How Good is the AT&T 6300 Plus?

[Joe Russack%CGL]

In article <551 at ihlpf.UUCP> gpw at ihlpf.UUCP (Wilkin) writes:
>
>
>
>What parts failed? Hard disks ? Floppies? Monitor? Assembling technician??
>How about just a few facts????  JUST WHAT FAILS?
>I wonder what would make metal worse than plastic ?

  Well, we have problems with three things. The worst is by far the keyboard. I am aware that AT&T has redone the keyboard to compensate for the multiple
failures of the old model, though. The other two problems are the disk drives 
(I think the main problems are with the mountings- thry tend to interfere with the internals of some drives) and the monitor. We have many a dead AT+T monitor.
They go out with alarming regularity, although with varying symtoms. 

>
>> things screwed to the motherboard, and other uglies. It is a two board computer
>
>You mean to say I could run all sorts of hot expansion cards and NOT fry the
>MAIN pc board. Neat, maybe I could buy one .

  Not necessarily true- the expansion board has very little in the way of its
own electronics. Any bad boards would still fry the mail logic board.

>
>> with the mail logic board on the bottom and the bus on the top. Becasue 
>> of this configuration, (Or at least we think becasue of this) the RF is pretty
>> bad. When the case is on, things are ok.....  but with it off, phew!
>> 
>HEY GANG,  RF is bad with the top off!!!! I'll be dammed! OH GOSH, 
>What did you think the metal case was for anyway.

  RF is often a symtom of a bad design- that was why I mentioed it. A good 
example of a similar configuration (and problem) would be the TRS-80 model I,
which was removed from the market because of extreme RF problems (Plastic case).
>
>>   The pc compatibility is not too good. It is passing, (and much better than
>
>Mine seem to run all the majors, lotus.... also check the compatabiltiy
>of the ever popular IBM AT... I think we still do better than that machine.

Aggreed. It won't run any machine-specific code (Some excelent machines will)
but other than that it is pretty good. (So says owner of PC-AT)

>> some unmentionable clones) but not as good as some others (like the ITT,
>> compaq,etc). The worst thing about it is the nonstandard bus. For normal
>
>Try Olivetti, or Xerox, or AT&T for 16 bit cards, we have a few, video, memory
>,otherwise why not use ANY 8bit card (THERE ARE A FEW THAT DON'T WORK, but not
>too many)
>
True- but It won't work with the majojority of the 16 bit cards. 8 bit workd just fine, though. I was complaining about the lack of 16 bit compatability
becasue one can get very inexpensive 16 bit cards for the AT from alternate 
sources. However, I found out after my post that the AT&T was released BEFORE
the AT, so this is no fault of AT&T engineers. Although an update might be in order.

Joseph russack
uucp:  !ucbvax!ucsfcgl!russack