termcap file, printing, porting

[Bill Vermillion]

On Thu, Jan 27 08:12 , while denying his reply is spam, Lerebours, Jose 
prattled on endlessly saying: 

> I wonder if you are billing for your time.  I do only
> because while trying to save money and not upgrade to
> new server with new OS and new runtime, your customer
> is putting out a lot more money and taking mush longer
> than necessary.  Funny thing is, at the end of it all,
> they just might have to put out and do what they should
> have done to begin with.

I had been doing work for one company and they got a new CFO.

The new guy wanted to see if the new OS they needed would run on the
equipment they had before buying a new computer that supported the
OS.

It was an upgrade on an orignal OSR5.

The 'pros from Dover' [ eg anyone who lives outside of town must be
better than the locals ] were hired in the morning before I was
supposed to come in an evaluate the job.

Three days later when they could not make it work I was called in.

I found out what was needed, and part had to do with some obsolete
hardware not supported under the new system, and luckily I still
had new in the box ISA video card that worked.

The CFO insisted on proving it on old hardware.   Some of the
processes were so long that I'd set things running in the evening
and come back the next day as there is nothing worse than watching
a machine for 4-5 hours.  Watching water boil is better :-)

It was about and 8 hour job just getting most of the thing things
running.  In the end I was paid about $3.5K for that part.

Then they OK'ed new hardware and we moved from an old slow '386
into a Pentium II.  Total bill for install and conversion on the
new machine - including getting their specific SW running with LD
calls from the support house the width of the continent away - was
only about $1500.

The CFO was let go a month or so later and that hardware ran for
about 6 years until the SW vendor finally got his port to MS
working - 3 years late.

Trying to use old HW in a modern environment is one of the biggest
mistakes many companies make - at least the ones I've been around.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com