Xref: utzoo comp.dcom.modems:2033 comp.unix.microport:896 comp.unix.xenix:2523 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!belltec!jim From: jim@belltec.UUCP (Mr. Jim's Own Logon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems,comp.unix.microport,comp.unix.xenix Subject: Re: "Smart" serial boards for the 80386 Summary: From Bell Technologies. Message-ID: <235@belltec.UUCP> Date: 22 Jun 88 14:45:10 GMT References: <628@wb3ffv.UUCP> <510@cimcor.UUCP> Organization: Bell Technologies, Fremont, CA Lines: 32 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? 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). 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.