Re: The Science Generations

[Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>]

Ryan Russell/SYBASE wrote:
> If I may offer another opinion...
> I ran a BBS for about three years straight off
> of floppies on an Apple ][+, without any
> hardware failures or disk problems.

[snip]

I can't argue against someone else's personal experience, but, if you
are asking me to believe that the rather cheaply made Apple II would
perform nearly as long and reliably as an HP-86/87 (for example), when
making hundreds of thousands (millions?) of accesses to floppies over
a period of weeks or months, without a disk drive tuneup or alignment,
then I must be living in the wrong reality, i.e., everything performs
the same, regardless of its construction design.

SHOCK TIME:

I'm going to shock you now, by telling you that of all the HP computer
gear I have bought, the failure rate of new computers and major peripherals
was approximately 40%, within the initial one-year warranty period.
Actually, the failure rate within 90 days was well over 30%.  When I
wrote out the detailed list and sent it to corp. HQ, they must have
peed their pants, judging by the reaction I got.

Surprised?  So how do I justify this?  All I really know for sure, besides
what I've told you, is when the initial fixes are made, I can run heavy-
duty operations for many times longer without interruption than I possibly
could with most other brands.

Wanna know who the worst offenders are in consumer electronics, not only
when it comes to warranty-period failures, but failures soon after, due
to shoddy failure-proofing?  Sony and Toshiba.  I haven't had a lot of
Toshiba equipment, but the experiences I've had, and the attitude of the
company for not fixing them, are convincing for me (just my opinion).

I have had a *lot* of Sony stuff, mostly small (but fairly expensive)
items, and their product quality is abysmal, excepting large items
such as TVs, or a couple of small "professional" items such as the
Walkman D6C cassette recorder (Stereophile's favorite) and their pilot's
radios S??-70 and -80.