From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: Double-View by Digiboard
Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto
Distribution: ont
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 15:47:08 GMT

In article <9212151932.AA15018@moore.com> telly!druid!bent!steve@moore.com () writes:
>I just had an interesting conversation with a sales-type at Truger
>Technologies, a computer distributer that bills itself as a UNIX
>house,

Truger is a bit of an odd place, a clone maker that specializes in the
UNIX market. To do this, they resell SCO, DigiBoard, and a number of
other products in order to assemble capable ingle-source Intel UNIX
systems. This approach may make sense for a VAR who doesn't
want to get at all involved in the hardware.

They sell only hardware and systems software. They sell no applications.
Truger's stated purpose is to deal only with resellers and VARs, but I
guess anyone who can wave an Ontario PST certificate in front of them
could qualify.

I personally treat them as a Canadian distributor/warehouse, just like
Merisel or Ingram or Tech Data. They happen to have good pricing on some
specific peripherals, and may have the best prices on OEM SCSI QIC tape
drives (250MB to 1.3GB) in the city.

I don't expect more from them than good prices, items in stock, and
maybe some brochures. While their technical support is pretty good when
they sell complete systems, they don't appear to know much of the UNIX
world outside SCO. I was been given a pretty hard time on one occasion when
a PC they sold me had problems with ESIX R4.

But I don't expect evaluation copies of software from them, nor would I
expect people intimately familiar with everything in their warehouse.
I don't expect this of Merisel, either.

>When I asked to come down to see it in
>action I was told that they don't use it in-house andthat they
>would need to set it up. Right!

Truger sells many different items, and sometomes they sell many different
paths to the same goal. For instance, they sell UNIX serial cards from
DigiBoard, Equinox  and Consensys. I wouldn't expect them to have all
three running in-house.

>The suspicion runs through my mind
>is that the salesman will do a two day crash course on how to use
>this thing, won't be able to answer any question that can't be read
>off the literature,

You're probably right. They're obviously unfamiliar with the product.
You may have a hard time finding a distributor who is.

>and if it's any good how come they're not using it themselves?

That's what DigiBoard's own sales department and technical support
departments are for. Truger will never be as familiar with the product
as DigiBoard themselves.

>So I'm sending this little missive around hoping to
>pick up any gossip on whether this stuff is any good, and if you
>want to drop any hints about something that'll do the same thing
>better, I'm all ears.

I don't use much of these kinds of products. There are at least two
others that I know of that claim to do similar things, ICE-TEN and
PC-Interface.

-- 
 Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
         evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
         "IBM's three letters are probably EBCDIC for CYA" - Nik H.
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