A Working PC: Not the Holy Grail

I know you have read letters like this before, but perhaps you will be more in tune with the concepts after your editorial ("The Net PC Blues") in the September BYTE. I run a Web server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is a 133-MHz 486 VL-Bus system with two Enhanced IDE (EIDE) drives and 32 MB of RAM. It has three modems attached, two connected full-time to the Internet and one for incoming calls and outbound faxing. It has a VL-Bus graphics accelerator, two standard 16550 serial ports, a smart eight-port serial card, trackball, voice synthesizer, 400-MB quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) 80 tape drive, 3-1/2- and 5-1/4-inch floppy drives, and a color hand scanner. Three printers are attached to th e system. There are also three dumb terminals and an Ethernet card leading to another PC. There are hundreds of megabytes of software installed on the system, some DOS, some Windows, some "other." Third-party device drivers abound.

This system has been up and running for three years. I never reboot to change OSe s, clear hung programs, or anything else.

To blame your PC design or hardware for your crippled computing environment only illustrates how brainwashed you are. It is not important what my OS is, it is simply a matter of what it is not -- Windows 95.

David Butcher
davidbu@chezhal.slip.netcom.com