On Mon, 11 Aug 1997, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:

> [ These are not the words or thoughts of my employer... 8-]
> 
> > It is not encouraging to see that even DEC's own people don't like SRM.
> 
> What, you think everybody within Digital likes VMS, UNIX and NT?
> or likes the Alpha?  or likes the VAX?  or ...?
> 
> There are a lot of technical arguments both for and against a lot of
> pieces of hardware and software.  SRM is a just piece of software,
> albeit one which is critical for certain operating systems to work on
> certain systems.
> 
> 
> > I like SRM, although I'd like to see more documentation for it.
> 
> There actually are some pretty good user docs...
> 
How about ARC documentation for those of us who have ARC only
machines and want to run UNIX?
> 
> > There are clearly a lot of untapped powerful features in there.
> 
> Yes, and the development of those powerful features have had a large
> cost, both in firmware size and in stability and reliability.
> 
> Many, in fact I'd say _most_, of the features in the newer versions of
> the SRM console are ... useless for the functions that console
> firmware is supposed to perform.  I'd trade multiple processes, lots
> of interactive help, 'more', pipes, a shell-like language, etc., away,
> if that meant that I could have firmware which would reliably boot the
> machines i've had to use over the past couple of years.  The old
> TurboChannel-system SRM was great: it wasn't very intelligent, but it
> worked.  The new SRM is much more "intelligent," but the fact of the
> matter is, (in my experience, with Digital UNIX and NetBSD) when you
> try to reboot with it sometimes it just doesn't reboot, and that's
> unacceptable.
> 
> 
> cgd
>