Man Compaq has a lot of bad pennies. Some of these
news releases bring up older items.
--
In Wake Of Suit, Compaq
Acknowledges Possible Floppy-Drive
Flaw
February 29, 2000 6:05 PM
NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Compaq Computer Corp. has alerted owners of
Presario desktop personal computers about a possible problem with
floppy-drive controls that may damage data under "extreme
circumstances."
Compaq, which posted a fix for the possible problem on its Web site
estimated that as many as 1.7 million Presarios may have been sold
containing the suspected floppy-drive components. The potential problem is
similar to a glitch described in high-profile lawsuits filed against Toshiba
Corp., Compaq and other PC makers last year.
After Toshiba settled a lawsuit related to floppy-drive controls for $2.1 billion
in October, Houston-based Compaq (CPQ), Hewlett-Packard Co., Packard
Bell NEC Inc., and eMachines Inc. were hit with similar class-action
lawsuits. Compaq has announced its intention to fight the suit.
The suits allege the companies ignored warnings by component-maker
NEC Corp. that there were potential problems with saving data to floppy
disks. The plaintiffs are represented by the same attorneys who won the
settlement from Toshiba.
The estimate of 1.7 million Presario computers with potential problems
came from a letter written by Steven M. Zager, an Austin lawyer
representing Compaq, the Associated Press reported. He made the
estimate based on tests that the plaintiffs' attorneys conducted on 11
Presarios. Compaq engineers were present during the tests. According to
documents filed by the plaintiffs, "a large percentage" of the Compaq
models tested had the defect.
Compaq said the machines work as intended and that no customer has
reported the type of failure claimed in the lawsuit.
Last year, Toshiba settled a class-action lawsuit for $2.1 billion rather than
go to trial in the U.S. with the possibility of a $9.5 billion judgment. Toshiba
agreed to give cash rebates ranging from $210 to $443 to an estimated 1.8
million owners of notebook computers, but it didn't acknowledge the
computers had caused any data-loss problems.
The Toshiba settlement sparked several questions: Why did the Japanese
giant surrender without a court fight and on such relatively generous terms?
Moreover, just how serious is the defect?
The threat of increased legal scrutiny is unnerving to the PC industry, which
tolerates a far higher degree of imperfection than many other consumer
industries. PC officials, in fact, often argue that because the hardware and
software components of PCs evolve so quickly, and are produced by such a
large array of suppliers, it is almost inevitable that PCs are prone to
unexplained lockups, mystifying bugs and unexpected crashes.
At the heart of the Toshiba settlement was a technical flaw in a chip known
as a floppy-disk controller, one that under certain circumstances could
damage or destroy data stored on floppy disks. Although that defect was
discovered 13 years ago and was corrected a few years later by the original
manufacturers of the defective chips, it somehow lived on in Toshiba PCs -
and, the plaintiffs' lawyers say, in those of other PC makers as well.
What may have made Toshiba particularly vulnerable to the suit, however, is
the fact that in addition to making notebook computers that exhibited the
data-corruption problem, it also produced the defective floppy-disk
controllers as well - chips it has supplied to other PC makers for years.
What is more, some Toshiba engineers had been aware of the problem in
its chips for more than a decade but declined to fix it because they
considered the likelihood of data-damaging errors remote.
The floppy-disk bug was first uncovered in late 1986 by Phillip Adams, then
an engineer at International Business Machines Corp., who noted that
under certain circumstances floppy-controller chips made by NEC could
damage data stored on floppy disks. Intel Corp., which had licensed the
floppy-disk controller chip design from NEC, also produced a chip that
exhibited the problem.
Even then, the companies say, the problem was difficult to detect, since it
didn't result in data loss except in unusual situations, such as when two
programs attempted to use the floppy disk drive at the same time. Such
conditions could prompt a common data-writing error known as an overrun.
The defective chips, however, failed to detect the error and prevent the
accidental destruction of existing data.
Both NEC and Intel fixed the problem in subsequent generations of chips
released within a few years, and in 1990 and 1991 NEC even ran ads
warning of the problem and urging PC makers to switch to its newer chips.
Neither NEC nor Intel received any complaints about data loss related to
the controller problem, the companies say.
The other PC makers may be better-positioned than Toshiba should they
decide to contest the suits. Several lawyers not connected to the suits
argue that the cases rest on a shaky legal foundation, since they allege
both breach-of-warranty claims and violations of a federal law that
criminalized computer fraud.
Perhaps more important, the plaintiffs haven't yet presented any public
evidence that the floppy-disk controller bug has caused anyone actual
harm. And none of the four companies facing the suits manufacture
floppy-disk controllers themselves. Legal experts such as Susan Koniak, a
law professor at Boston University, argue that the remaining cases are
unlikely to ever make it to trial. Should they get that far, Koniak and some
others argue, the plaintiffs will have a tough time proving that consumers
suffered serious harm.
Copyright (c) 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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