PERVISIT.TXT Sparta PCBoard Hard Drive Conference PERSTOR Conference This text file is general notes from the visit to Perstor Systems, Inc., on March 1, 1988. Purpose of visit: The main purpose of the visit to Perstor Systems, Inc., was to help establish a product support bulletin board. Since I have extensive experience in setting up a bbs, Perstor indicated a desire to utilize this experience and review my recommendations about how a fulltime BBS might be used to provide a 24 hour a day forum for the exchange of information and provision of support for the Perstor line of PC controllers and other products. Itinerary: 2-26-88 - Leave Newark, Arrive in Phoenix around 6:30PM MST 2-27-88 - Install PCBoard 12.1/D BBS Software 2-28-88 - Install Menus, Bulletins, Organize Directory Structure, Establish support conferences, etc. 2-29-88 - Return to the cold country in New Jersey. Detailed Trip Report: Upon arrival at the Phoenix International Airport, I was greeted by some really nice warm weather. The liquid stuff that was dropping from the sky was some sort of liquid sunshine quite peculiar to the Phoenix area. Hey, I am not going to complain. At least it was comfortable in a short sleeve shirt. After waiting forever for Continental Airlines to find and deliver the baggage, I was greeted by a familiar face in the person of Ron Fife and his lovely wife Carolyn. They were gracious enough to provide transportation to the hotel in Scottsdale and accompany me to a local establishment for some good Mexican food. After consuming an abundant amount of food, washed down by an over abundant amount of Miller Lite, I settled in for the night and prepared notes for my planned sequence of events needed to get the bulletin board up in the minimum amount of time. Early Saturday morning, breakfast at the Thunderbird Inn (located right at the entrance to Scottsdale Airport), and off to Perstor's office on Greenway Road, also located adjacent to the Scottsdale Airport. In fact, if you want to fly in to Scottsdale, you can roll your plane right up to the Perstor shipping dock, tell the tower to have them raise the hangar door, and have the shipping department load the plane up with controllers. How's that for location, location, location. Attach those PC's. We did that quite early so as to get a good start. However, I brought 1.2mb diskettes with me loaded with files from the Sparta PCBoard HD conference. Ah! Test that prototype 16 bit controller right away. It was in the lab humming away on overnight tests in an Intel 386 machine, also equipped with a 1.2mb floppy drive. Our plan was to disconnect the hard drive from the 8 bit PERSTOR controller where the BBS would be running, hook it up to the 16 bit controller, transfer all the files from floppy, transport them intact back to the 8 bit machine. Voila! It worked. The format on the Miniscribe drive could be read from and written to by both the 8 bit and 16 bit. No difference, just plug and play. Nice, nice feature! The PCBoard software was installed in no time. A breeze when you have done it a few times. The next step was to get that Qubie' 1200 baud modem to working. No documentation was in sight, as the modem had been lying around gathering dust for a while. Nine switches on the front panel had us confused real quick. A call to Salt Air and a plea for help on modem settings and setup string was no help. Oh, well. Lets get everything else in place. Modem operation can come later after all testing is done on the software. Proceeding along that line, we installed some fancy graphics welcome screens, sample bulletin menus, sample conference menus, and suggested categories for conferences that would follow different Perstor product lines. All that went into place in a snap. Most of the keyboard time was spent in the accompaniment of Ted Buck, one fine gentleman who provides the technical support for the Perstor Products. Ted catches on quick, and will have the operation of a BBS down pat in no time. He is also about the most patient guy you will ever meet. A real asset to Perstor I must say. The Qubie' modem seemed quite sick and did not want to answer the phone properly, nor shift down to 300 baud after answering the phone. This prompted some discussion about power users, Perstor products, and naturally, the two go together very well. So, stage two planning went into operation. Would a USR Courier 9600 HST appear in the long range plans? You bet. Perstor is committed to solid product support and did not hesitate to accept my recommendation on the high speed modem. With most of the BBS software in place, it was time to sneak into the lab and peek at that PERSTOR 16 bit combined Hard Disk/Floppy controller in operation again. It looked impressive, especially to this old country boy. But then again, back where I was raised, we only got electricity a few years ago. The real test would be in some measurements against the 8 bit controller and evaluation based on typical measurements I was used to seeing back at Sparta PCBoard. I came away duly impressed. More about that when I get clearance from Perstor to release the information. Of course, that will be included in our continuing series of files on the Perstor controller line, specifically in a file called perstor3.arc. Why the suspense about the Perstor BBS telephone number. No mystery. US Robotics has not shipped the HST modem yet. When it is installed and ready to start accepting calls, we will announce it on Sparta PCBoard, Salt Air's Bulletin #1, etc. In the meantime, Sparta has established a Perstor specific conference, and is continuing to offer this medium of support while waiting for the Perstor BBS to come up. Enough about the BBS. Let's meet some of the Perstor Staff. Last names are omitted where I did not write them down. This is to be sure I do not misspell the name. Les Blodgett - Chief Executive Officer Ron Fife - President and Chief Engineer Designer of the Perstor Cards Mark Fife - Vice President of Marketing - Responsible for Distribution and Dealer Network Carolyn Fife - Office Manager (really runs the company) Kristi Ferris - Sales Support Ted Buck - Technical Support Manager - BBS Sysop Maureen Rice - Handles all the Literature, Mailing Lists, etc. One fast set of hands on that keyboard! Safa - Software Engineer - This young fellow is one sharp cookie on the Perstor BIOS and microcode Norma - A charming voice on the phone. I did not get to meet Norma. James\______ - These two young fellows take care of all testing, Bryan/ shipping, etc. They do a heck of a job. Especially helpful on those short notice "need the next day" orders. They will stay late and make sure those orders get shipped. Thanks, guys! I hope I have not left anyone out. Any omissions are strictly unintentional. My overall impression of the Staff at Perstor Systems, Inc. is very, very favorable. I was impressed with their commitment to excellence in the products they design and sell. Their knowledge of the storage needs of the industry, along with products to meet those increasing needs makes for a very professional approach to filling that niche of the market. Their contacts in the industry and solid understanding of bringing new products to the market place positions Perstor in an enviable spot to become a leader and moving force in an industry where "sensible solutions to storage problems" is needed more and more every day. ----------------------------------------------------------------- TIDBITS Ah! Almost forgot that some of you just might like to know about some of the other things going on at Perstor. Will tell you what I can. 1) Perstor has a new bios for the PS180 AT type controller. The one with the AT9-103 BIOS. The new one is AT9-105 and was released to take care of a couple of miscellaneous problems with Award Bios. Trouble with having to radially select at least 3 DS lines when using Award and ONE hd hooked up was found to be in the manner in which Award sets stack space at boot time. Solved by changing some routines in Perstor Bios to compensate for this shortcoming. 2) New driver released that will allow adding a second Perstor controller to the same cpu. Now can recognize the second controller and up to one partition (can be over 32mb) on each of two drives hooked up to second controller. Details can be found on Sparta PCBoard in a file called ADDCTLR.ARC 3) Official announcement of the PERSTOR 200 Series ATF 16 bit controller will be made on March 21, 1988, at a computer showcase in Santa Clara, California. Press kits will be released at that time. Perstor3.arc will also be released on that date. That's about it for now. See ya on the keys later on.