"Smart" serial boards for the 80386

[Howard Leadmon]

In article <235 at belltec.UUCP>, jim at belltec.UUCP (Mr. Jim's Own Logon) writes:
> 
>     A lot of complaints about Bell Tech all of a sudden. I'm sorry that you
> don't like the serial card. You are in the minority. It is still the best
> selling smart card in Europe, and one of the best in the US. We have a full
> time tech support staff to handle problems with any of our hardware or
> software products, and they would soon be aware of any prevelant problems
> with the board or the driver software. Most problems are with the users not
> reading the manual, or not understanding what they want to do. Those that
> are technically knowledgable often blaim the added feature, which is the 
> serial card. In Microport 386, when you add a smart card and it doesn't
> work properly, is it the card, the driver, or the OS?

 Well Jim I don't really want to start a mud slinging contest here on the net 
as you mention later on in this message, but I do feel there is a problem, and
so that it is all out in the open I will go into it in a little more detail 
here. I really hope you can shed some light on the subject, and I am more 
than willing to put a card back in my machine and give it a try if you would
like to call me on the phone a make sure I have it installed correctly (Let
me say that I have talked with several of your technical support people). Also
as I mentioned in one of my previous postings, I have talked about Bell
Technoliges with the highest reguards over the past several years, and it hurt
me as well to have to flame the company I once supported by selling your
products. As far as is it being a user problem, I think not, as I am a very 
experienced UNIX system installer, and on top of that I have spent several 
hours on the phone with your technical services department trying to work
out all the problems. In fact I was so willing to let you people work out 
the problems with the card that I kept the boards for over eight months, since
I knew how well your tape backups worked for several years. Well it took so
long that I lost a $100,000 contract to faulty ICC cards, and believe me I
am not real happy about the situation, and to this date the cards still don't
work! Here are several things that I did in an attempt to resolve the problem
with your ICC board. I switched from Microport V/386 to Bell V.3 UNIX, since
eventually I called Bell and they said "We are no longer going to support
Microport, since they don't have a very large share of the UNIX market, and
for that reason we will not spend any more development time on the Microport
Drivers". So to knock that brick wall down I bought a copy of your own UNIX
release, and it came with the drivers installed, so I couldn't have botched
that part of it. Also as mentioned above I went over every switch setting 
on that card with you Technical support people, so thay must have been 
right. So then I was told the problem was with the Telebit Trailblazer modems,
and that you would be getting one in to run some tests on. Well I even went
as far as to give you people a login to my on system so that you could run
tests with the high-speed modems, but I don't believe you ever called. So
honestly, have I been unfair in my critisims ?? I have never flamed a company
on the NET before, so I don't consider myself a person that FLAMES just to
get attention. Again I say, would you personally like to make your ICC work
on my system ?? (Inquiring minds want to know :-)

>    I realize that you will take all of this with a grain of salt since I'm
> from Bell Tech (I did the ICC hardware), but I wanted to present our side.
> There are a lot of satisfied Bell Tech customers using everything from 
> samrt cards to high resolution graphics; and many of these people are on
> the net. Like any company or any product there are those that will leap out
> to flame them for whatever reason (I could go through our tech support data 
> base and find out the history of the complainers here, but I don't think
> a mud slinging contest will help any).

 Actually I am very glad to see you respond, since I knew from Dianne in
your sales department that you received the messages posted to the NET. I 
will say that I resent being refered to as a person that would flame a 
product for no reason at all, and I will gladly retract all statements 
that I have made to the NET if you can prove that the problems were all
caused by my inability to install the product correctly...

>    Anyway, our ICC smart cards as well as the new ACE smart cards work fine
> with terminals, modems, printers and all other serial devices. Large
> companies that have evaluated our smart cards against the top 5 or so
> other smart card companies have all signed OEM deals with us. And this is
> after a 2 month testing and evaluation period. If they had the type of 
> problems that you claim, we wouldn't be selling them 1000 a month.
> 
>    Sorry for the length of this, but it IS a good design.
> 
> 							-Jim Wall
> 							Bell Technologies Inc.

 Well I sure hope the new ACE card works better than the original ICC, and
as usual I wish you the best of luck with resolving the problems that you
encounter, and any products that you introduce..


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