FORCED to buy new cart for XL400?

[Richard J Brandau <rjb1%vega%gte.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

  It seems  that  ALL  software  for  MacIvory's  and XL400's will ONLY be
  delivered on the small cartridges.  We already have two carts (large) at
  our site;  it  seems  extravagant  to  buy  another.   That's one of the
  reasons we have networks.

I took a census of our large form-factor cart drives, and it comes to
seven.  When we bought our first MacIvory, I raised hell with our sales
rep about having to buy yet another tape drive.  She acted sympathetic
and volunteered to accept my nasty letter, but it had no effect.  The
reply, attributed to the software support organization, was that they
didn't want to have to deliver all the releases and ECOs in both
form-factors.

Somehow someone slipped an order past purchasing, and now we own one of
those little tape drives.  So slow that it makes me nostalgic about
DECtape.

But I could live with all that if it weren't for the fact that I now
have an unduplicated tape drive, while before, I had plenty of
redundancy.

This used to bother me a lot.  I thought for a while that I could maybe
bribe somebody in Symbolics to cut the large tapes for me.  Or to make
it more convenient, maybe they could just increase the price of software
support to cover the extra trouble.  But wait!  Aren't we paying enough
for this already?

So that's when I gave up on Symbolics support.  This year I recommended
that they cancel the hardware contract and let the machines die with
dignity.  Now, that software renewal is starting to look pretty
tempting, cost-consciousness-wise.

-- Rich Brandau
GTE Laboratories