse, and it was impossible to configure the Prioris server with the supplied software without one. It also came without a "registration diskette" which I needed to send back to the company in order to register the warranty for the machine. Since the system is techncially incomplete, I'm not going to sign the acceptance certificate Digital Financial Service requires me to execute before they pay PCs Compleat. The point is moot, anyway, since Digital Financial Services hasn't returned any of my calls for the past three days. I don't have new leasing documents which reflect the configuration and price change, and I don't even know what the monthly payments will be. As a contrast, consider my experience in ordering a Partner II phone system from AT&T to replace the one barbecued by lightning the same week I ordered the Digital PC. I called AT&T at two in the afternoon on a Thursday. The salesman came to my house that evening at 7, where I decided on a system and signed the leasing papers. The bank approved the lease the next day and the equipment was delivered to my house in under a week. I've had three unsolicited follow-up calls from the salesman to see if the system is working okay, unsolicited calls from AT&T's customer support center to see if I needed assistance programming the system, and calls from the bank telling me to make sure I was satisfied with the equipment before I signed the acceptance document. Oh, and I bought a Pentium system for my son from one of those home shopping channels on cable tv. Charged it to my VISA and had it delivered Fedex in two days. I think I've acquired my last Digital PC. ***** Dain Bramage: A few months back I republished some DCL hints that included: $ DELETE FILE.DAT;0 as a way to delete the latest version of a file. Scores of folk e-mailed me to point out the "0" is superfluous: FILE.DAT; will work just as well and saves another keystroke. Also, you can subsitute the period "." for the semi-colon in a file specification: $ DELETE FILE.DAT. will delete the most recent version of a file. I received the same comments when the tips originally appeared several years ago. I dutifully added them to an addendum to the file, then copied the old version into the column. Sigh. ***** Determined: I used to think disk utility software salespersons were the most aggressive critters on the planet. That honor now goes to uninterruptible power supply (UPS) salestypes. After writing about electrical problems here at my home office, I received scores of e-mail messages and fedexed literature packages. This is all well and good, but one UPS salestype sent me several internet messages with a return address that appeared to come from a parallel universe. My replies kept bouncing back to me. Finally, he sent me a rather terse message to the effect that if I was going to continue to ignore him, I could do something that I believe is anatomically impossible, at least at my age. Look, people: internet e-mail still has reliability problems. When you send someone an e-mail message, be certain to include your US mail address and voice phone number, in the event something happens that prevents an electronic reply from getting to you. ******************* Favorite response of the month: Cartoon star Dilbert, asked when he planned to upgrade to Windows 95: "I'm waiting for the Mac version." ******************* Kevin G. Barkes is an independent consultant who loves his new phone system, especially since it permits him to transfer salespersons into a music-on-hold purgatory which features an endless loop of "The Girl From Ipanema", the elevator music featured in the film "The Blues Brothers". Kevin lurks on comp.os.vms and can be reached at kgbarkes@gmail.com.