*BSD News Article 21417


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From: veit@mururoa.gmd.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Forward: QIC-80
Message-ID: <1993Sep26.203329.10048@gmd.de>
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Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1993 20:33:29 GMT
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I am posting the following letter for someone who has no access to
netnews. If you have questions or comments, please followup here,
but also send a reply to the mail address in the signature of the letter.
This is not my plea, I'm just forwarding, so don't mail to me on this.
This is also crossposted to comp.os.linux, although the letter mentions
386bsd/NetBSD, since it might be a common problem.
I have already replied to this person, that some experimental versions
for such code is existing, but it could be a good idea to try to
get support from the hardware vendors as well.

Holger
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From kkou@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr Sun Sep 26 20:55:51 1993
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Date: Sun, 26 Sep 93 21:51:59 +0200
From: Kostas Kourakis <kkou@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr>
Message-Id: <9309261951.AA27137@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr>
To: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
Subject: QIC-40/80 Streamer support in Net/386BSD
Status: RO

Dear Dr Veit,

	I've seen your suggestion regarding the creation of support
for the Mitsumi CD Rom Drive, and certainly it's a wise move, I could
never understand why very popular and cheap hardware was kind of
"snubbed at" my most of the recent OS (including Unixware, NT etc.).
	There's though an area that needs even more attention (in my
opinion at least), namely  the support for the most popular (and cheap)
streamers.  I'm sure very few can afford QIC-02 or SCSI-based tape strea-
mers, however, almost everybody I know has a Colorado or Irwin model
(that can be had for less than a _third_ of the price of a QIC-02 or
a SCSI model) (thanks to Microsoft, due to the inherent instability of 
Windows it made everybody buy a streamer ;-) ).
	On the other hand I gather it's not that practical for the pro-
grammers that do most of the work on Net/386BSD to sit and write drivers
from scratch, it'll be much easier to put some pressure on the respective
ventors to create themselves the drivers.  The reason is that each brand
has a few variations, e.g. Colorado comes as 125Mb model with or without
the FC10 or FC20 controller, or as 250Mb model ditto, thus it'll be 
rather a lot to ask the Net/386BSD programmers to cater for all variations.
The ventors on the other hand can do it rather easily.  What's needed is
that as many as possible of the prominent people involved in Net/386BSD 
such as yourself, Messrs Chris Demetriou, Nate Williams, Terry Lambert 
et al. would write or email Colorado and Irwin and pressure them to create 
the drivers (just drivers will do fine, no need for more sophisticated 
software like Colorado's "jtape" for SCO/ISC ). 
	I'm sure they'll _have_ to pay heed to what people of your stand-
ing say to them.  I've taken the liberty to include here the mail and 
Compuserve address of Colorado, just in case you feel like supporting 
this idea. These are:
	Colorado Memory Systems,
	800 South Taft Avenue
	Loveland CO 80537 - 9929 , USA
Compuserve users can leave messages for Colorado Memory Systems Inc. in
IBMHW Forum/Session 4 at the following address : 
	(CO_MEM_SYS) SUPPORT 71621,3022
Thus, for Interneters, just email 71621.3022@compuserve.com (if I'm not
wrong).
	Unfortunately my local host does not cary netnews, so I've no way
to put a relevant message in comp.os.386bsd.*, however, if you feel like
posting any part or all of this message in these areas just to see how many 
users respond in favor, please fell free to do it.

	Best regards,

	Konstandinos Kourakis
	(kkou@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr)