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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: edamo who wrote (140738)	8/27/1999 11:00:00 AM
From: John Koligman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Hello Ed, Some time yet for the 100th, the 75th was only a couple years back. As for the tech, since I worked with operating systems for a long time, I can comment from at least some experience on what is and is not out there. It is pretty obvious that many have no concept of what has been available in the services (or any other) area from the competition... Remote service has been around (that I am aware of) at IBM since at least the '70's. Machines log errors in a file called 'logrec' and can also report them remotely. Patches can be downloaded and installed... For software support, the customer has a system dump that is out there on a dataset, and the IBM programmer dials in and looks at the data to diagnose the problem. This has been the case since the early 1980's, and can also be done from the programmer's home (which is why I got tired of those 3am diagnostic sessions <ggg>). I can also tell you that for software problems, we attempted to develop an 'artificial intelligence' system that would attempt to diagnose simple problems. The idea was to take the knowledge of a group of senior software service experts and actually write code to do the job. It did not work then and I doubt it will work today for anything but the most simple and straightforward types of problems... Keep in mind this was in the mainframe (now enterprise server) arena, although most of this stuff is filtering down to the Netfinity servers, which IBM is trying to differentiate from the crowd with services and stuff like 'light path diagnostics'.. (Man, I could see the thread just erupt if Dell had come up with light path diagnostics (LOL)). Regards, John

To: edamo who wrote (140738)	8/27/1999 11:35:00 AM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Edamo, you're the type who probably believes companies like ibm and hwp have contributed greatly to technology. (vbg) Just putting in my two cents about this IBM technology thing. If you take the aggregate of computer development, semiconductors, magnetic storage, software, service and reliability, and I'm sure I left out other areas, there is no company that approaches IBM in technology contribution. Maybe you ought to get away from the Dell thread once in a while. If you did, what I said would become obvious pretty quickly. For the record, I own no Dell and no IBM shares. While I'm here, let me say that there was an excellent contributor to this thread that you helped drum out of here for not singing Dell hymns continuously. I thought that was poor. Tony